ON THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION.

A SUBJECT on which I have for many years bestowed consi derable attention, as appearing to me both very curious, and, in many respects, highly important (much more so than many suppose), is, the Origin of Civilisation. And I propose to lay before you a small portion of the results of my researches, and reflections thereupon; which will, I trust, be found not uninteresting or uninstructive.

Every one who is at all acquainted with works of ancient nistory, or of voyages and travels, or who has conversed with persons that have visited distant regions, must have been greatly struck (if possessing at all a thoughtful and intelligent mind) with the vast difference between civilised Man and the savage. If you look to the very lowest and rudest races that inhabit the earth, you behold beings sunk almost to the level of the brute-creation, and, in some points, even below the brutes. Ignorant and thoughtless, gross in their tastes, filthy in their habits, with the passions of men, but with the intellect of little children, they roam, half-naked and halfstarved, over districts which might be made to support in plenty and in comfort as many thousands of civilised Europeans as there are individuals in the savage tribe. And they are sunk, for the most part, quite as low, morally, as they are

intellectually. Polygamy, in its most gross and revolting form, and infanticide, prevail among most savage tribes; and

cannibalism among many. And the sick or helplessly aged are usually abandoned by their relatives, to starve, or to be devoured by wild beasts. Even in bodily person they differ greatly from the civilised man. They are not only, in general, very ugly and ill-made, but, in the structure of their limbs, and especially in the head and face, they approach considerably to animals of the ape tribe; and the countenance is usually expressive of a mixture of stupidity, ferocity, and something of suspiciousness and low cunning.

If you compare together merely the very lowest of savages and the most highly civilised specimens of the European races, you will be at first inclined to doubt whether they can all belong to the same Species. But though the very topmost round of the ladder is at a vast distance from the ground, there are numerous steps between them, each but a very little removed from that next above and that next below it. The savages whom we found in Van Diemen's Land, and of whom there is now but a very small remnant, and others of the same race, the Papuan,-who are found widely scattered over the South-eastern regions of the globe, -the people of Tierra del Fuego, in the Southern extremity of America,-and again, the Bushmen-Hottentots in the neighbourhood of the Cape Colony (some specimens of whom were not long since exhibited in this country), seem to be the lowest of savages. But one might find specimens of the human race, to the number of perhaps twenty or more, gradually ascending by successive steps, from these, up to the most civilised nations upon the earth; each, not very far removed from the one below and the one above it; though the two extremes present such a prodigious contrast.

As for the alleged advantages of savage life-the freedom enjoyed by Man in a wild state, and the pure simplicity, and

innocence, and magnanimous generosity of character that he exhibits-I need not, I trust, detain you by offering proofs that all this exists only in poems and romances, and in the imagination of their readers; or in the theories of such philosophers as the well-known Rousseau, who have undertaken to maintain a monstrous paradox because it affords the best exercise for their ingenuity, and who perhaps have ended in being themselves bewildered by that very ingenuity of their own, like a spider entangled in the web spun by herself. The liberty enjoyed by the savage consists in his being left free to oppress and plunder any one who is weaker than himself, and in being exposed to the same treatment from those who are stronger. His boasted simplicity consists merely in grossness of taste, improvidence, and ignorance. And his virtue merely amounts to this, that though not less covetous, envious, and malicious than civilised Man, he wants the skill to be as dangerous as one of equally depraved character, but more intelligent and better informed.

I have heard it remarked, however, by persons not destitute of intelligence, as a presumption in favour of savage life, that it has sometimes been voluntarily embraced by civilised men; while, on the other hand, it has seldom if ever happened that a savage has consented to conform to civilised life.

But this is easily explained, even from the very inferiority of the savage state. It is easier to sink than to rise. To lay aside or lose what we have, is far easier than to acquire what we have not. The savage has no taste for the enjoyments of civilised life. Its pursuits and occupations are what he wants capacity to enjoy, or understand, or sympathise with. On the other hand, the pursuits and gratifications (such as they are) of the savage, are what the civilised man can fully understand and partake of; and if he does but throw aside and disregard the higher portion of his nature, he can enter

heartily into the enjoyments of a hunting tribe of wild Indians, whose business is the same as the recreation of the sportsman, and who alternate the labours of the chase with torpid repose and sensual indulgence.

In short, the case is nearly the same as with the resemblance, and the distinction, between Man and the brute creatures. Man is an animal as well as they. He has much in common with them, and something more besides. Both have the same appetites, and many of the same passions; but the brutes lack most of the intellectual and moral faculties ; and hence, a brute cannot be raised into a man, though it is possible, as we too often find, for a man to sink himself nearly into a brute, by giving himself up to mere animal gratifications, and neglecting altogether the nobler and more properly human portion of himself.

It may be worth remarking, before I quit this portion of the subject, that persons not accustomed to accuracy of thinking, are often misled by the differences of form, and consequently of name, under which the same evils may be found in different states of society; and consequently are inclined to suppose that others may be exempt from such vices and other evils as prevail among ourselves, inasmuch as they cannot have exactly the same under the same titles. Where there is no property in land, for instance, there cannot be a grasping and oppressive landlord; where there is no trade, there can be no bankrupts; and where money is unknown, the love of money, which is our common designation of avarice, cannot exist. And thence the unthinking are perhaps led to imagine that avarice itself has no place in the savage state, and that oppression, and cruelty, and rapacity, and ruin, must be there unknown.

But the savage is commonly found to be covetous, often thievish, when his present inclination impels him towards any objects he needs, or which his fancy is set on. He is not, indeed, so steady, or so provident, in his pursuit of gain as the