Chapter XXIV

PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION IN EUROPE

POPULATION extending to the milder regions

of Europe, brought civilization along with it; so that it is only among the savages (as we call our ancestors of the north) that we can trace the intermediate state I have spoken of. Amongst them, one regular gradation seems to have taken place; they were first hunters and then warriors. As they advanced in their knowledge of the arts of life, and acquired a little property, as much of pastoral pursuits as their rigorous climate would allow, without the aid of regular agriculture, mingled with their wandering habits. But, except in a few partial instances, from hunters they became conquerors: the warlike habits acquired from that mode of life raising their minds above patient industry, and teaching them to despise the softer arts that embellish society. In fine, their usual process was to pass to civilization through the medium of conquest. The poet says,

"With noble scorn the first fam'd Cato viewed

Rome learning arts from Greece which she subdued."

The surly censor might have spared his scorn, for doubtless science, and the arts of peace were by

far the most valuable acquisitions resulting from their conquest of that polished and ingenious people. But when the savage hunters of the north became too numerous to subsist on their deer and fish, and too warlike to dread the conflict with troops more regularly armed, they rushed down, like a cataract, on their enfeebled and voluptuous neighbors; destroyed the monuments of art, and seemed for a time to change the very face of nature. Yet dreadful as were the devastations of this flood, let forth by divine vengeance to punish and to renovate, it had its use in sweeping away the hoarded mass of corruption with which the dregs of mankind had polluted the earth. It was an awful, but a needful process; which, in some form or other, is always renewed when human degeneracy has reached its ultimatum. The destruction of these feeble beings, who, lost to every manly and virtuous sentiment, crawl about the rich property which they have not sense to use worthily, or spirit to defend manfully, may be compared to the effort nature makes to rid herself of the noxious brood of wasps and slugs, cherished by successive mild winters. A dreadful frost comes; man suffers, and complains; his subject animals suffer more, and all his works are for a time suspended: but this salutary infliction purifies the air, meliorates the soil and destroys millions of lurking enemies, who would otherwise have consumed the productions of the earth, and deformed the face of nature. In these barbarous irruptions,

the monuments of art, statues, pictures, temples, and palaces, seem to be most lamented. From age to age the virtuosi of every country have reëchoed to each other their feeble plaints over the lost works of art; as if that had been the heaviest sorrow in the general wreck; and as if the powers that produced them had ceased to exist. It is over the defaced image of the divine Author, and not merely the mutilated resemblance of his creatures, that the wise and virtuous should lament! We are told that in Rome there were as many statues as men: had all these lamented statues been preserved would the world be much wiser or happier? a sufficient number remain as models to future statuaries, and memorials of departed art and genius. Wealth, directed by taste and liberality, may be much better employed in calling forth, by due encouragement, that genius which doubtless exists among our cotemporaries, than in paying exorbitantly the vender of fragments.

66 Mind, mind alone, bear witness earth and heav'n!
The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime."

And what has mind achieved, that, in a favorable conjuncture, it might not again aspire to? The lost arts are ever the theme of classical lamentation; but the great and real evil was the loss of the virtues which protected them; of courage, fortitude, honor, and patriotism; in short, of the whole manly char

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acter. This must be allowed, after the dreadful tempest of subversion was over, to have been in some degree restored in the days of chivalry: and it is equally certain that the victors learnt from the vanquished many of the arts that support life, and all those which embellish it. When their manners were softened by the aid of a mild and charitable religion, this blended people assumed that undefined power, derived from superior valor and superior wisdom, which has so far exalted Europe over all the regions of the earth. Thus, where a bold and warlike people subdue a voluptuous and effeminate one, the result is, in due time, an improvement of national character. In similar climes and circumstances to those of the primeval nations in the other hemisphere, the case has been very different. There, too, the hunter, by the same gradation became a warrior; but first allured by the friendship which sought his protection; then repelled by the art that coveted and encroached on his territories; and lastly by the avarice that taught him new wants, and then took an undue advantage of them; they neither wished for our superfluities, nor envied our mode of life; nor did our encroachments much disturb them, as they receded into their trackless coverts as we approached from the coast. But though they scorned our refinements; and though our government, and all the enlightened minds amongst us, dealt candidly and generously with all such as were not set on by our enemies to injure us, the blight

of European vices, the mere consequence of private greediness and fraud, proved fatal to our very friends. As I formerly observed, the nature of the climate did not admit of the warriors passing through the medium of a shepherd's life to the toils of agriculture. The climate, though extremely warm in summer, was so severe in winter, and that winter was so long, that it required no little labor to secure the food for the animals which were to be maintained; and no small expense in that country to procure the implements necessary for the purpose of agriculture. In other countries, when a poor man has not wherewithal to begin farming, he serves another; and the reward of his toil enables him to set up for himself. No such resource was open to the Indians, had they even inclined to adopt our modes. No Indian ever served another, or received assistance from any one except his own family. 'Tis inconceivable, too, what a different kind of exertion of strength it requires to cultivate the ground, and to endure the fatigues of the chase, long journeys, etc. To all that induces us to labor they were indifferent. When a governor of New York was describing to an Indian the advantages that some one would derive from such and such possessions; "Why," said he, with evident surprise, "should any man desire to possess more than he uses?" More appeared to his untutored sense an incumbrance.

I have already observed how much happier they