“I also found, that a certain degree of occasional industry had taken place among the Maroons. Some of these young men had devoted a few days in the year to cutting down trees which nature had planted. From such occasional labour they were enabled to procure finery for a favourite female, a better, gun, or a new axe.” Surely this statement is most encouraging. No sooner was security given to these Maroons, than improvement commenced. A single generation has sufficed to change these hunters into cultivators of the earth, to teach them the use of domestic animals, to awaken among them a taste for the luxuries and distinctions of polished societies. That their labour is still only occasional, we grant. But this, we cannot too often repeat, is not the question. If occasional labour {388}will supply the inhabitant of the temperate zone with comforts greater than those to which he is accustomed, he will labour only occasionally. These negroes are not only willing to work rather than forego their usual comforts, but are also willing to make some addition to their labour, for the sake of some addition to their comforts. Nothing more can be said for the labourers of any country. The principle which has made England and Holland what they are, is evidently at work in the thickets of Surinam. That the habits of the fugitives were altogether idle and irregular till within the last fifty years, is nothing to the purpose. How much of regular industry was formerly to be found among the outlawed moss-troopers of our Border, or in the proscribed elan of the Macgregors? Down to a very late period, a large part of the Scotch people were as averse to steady industry as any tribe of Maroons. In the year 1698, Fletcher of Saltonn called the attention of the Scottish Parliament to this horrible evil. “This country,” says he, “has always swarmed with such numbers of idle vagabonds as no laws could ever restrain. There are at this day in Scotland two hundred thousand people begging from door to door, living without any regard or subjection to the laws of the land, or to even those of God and nature. No magistrate could ever discover or be informed which way one in a hundred of these wretches died, or that ever they were baptised.” He advises the Government to set them to work; but he strongly represents the difficulty of such an undertaking. That sort of people is so desperately wicked, such enemies of all work and labour, and, which is yet more amazing, so proud in esteeming their own condition above that which they will be sure to call slavery, that, unless prevented by the utmost industry and diligence, upon the first publication of any orders for putting in execution such a design, they will rather die with hunger in caves and dens, and murder their young children. Fletcher was a brave, honest, and sensible man. He had fought and suffered for liberty. Yet the circumstances of his country shook his faith in the true principles of government.