Page:The crater; or, Vulcan's peak.djvu/333

 OR, VULCAN S PEAK. 93 among them ail that did not, for the moment, feel and speak as if he or she had been suddenly transformed to an earthly paradise. CHAPTER VII. &quot; You have said they are men ; As such their hearts are something.&quot; BTHOK. THE colony had now reached a point when it became necessary to proceed with method and caution. Certain great principles were to be established, on which the gover nor had long reflected, and he was fully prepared to set them up, and to defend them, though he knew that ideas prevailed among a few of his people, which might dispose them to cavil at his notions, if not absolutely to oj;^ose him. Men are fond of change; half the time, for a reason no better than that it is change ; and, not unfrequently, they permit this wayward feeling to unsettle interests that are of the last importance to them, and which find no small part of their virtue in their permanency. Hitherto, with such slight exceptions as existed in de ference to the station, not to say rights of the gove-nor, everything of an agricultural character had been possessed in common among the colonists. But this was a state of things which the good sense of Mark told him could not, and ought riot to last. The theories which have come into fashion in our own times, concerning the virtues of association, were then little known and less credited. Society, as it exists in a legal form, is association r^ough for all useful purposes, and sometimes too much; and the governor saw no use in forming a wheel within a wheel. If men have occasion for each other s assistance to effect a particular object, let them unite, in welcome, for that pur pose ; but Mark was fully determined that there should be but one government in his land, and that this government should be of a character to encourage and not to depress exertion. So long as a man toiled for himself and those