Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 9).djvu/294

 sufficiently sensible of the disadvantages resulting from settling in unhealthy situations. Fertility of soil and commercial advantages are the great attractions, but men who look to these as primary considerations, obviously undervalue some of the strongest checks to population and public prosperity. The endemical distempers of this country, so far from being chiefly confined to the weak and the aged, seem to commit their greatest devastations amongst the young and the strong. Surviving sufferers are frequently rendered unfit for labour for a third or fourth part of the year, and receive an irreparable injury to their constitutions; regimen and medicine become almost as indispensable as food; productive labour is thus diminished, and an additional cost imposed on life.

Tavern-keepers observe that travellers are not nearly so numerous as they were last year. The change is to be imputed solely to the decline in trade, and to depression in the price of lands. The fact shows that a proportion of the populace remains at home through necessity or economical motives. Happy it is for them, that the pressure of the times does not, as in certain other countries, turn out a numerous class in the condition of houseless poor. Travellers, however, are still so numerous, that a stranger, not fully aware of the rapidity with which new settlements are forming, and of the great populace of eastern States, might be apt to imagine that Americans are a singularly volatile people.

In the whole of my correspondence with the unlettered part of the people of the western country, I have observed a brevity of language, that seems to be occasioned by their not being acquainted with {263} an extensive vocabulary. Their manner of speech is grave, apparently earnest, and adapted to business more than to intellectual enjoyment.