Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 1 (Stockdale).djvu/435

] this arbitrary contribution. The most laborious man, like the most lazy, is almost sure of being stripped of every thing but a scanty subsistence. Hence most of the natives content themselves with the easiest species of cultivation, passing in idleness that time which, under a different government, they might have employed in placing themselves in easy circumstances.

The fiscal, who superintends the police, compleats the oppression of the inhabitants. That officer has the power of imposing, for his own benefit, pecuniary fines, which he fixes according to the measure of his own rapacity, and the circumstances of the natives, whom he is often pleased to find guilty, when they have not committed the slightest offence!! A Mr. M'Kay, however, then exercised that office in a manner very different from that of most of his predecessors. The inhabitants very much extolled his humanity, which was the more praise-worthy, as he had it in his power to do them every possible mischief with impunity. That brave man told us, that he preferred mediocrity of fortune to riches obtained by such means. Mr. M'Kay, when explaining to us one day the prerogatives of his office, informed us that some of our sailors had caused a riot, at an unseasonable hour of the night, in the house of a very rich Chinese, who sold arrack