her
intil the General Assembly, to tussle wi' the wild men." "He's nae
Moderate, man; and gin I'm no sair mistaen, he's a wild man himsel, and
wull uphaud the Veto." "Wheesht! wheesht! wheesht!"

True, that in savage life men starve. But is that any proof that nature
has cursed the race with a fatal tendency to multiply beyond the means
of subsistence? None whatever. Attend for a little to this point. Of the
real power of the bodily appetites for food, and the sway they may
attain over the moral nature of the mind, we, who are protected by our
place among the arrangements of civil society from greatly suffering
under it, can indeed form no adequate conception. Let us not now speak
of those dreadful enormities which, in the midst of dismal famine, are
recorded to have been perpetrated by civilised men, when the whole moral
soul, with all its strongest affections and instinctive abhorrences, has
sunk prostrate under the force of that animal suffering. But the power
of which we speak, as attained by this animal feeling, subsists
habitually among whole tribes and nations. It is that power which it
acquires over the mind of the savage, who is frequently exposed to
suffer its severity, and who hunts for himself the food with which he is
to appease it. Compare the mind of the human being as you are accustomed
to behold him, knowing the return of this sensation only as a grateful
incitement to take the ready nourishment which is spread for his repast,
with that of his fellow-man bearing through the lonely woods the gnawing
pang that goads him to his prey. Hunger _is_ in his heart; hunger bears
along his unfatiguing feet; hunger lies in the strength of his arm;
hunger watches in his eye; hunger listens in his ear; as he couches down
in his covert, silently waiting the approach of his expected spoil, this
is the sole thought that fills his aching breast--"I shall satisfy my
hunger!" When his deadly aim has brought his victim to the ground, this
is the thought that springs up as he rushes to seize it, "I have got
food for my hungry soul!" What must be the usurpation of animal nature
here over the whole man! It is not merely the simple pain, as if it were
the forlornness of a human creature bearing about his famishing
existence in helplessness and despair--though that, too, is indeed a
true picture of some states of our race; but here is not a suffering and
sinking wretch--he is a strong hunter, and puts forth his strength
fiercely