unbiased mind, must go away
mournfully asking--'Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five years of
enlightening?'

In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few
and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but
Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in
reserve;--the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries,
the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of
refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human
misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people.

But it will be urged that these shocking unprincipled wretches are
cannibals. Very true; and a rather bad trait in their character it must
be allowed. But they are such only when they seek to gratify the passion
of revenge upon their enemies; and I ask whether the mere eating of
human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only
a few years since was practised in enlightened England:--a convicted
traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike
heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels
dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four
quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and
fester among the public haunts of men!

The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of
death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our
wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are
enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most
ferocious animal on the face of the earth.

His remorseless cruelty is seen in many of the institutions of our own
favoured land. There is one in particular lately adopted in one of the
States of the Union, which purports to have been dictated by the most
merciful considerations. To destroy our malefactors piece-meal, drying
up in their veins, drop by drop, the blood we are too chicken-hearted
to shed by a single blow which would at once put a period to their
sufferings, is deemed to be infinitely preferable to the old-fashioned
punishment of gibbeting--much less annoying to the victim, and more in
accordance with the refined spirit of the age; and yet how feeble is all
language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we
mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude
in the very heart of our popula