on equal to the amount of literary and political damage which
it had effected.

If people mean, when they say that Human Nature is always the same, that
a few primitive impulses appear through the disguise of all ages and
races, which can be modified, but never extinguished, which work and
are worked upon, are capable of doing good or harm according to
circumstances, but are at all events the conditions of life and motion,
it is fortunately true. That is to say, it is very fortunate that men
and women inhabit the earth. Their great, simple features uplift and
keep all landscapes in their places, and prevent life from falling
through into the molten and chaotic forces underneath. These rugged
water-sheds inclose, configure, temper, fertilize, and also perturb,
the great scenes and stretches of history. They hold the moisture, the
metal, the gem, the seeds of alternating forests and the patient routine
of countless harvests. Superficially it is a great way round from
the lichen to the vine, but not so far by way of the centre. The
many-colored and astonishing life conceals a few simple motives.
Certainly it is a grand and lucky thing that there are so many people
grouped along the lines of divine consistency.

Men will not starve, if they can help it, nor thirst, if water can be
gathered in the palm or reached by digging. If they succeed in making a
cup, they betray a tendency to ornament its rim or stem, or to emboss a
story on its side. They are not disposed to become food for animals,
or to remain unprotected from the climate. They like to have the
opportunity of supplying their own wants and luxuries, and will resist
any tyrannical interference with the methods they prefer. They propagate
their race, and collect in communities for defence and social advantage.
When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize,
to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon. Their
primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms
of their ignorance and of their disposition: dread and cruelty, awe and
size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, will be found
together in the rites and constructions of religion. They like to make
the whole tribe or generation conform; and it is dangerous to oppose
this tendency to preserve the shape of society from within and to
protect it against assaults from without. These are motives originally
independent of circumstances, and which m