In short, touching the Servants of this Province, they live well in the time of their Service, and by their restrainment in that time, they are made capable of living much better when they come to be free; which in several other parts of the world I have observed, That after some servants have brought their indented and limited time to a just and legal period {60} by Servitude, they have been much more incapable of supporting themselves from sinking into the Gulf of a slavish, poor, fettered, and intangled life, then all the fastness of their prefixed time did involve them in before. Now the main and principal Reason of those incident casualties, that wait continually upon the residences of most poor Artificers, is (I gather) from the multiciplicity or innumerableness of those several Companies of Tradesmen, that dwell so closely and stiflingly together in one and the same place, that like the chafing Gum in Watered-Tabby, they eat into the folds of one anothers Estates. And this might easily be remedied, would but some of them remove and disperse distantly where want and necessity calls for them; their dwellings (I am confident) would be much larger, and their conditions much better, as well in reference to their Estates, as to the satisfactoriness of their minds, having a continual imployment, and from that imployment a continual benefit, without either begging, seducing, or flattering for it, encroaching that one month from one of the same profession, that they are heaved out themselves the next. For I have observed on the other side of _Mary-Land_, that the whole course of most Mechanical endeavours, is to catch, snatch, and undervalue one another, to get a little work, or a Customer; which when they have attained by their lowbuilt and sneaking circumventings, it stands upon so flashy, mutable, and transitory {61} a foundation, that the best of his hopes is commonly extinguisht before the poor undervalued Tradesman is warm in the enjoyment of his Customer.