That of draughts appeared the most common.

The checker-board is very simple, the squares being marked on the ground with a sharp stick: the men are merely shells or pebbles.

The game was different from that played in civilized countries, so that we could not understand it.
Although nature has done almost everything for the inhabitants of the Sandwich islands--though they enjoy a perpetual spring, a clear sky, a salubrious climate, and scarcely any labor is required to produce the necessaries of life--they can not be regarded as generally happy: the artisans and producers, whom they call _Tootoos_, are nearly in the same situation as the Helots among the Lacedemonians, condemned to labor almost incessantly for their lord or _Eris_, without hope of bettering their condition, and even restricted in the choice of their daily food.[F] How has it happened that among a people yet barbarous, where knowledge is nearly equally distributed, the class which is beyond comparison the most numerous has voluntarily submitted to such a humiliating and oppressive yoke?
The Tartars, though infinitely less numerous than the Chinese, have subjected them, because the former were warlike and the latter were not.

The same thing has happened, no doubt, at remote periods, in Poland, and other regions of Europe and Asia.

If moral causes are joined to physical ones, the superiority of one caste and the inferiority of the other will be still more marked; it is known that the natives of Hispaniola, when they saw the Spaniards arrive on their coast, in vessels of an astonishing size to their apprehensions, and heard them imitate the thunder with their cannon, took them for beings of a superior nature to their own.