"If climate operates extensively upon the actions of human beings, it is principally their amusements that are regulated by proximity to the tropics. Dancing might be called the principal amusement of both sexes, in Louisiana. Beholding the airy sweep of a Creole dance, the length of time that an assembly will preserve in the sport, at any season of the year, cold or warm, indolence would be the last charge that candour could lodge against such a people."[1]
"Copying from Montesquieu," elsewhere says Mr. Darby,
himself a slaveholder, "climate has been called upon to account
for stains on the human character, imprinted by the hand of
political mistake. No country where Negro Slavery is established
but must have parts in the wounds committed on
nature and justice."
The unacclimated whites on the sea coast and on the river and bayou banks of the low country, between which and the sea coast there is much inter-communication, unquestionably suffer much from certain epidemic, contagious, and infectious pestilences. This, however, only renders the fact that dense settlements of whites have been firmly established upon them, and that they are remarkably exempt from miasmatic disease, one of more value in evidence of the practicability of white occupation of the upper bottom lands. There are grounds for doubting the common opinion that the negroes at the South suffer less from local causes of disease than whites. (See
- ↑ A writer in "Household Words," speaking of the "popular fallacy that a man cannot do a hard day's work in the climate of India," says:— "I have seen as hard work, real bone and muscle work, done by citizens of the United Kingdom in the East, as was ever achieved in the cold West, and all upon rice and curry—not curry and rice—in which the rice has formed the real meal, and the curry has merely helped to give it a relish, as a sort of substantial Kitchener's zest, or Harvey's sauce. I have seen, likewise, Moormen, Malabars, and others of the Indian labouring classes, perform a day's work that would terrify a London porter, or coal-whipper, or a country navvy, or ploughman; and under the direct rays of a sun that has made a wooden platform too hot to stand on in thin shoes, without literally dancing with pain, as I have done many a day, within six degrees of the line."
