They willingly submit to all the inconveniences of this method of farming for the sake of each other's society, rather than betake themselves to the solitary backwoods, as English, Germans, and Americans so readily do.
Indeed, not only does the American backwoodsman become accustomed to solitude, but he prefers it.

And in the Western States, when settlers come too near him, and the country seems to become "overcrowded," he retreats before the advance of society, and, packing up his "things" in a waggon, he sets out cheerfully, with his wife and family, to found for himself a new home in the Far West.
Thus the Teuton, because of his very shyness, is the true colonizer.
English, Scotch, Germans, and Americans are alike ready to accept solitude, provided they can but establish a home and maintain a family.
Thus their comparative indifference to society has tended to spread this race over the earth, to till and to subdue it; while the intense social instincts of the French, though issuing in much greater gracefulness of manner, has stood in their way as colonizers; so that, in the countries in which they have planted themselves--as in Algiers and elsewhere--they have remained little more than garrisons.

[1816] There are other qualities besides these, which grow out of the comparative unsociableness of the Englishman.

His shyness throws him back upon himself, and renders him self-reliant and self-dependent.
Society not being essential to his happiness, he takes refuge in reading, in study, in invention; or he finds pleasure in industrial work, and becomes the best of mechanics.

He does not fear to entrust himself to the solitude of the ocean, and he becomes a fisherman, a sailor, a discoverer.