This Industrious Turn Has Also Led Them, In The Cultivation
Of All Their Arts, To So Much Greater Perfection Than The Otaheitans.
By Degrees They Have Hit Upon New Inventions, And Introduced An Active
Spirit, And Enlivening Cheerfulness Even Into Their Amusements.
Their
happiness of temper they preserve under a political constitution,
which does not appear to be very favourable to
Liberty; but we need
not go so far from home to wonder at such a phenomenon, when one of
the most enslaved people in all Europe (the French, no doubt, are
intended; this was published in 1777,) are characterised as the
merriest and most facetious of mankind. Still there may be more
sincerity in the cheerfulness of the natives of Tonga-tabboo, for,
exclusive of great and almost servile submission, their king does not
seem to exact any thing from them, which, by depriving them of the
means to satisfy the most indispensable wants of nature, could make
them miserable. Be this as it may, so much seems to be certain, that
their systems of politics and religion, from their similarity with the
Otaheitan, as far as we could judge, must have had one common origin,
perhaps in the mother country, from whence both these colonies issued.
Single dissonant customs and opinions may have acceded to the
primitive ideas, in proportion as various accidents, or human
caprices, have given rise to them. The affinity of their languages is
still more decisive. The greatest part of the necessaries of life,
common to both groups of islands, the parts of the body, in short, the
most obvious and universal ideas, were expressed at the Society and
Friendly Isles, nearly by the same words.
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