nursery of seamen, pilots, coasters, and bank-fishermen; as a
country belonging to the province of Massachusetts, it has yearly
the benefit of a court of Common Pleas, and their appeal lies to the
supreme court at Boston. I observed before, that the Friends compose
two-thirds of the magistracy of this island; thus they are the
proprietors of its territory, and the principal rulers of its
inhabitants; but with all this apparatus of law, its coercive powers
are seldom wanted or required. Seldom is it that any individual is
amerced or punished; their jail conveys no terror; no man has lost
his life here judicially since the foundation of this town, which is
upwards of an hundred years. Solemn tribunals, public executions,
humiliating punishments, are altogether unknown. I saw neither
governors, nor any pageantry of state; neither ostentatious
magistrates, nor any individuals clothed with useless dignity: no
artificial phantoms subsist here either civil or religious; no
gibbets loaded with guilty citizens offer themselves to your view;
no soldiers are appointed to bayonet their compatriots into servile
compliance. But how is a society composed of 5000 individuals
preserved in the bonds of peace and tranquillity? How are the weak
protected from the strong?--I will tell you. Idleness and poverty,
the causes of so many crimes, are unknown here; each seeks in the
prosecution of his lawful business that honest gain which supports
them; every period of their time is full, either on shore or at sea.
A probable expectation of reasonable profits, or of kindly
assistance, if they fail of success, renders them strangers to
licentious expedients. The simplicity of their manners shortens the
catalogues of their wants; the law at a distance is ever ready to
exert itself in the protection of those who stand in need of its
assistance. The greatest part of them are always at sea, pursuing
the whale or raising the cod from the surface of the banks: some