Among those who are neither beloved in the vicinity of their place of abode, nor kept stationary by any gainful pursuit, it is incredible how light a matter will afford a pretext for removal!

Here is one great motive, for good conduct and decorous manners, obliterated. The good opinion. of his neighbors is of little consequence to him, who can scarce be said to have any. If a man keeps free of those crimes which a regard to the public safety compels the magistrate to punish, he finds shelter in every forest from the scorn and dislike incurred by petty trespasses on society. There, all who are unwilling to submit to the restraints of law and religion, may live unchallenged, at a distance from the public exercise of either. There all whom want has made desperate, whether it be the want of abilities, of character, or the means to live, are sure to take shelter. This habit of removing furnishes, however, a palliation for some evils, for the facility with which they change residence becomes the means of ridding the community of members too turbulent or too indolent to be quiet or useful. It is a kind of voluntary exile, where those whom government want power and efficiency to banish, very obligingly banish themselves; thus preventing the explosions which might be occasioned by their continuing mingled in the general mass.

It is owing to this salutary discharge of peccant humors that matters go on so quietly as they do, under a government which is neither feared nor

loved, by the community it rules. These removals are incredibly frequent; for the same family, flying as it were before the face of legal authority and civilization, are often known to remove farther and farther back into the woods, every fifth or sixth year, as the population begins to draw nearer. By this secession from society, a partial reformation is in some cases effected. A person incapable of regular industry and compliance with its established customs will certainly do least harm, when forced to depend on his personal exertions. When a man places himself in the situation of Robinson Crusoe, with the difference of a wife and children for that solitary hero's cats and parrots, he must of necessity make exertions like his, or perish. He becomes not a regular husbandman, but a hunter, with whom agriculture is but a secondary consideration. His Indian corn and potatoes, which constitute the main part of his crop, are, in due time, hoed by his wife and daughters; while the axe and the gun are the only implements he willingly handles.

Fraud and avarice are the vices of society, and do not thrive in the shade of the forests. The hunter, like the sailor, has little thought of coveting or amassing. He does not forge, nor cheat, nor steal, as such an unprincipled person must have done in the world, where, instead of wild beasts, he must have preyed upon his fellows, and he does not drink much, because liquor is not attainable. But he becomes coarse, savage, and totally negligent

of all the forms and decencies of life. He grows wild and unsocial. To him a neighbor is an encroacher. He has learnt to do without one; and he knows not how to yield to him in any point of mutual accommodation. He cares neither to give or take assistance, and finds all the society he wants in his own family. Selfish, from the over-indulged love of ease and liberty, he sees in a new comer merely an abridgement of his range, and an interloper in that sport on which he would much rather depend for subsistence than on the habits of regular industry. What can more flatter an imagination warm with native benevolence, and animated by romantic enthusiasm, than the image of insulated self-dependant families, growing up in those primeval retreats, remote from the corruptions of the world, and dwelling amidst the prodigality of nature. Nothing however can be more anti-Arcadian. There no crook is seen, no pipe is heard, no lamb bleats, for the best possible reason, because there are no sheep. No pastoral strains awake the sleeping echoes, doomed to sleep on till the bull-frog, the wolf, and the quackawary1 begin their nightly concert. Seriously, it is not a place that can, in any instance, constitute happiness. When listless indolence or lawless turbulence fly to shades the most tranquil, or scenes the most beautiful, they degrade nature instead of improving or enjoying

1 Quackawary is the Indian naine of a bird, which flies about in the night, making a noise similar to the sound of its name. Mrs. Grant.

her charms. Active diligence, a sense of our duty to the source of all good, and kindly affections towards our fellow-creatures, with a degree of selfcommand and mental improvement, can alone produce the gentle manners that ensure rural peace, or enable us, with intelligence and gratitude, to "rejoice in nature's joys."

F

Chapter XXIX

SKETCH OF THE SETTLEMENT OF

PENNSYLVANIA

AIN would I turn from this gloomy and uncertain prospect, so disappointing to philanthropy, and so subversive of all the flattering hopes and sanguine predictions of the poets and philosophers, who were wont to look forward to a new Atlantis,

"Famed for arts and laws derived from Jove."

in this western world. But I cannot quit the fond retrospect of what once was in one favored spot, without indulging a distant hope of what may emerge from this dark, disordered state.

The melancholy Cowley, the ingenius bishop of Cloyne, and many others, alike eminent for virtue and for genius, looked forward to this region of liberty as a soil, where peace, science, and religion could have room to take root and flourish unmolested. In those primeval solitudes, enriched by the choicest bounties of nature, they might (as these benevolent speculators thought) extend their shelter to tribes no longer savage, rejoicing in the light of evangelic truth, and exalting science. Little