Le Vaillant found the native colonists of the Cape handsome and well formed, particularly the women; but, although they studied with perseverance the important science of dress, they were still very far, in his opinion, from the ease and elegance of the ladies of France; a result which he in a great measure attributes to the practice of employing slaves as wet-nurses, and of otherwise living with them in habits of great familiarity. Slavery under any form is a thing to be abhorred; but our traveller here seems to exaggerate its deformities. Gracefulness, taste, decorum, which should, perhaps, be numbered among the virtues in a well-regulated state, are things with which slavery is by no means incompatible. The most polished nation of antiquity, which every person but a Frenchman will allow to have at least equalled the Parisians in refinement, constantly employed domestic slaves, and lived with them on terms of considerable familiarity. But ignorance and refinement are necessarily repugnant to each other; and in general the Dutch inhabitants of the Cape were, according to Le Vaillant, remarkable for their ignorance, which, without the aid of slavery, would sufficiently account for the absence of graceful and elegant manners. Strangers, however, arriving at the Cape were almost invariably received with great hospitality, more particularly the English, who were admired for their generosity, as much as the French, for their sordid avarice and egotism, were despised and hated. Le Vaillant, in fact, observes that he has frequently heard colonists declare they would prefer being conquered by the English to their owing their safety to a nation whom they regarded with such aversion as the French; and the French troops which shortly afterward arrived in the colony, spreading around them vice and profligacy like a pestilence, debauching the wives and daughters of those who hospitably received them into their houses, and sowing dissension and eternal regrets in the bosoms of a hundred families, fully justified this deep-rooted hatred. The great number of persons in France who from selfish motives remain unmarried, and speculate upon the gratification of their feeble passions at the expense of the weak-minded and the miserable, must always render the nation an object of aversion among a remote people like the Dutch colonists of the Cape, whose ignorant simplicity necessarily exposes them to the shame of suffering by such immorality.