Page:Aristopia (1895).pdf/145

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Carondolet on the great river. As the people at the posts raised their own corn and vegetables, there was no great bulk of goods to be brought to them, and as they had only furs and peltries to ship away, there was no great weight to export, so that frequent trips were not necessary.

Though the colonists of Aristopia were not allowed to furnish the Indians firearms or other deadly weapons, they rendered them great assistance in getting furs and peltries by furnishing them steel traps.

When civilized people are brought into close contact with barbarism, as were the first European settlers of America, there is a great temptation with many of them to plunge into that barbarism and themselves become semi-barbaric. This was notably the case with a large portion of the settlers of Virginia. They did not congregate in communities and build towns, but scattered out on separate plantations. Very many of the younger sons of English "gentle" families, and many disbanded soldiers, unused to manual labor, but attracted by the free life of the new world, settled on the frontiers of the colony, and, raising only an acre or two of corn, depended for the rest of their subsistence