The prevailing taste in Santo Domingo, according to this observer, was creolian tinctured with _boucan_, or with the characteristics of the buccaneers. White society on the island was divided into governmental or town officials, merchants, and planters, the several classes having their own interests, which were often conflicting. The planters were concerned only with negroes, their sugar, their cotton or their coffee, and could talk of nothing else; values were reckoned in negroes, or in sugar, for which slaves were commonly exchanged. The laxity of morals, the absence of schools, and the total lack of books were patent on every hand. After sunset dancing was the chief form of amusement in the towns, and handsome mulattoes were the acknowledged Bacchantes of the island. It was from this class that housekeepers were usually chosen by the greater part of the unmarried whites. They had "some skill," said Baron de Wimpffen, "in the management of a family, sufficient honesty to attach themselves invariably to one man, and great goodness of heart. More than one European, abandoned by his selfish brethren, has found in them all the solicitude of the most tender, the most constant, the most generous humanity, without being indebted for it to any other sentiment than benevolence." Expense of cultivation at this time is said to have risen out of all proportion to the value of the product. While negro service was a prime necessity to the planter, the African mine was becoming exhausted; even then slave dealers were penetrating a thousand leagues or more from the Guinea coast. Added to the cost of slaves, which was yearly increasing and had already reached to 2,000 or even 3,000 francs per head, the Government exacted a ruinous capitation tax, which bore with special weight on the planter.[33] Physicians and lawyers, however ignorant, exacted exorbitant fees; masons and carpenters, however inefficient, demanded an unreasonable wage; they, we are told, with the merchant and official governmental class, were the only money makers on the island. The merchant whom we have seen taking the planter's produce at his own price, in exchange for slaves again at his own price, had the advantage in every business transaction; the planter, as a result, was his chronic debtor, and at usurious rates.