ncivilized aborigines living in forests, or roaming wildly over
uninclosed and trackless plains. Of those who have the opportunity to
observe them, accordingly, some extol, in the highest degree, their
rude but charming simplicity, their truth and faithfulness, the
strength of their filial and conjugal affection, and their superiority
of spirit in rising above the sordid sentiments and gross vices of
civilization. They are not the slaves, these writers say, of appetite
and passion. They have no inordinate love of gain; they are patient in
enduring suffering, grateful for kindness received, and inflexibly
firm in their adherence to the principles of honor and duty. Others,
on the other hand, see in savage life nothing but treachery, cruelty,
brutality, and crime. Man in his native state, as they imagine, is but
a beast, with just intelligence enough to give effect to his
depravity. Without natural affection, without truth, without a sense
of justice, or the means of making law a substitute for it, he lives
in a scene of continual conflict, in which the rights of the weak and
the defenseless are always overborne by brutal and tyrannical power.

The explanation of this diversity is doubtless this, that in savage
life, as well as in every other state of human society, all the
varieties of human conduct and character are exhibited; and the
attention of each observer is attracted to the one or to the other
class of phenomena, according to the circumstances in which he is
placed when he makes his observations, or the mood of mind which
prevails within him when he records them. There must be the usual
virtues of social life, existing in a greater or less degree, in all
human communities; for such principles as a knowledge of the
distinction of right and wrong, the idea of property and of individual
rights, the obligation resting on every one to respect them, the sense
of justice, and of the ill desert of violence and cruelty, are all
_universal instincts of the human soul_, as universal and as essential
to humanity as maternal or filial affection, or the principle of
conjugal love. They were established by the great Author of nature as
constituent elements in the formation of man. Man could not continue
to exist, as a gregarious animal, without them. It would accordingly
be as impossible to find a community of men without these moral
sentiments generally prevalent among them, as to find vultures or
tigers that did not like to p