cultivate their little farms with the utmost diligence; some are
employed in exercising various trades; others again in providing
every necessary resource in order to refit their vessels, or repair
what misfortunes may happen, looking out for future markets, etc.
Such is the rotation of those different scenes of business which
fill the measure of their days; of that part of their lives at least
which is enlivened by health, spirits, and vigour. It is but seldom
that vice grows on a barren sand like this, which produces nothing
without extreme labour. How could the common follies of society take
root in so despicable a soil; they generally thrive on its exuberant
juices: here there are none but those which administer to the
useful, to the necessary, and to the indispensable comforts of life.
This land must necessarily either produce health, temperance, and a
great equality of conditions, or the most abject misery. Could the
manners of luxurious countries be imported here, like an epidemical
disorder they would destroy everything; the majority of them could
not exist a month, they would be obliged to emigrate. As in all
societies except that of the natives, some difference must
necessarily exist between individual and individual, for there must
be some more exalted than the rest either by their riches or their
talents; so in this, there are what you might call the high, the
middling, and the low; and this difference will always be more
remarkable among people who live by sea excursions than among those
who live by the cultivation of their land. The first run greater
hazard, and adventure more: the profits and the misfortunes
attending this mode of life must necessarily introduce a greater
disparity than among the latter, where the equal divisions of the
land offers no short road to superior riches. The only difference
that may arise among them is that of industry, and perhaps of
superior goodness of soil: the gradations I observed here, are