By a process of evolution certain customs and unwritten laws have come into use and are, perhaps, more rigidly adhered to than any definite written rulings. Crime does not seem to exist. In the history of the island there has been one case of suicide. Petty thieving is said to occur occasionally, but in so small a community, where everyone knows everybody else so well and their goings and comings, any stolen article would be quickly recognized, so that their honesty in this way may be enforced through certainty of detection. Sheep are occasionally missed, and it is thought that theft may account for some of them, the depredations being carried out at night and the animal immediately skinned and cut up so that it is unrecognizable in the morning. There is no policeman, no jail, and no system of punishment for offenders. It seemed to me that they lived very harmoniously together, with much give and take and very little quarrelling. It is curious that the minds of visitors to this settlement have been mainly struck in two very different ways. To the first class this island community seems to have approached the ideal. The French captain, Raymond du Baty, who visited the island in 1907, says: The social status of Tristan da Cunha is a commonwealth of a kind which has been dreamed of by philosophers of all ages and by our modern Socialists. There is no envy, hatred or malice among them; everything is done for the common good; they render each other brotherly service; they are free from all the vices of civilization; they worship God in a simple way; they live very close to Nature, but without pantheistic superstition; greed and usury are unknown among them; there are no class distinctions, no rich or poor. Truly on this lonely rock in the South Atlantic we have a people who belong rather to the Pastoral Age of the world than to our modern unrestful life, and who, without theory or politics or written laws, have reached that state which has been described by the imaginative writers of all ages, haunted by the thought of the decadent morality of the seething cities, as the Golden Age or the Millennium. I have often wondered as to what place the fleas, the rats, the offal outside the window and the fouled water supply take in the Golden Age. The second class of people are struck at once by the extreme poverty, the squalor and lack of comforts, the illiteracy and ignorance and the extreme isolation. The captain of a steamer who had once called to drop mails said to us: They are a greedy lot of beggars and thieves. When they come aboard they ask you for everything they see, and if you do not give them what they want they will try and pinch it. When it comes to a matter of a bargain, they give you diseased sheep and bad potatoes, though they have good enough stuff ashore.