our own ancestors of being anthropophagi; and savage tribes in all parts of the world, and in all ages of its history, have been convicted of eating each other in time of

war.

Whilst writing this, I took down from its place on my bookshelves, Wilkes's "Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition," opened it at a chapter on the Customs of the Feejee Group, and found the concluding part of the contents as follows:-" Consequences of the Religious Belief-Parents put to Death-Suicide-Wives Strangled at Funerals-Deformed and Diseased Persons put to Death - Human Sacrifices Cannibalism Price of Human Life-Attacks on Foreign Vessels." I can conceive nothing more revolting than the details given by the gallant officer in relation to these habits :-"The eating of human flesh," he says, "is not confined to cases of sacrifice for religious purposes, but is practised from habit and taste." In the following chapter he remarks, "One could not but perceive the great difference between the Tongees and Feejees who passed the night on board. The former are generally Christian or missionaries' people; they were orderly and respectable, and before going to rest quietly and very devoutly met and had their evening prayer, which, contrasted with the conduct of the others, had a pleasing effect."

Only the other day I was reading, in an interesting little book by a Frenchman, descriptive of a twenty years' residence in the Philippines, an account of a visit which he paid to a tribe of savages very little known, though living at no great distance from the great seaport of Manilla. He arrived just after they had gained a victory over the equally wild inhabitants of a neighbouring district, and he thus describes the feast in celebration of the triumph :"Towards eleven o'clock the chiefs of the village, followed

by the entire population, repaired to the great barn or council-house. There all sat upon the ground; every village, its chief at its head, occupying a space specially allotted to it. In the centre of a circle formed by the chiefs of the combatants stood large jars, full of a drink made of sugar-cane juice and four hideously-mutilated heads of their slaughtered foes; the latter were the trophies of the victory. When all had taken their places a warrior took one of the heads and presented it to the chiefs of the village, who showed it to all present, accompanying its display by a long laudatory speech, addressed to the visitors. The harangue at an end, the warrior took back the head, split it with his hatchet, and took out the brains. During this operation, not very agreeable to witness, another warrior took a second head and presented it to the chiefs; the same oration was made, and then the skull was split, and the brains taken out. With the other two heads the same ceremony was gone through, and then the brains were crushed, by young girls, into the jars containing the fermented cane-juice. When all was well mixed, they took the jars to the chiefs, who dipped into them the small wicker cups, and drank the contents with greedy delight! I turned horribly sick. After the chiefs, it was the turn of the warriors. The jars were offered to them, and they quaffed the revolting beverage to the sound of savage songs. There was something truly infernal in this sacrifice to victory."

And this happened not many years ago on an island of the Celebes possessed by the Spanish crown, and on a spot not two hundred miles from a rich commercial emporium. It illustrates, better than folios of argument, the sad degradation of the heathen state. Need I remind you further of the cruel practices, and unfeeling customs, which the first Europeans who visited North America found prevalent

among its aboriginal tribes? No sympathetic look or zealous service was accorded to their sick; when attacked by disease, especially if it were contagious, they were left to their fate in the lonely forest. In some of the more southern provinces, the Spanish conquerors were obliged to pass laws, forcing husbands to support their wives, and parents to attend their children, during sickness and distress. In the breast of a heathen there are cherished none of those warm feelings of affection and self-denying devotion which take the edge off the ills of this life, and point to a brighter period of existence beyond the grave. Nor does a partial civilisation alter the state of the case. All the inhabitants of America were not rude Indians, dwelling in wigwams, living by the chase. Cortez and Pizarro encountered very different races in Mexico and Peru. The halls of Montezuma rivalled the chambers of the Alhambra; the defence of his capital city gave evidence of a people wanting neither in science, nor in bravery, nor in acquaintance with the art of war. "Yet, after all," remarks the historian Prescott, "the Aztecs were emphatically a fierce and brutal race, little calculated, in their best respects, to excite our sympathy and regard. They did nothing to ameliorate the condition, or in any way promote the progress of their vassals, who were serfs, used only to minister to their pleasure, held in awe by armed garrisons, ground to the dust by imposts in peace, by military conscriptions in war." Or, to return to the old world, what was the condition of one and all of those barbarous hordes, who, from the remote steppes of central Asia, overran the fairest European kingdoms, poured like a winter torrent through the streets of Rome, and devastated every province washed by the Mediterranean? They lived, ancient writers tell us, very like the birds of prey, greedily devoured horse flesh, knew of no better habitations than dark dirty huts, and had no employments but hunting and predatory excur

sions. "The Thuringians who served in the army of Attila," Gibbon relates, "massacred their hostages, as well as their captives; two hundred young maidens were tortured with exquisite and unrelenting rage; their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses, or their bones were crushed under the weight of rolling waggons; and their unburied limbs were abandoned, on the public roads, as a prey to dogs and vultures." "Such," adds that elegant writer, were those savage ancestors, whose imaginary virtues have sometimes excited the praise and envy of civilised ages." And such, ladies and gentlemen, might we have been, but for the humanising and softening influence of that religion which then was, as it now is, unknown beyond the Ural mountains and the Aral sea.

Can the quotation which I have just made fail to remind you of the awful tragedies, so fresh in the memories of us all, of the refinements in cruelty, of the unheard-of barbarities practised on helpless women and children by men, far removed from the condition of rude barbarians, and many of whom were indebted for some act of kindness to the very persons whose life-blood they shed? The newspapers have lately narrated to you instances of cruelty as dreadful as those which disgraced the reigns of Caligula and Nero; of tortures as lingering as those endured by Christian martyrs, when fighting with the wild beasts of Africa in the Coliseum at Rome. Yet they were perpetrated by a race comparatively civilised, and at the instigation of rulers accomplished in the various arts and elegancies of life, but professing a faith which panders to the worst passions of mankind. The atrocities of Delhi and Cawnpore surprised no one who has studied with impartial care the peculiarities of the Mahommedan and the Hindoo faiths. Nor have such deeds been committed now, for the first time, in the history of India. In 1806, a mutiny broke out at Vellore, when not only the

European soldiery, but the sick in the hospital, without respect to sex or age, were massacred in cold blood. Twenty years before, our countrymen who had been taken prisoners by Hyder Ali, endured privations in the dungeons of Seringapatam, the narrative of which makes one shudder; and our children's children will peruse, with dismal interest, the account of the sufferings undergone by a defeated garrison in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Tippoo Saib, when the merchants of Calicut could not pay an exorbitant tribute, chained them to a barren rock, and there left them to perish; the Dewan of a Mahratta prince extorted money from the rich inhabitants of Poonah, by tying them on heated guns;-when Nadir Shah entered Delhi as a conqueror, fifty thousand human beings fell victims to his vengeance; and no one can tell the number of lives taken in Hindostan by the associations of assassins worshipping sometimes the Goddess of Destruction, sometimes the Mussulman Allah, and known by the name of Thugs. Every petty palace from Cabool to Colombo has been the scene of diabolical outrage; "the dark places" of every Province, from Ceylon to Cashmere, have been "the habitations of horrid cruelty." Nor will the spread of education and science-the introduction of railways, and steamboats, and telegraphsprove sufficient to change the hearts of a people who have not the fear of God before their eyes. Recent events have signally proved that a man may be a monster though civilised, and that a higher and more powerful influence than that of secular colleges is required to soften the manners of a people who worship, with divine honours, Siva the Destroyer. We may cover India with a network of railroads, irrigate its deserts, reclaim its jungles, make its rivers highways for traffic, reform its courts of justice, raise the physical condition of its Ryots, and make it a model of successful government, and still be liable to outrages as fearful as those which have