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which comes right out of the pioneer period. If one suffers, the others must look after them and the widows. You find that running through all town meeting records - the Widow Jones' husband was lost at sea, she had seven children, obviously the town must make some provision for them and there didn't seem to be any debate about it. The town did.

There never was a class structure in this country that I can see. People got rich, but they were still Sam Jones, the blacksmith's son. You got rich and the next day it was somebody else's. You all put in so many hours of labor into a ship, she went out, made her first voyage, came back and she'd paid herself on the first cargo, so you sat around a table and divided up the money. The carpenters got this, the shipwrights got that, the fitters got the other, the people who had contributed the iron or oak or pine out of their forest got their share, and the manager of the enterprise who had acted as treasurer got a good share. You used to not have to pay the carpenter's wages till the ship came back. (My grandmother or my father told me about this method of managing.)

That bred a community in which there was no class structure. You moved from one group to the other just depending on chance and luck. Somebody was poor today, and rich the next day. I think it was out of that that the idea