i5o TRAVELS IN 
each other compared together, and prices offered for them 
proportionate to their quality, instead of their being deUvered 
to the butcher, as they now are, good and bad together, at so 
much per head. The good effects produced by occasionally 
meeting in society would speedily be felt. The lan- 
guor, the listlessness, and the heavy and vacant stare, that 
characterize the African peasant, would gradually wear off. 
The meeting together of the young people would promote 
the dance, the song, and gambols on the village green, now 
totally unknown ; and cheerfulness and conversation would 
succeed to the present stupid lounging about the house, sullen 
silence, and torpid apathy. The acquaintance with new ob- 
jects would beget new ideas, rousing the dormant powers of 
the mind to energy, and of the body to action. By degrees, 
as he became more civilized by social intercourse, humanity 
as well as his interest would teach him to give encouragement 
to the Hottentots in his employ to engage in useful labor, 
and to feel, like himself, the benefits arising from honest 
industry. 
The establishment of villages in an extensive country thinly 
peopled, may be considered as the first step to a higher state 
of civilization. A town or a village, like the heart in the 
animal frame, collects, receives, and disperses the most valu- 
able products of the country of which it is the centre, giving 
life and energy and activity by the constant circulation which 
it promotes. Whereas while men continue to be thinly scat- 
tered over a country, although they may have within their 
reach all the necessaries of life in a superfluity, they will have 
very few of its comforts or even of its most ordinary conve- 
niencies. Without a mutual intercourse and assistance among 
