ark! what a sameness, and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all
the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us _men_ out of
our mothers, but babes--helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless
_babes_!--ignorant; who must _grow_ into the perfect stature and the
mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way?
Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which
separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law of nature is
progress. It is often, nay, always, a very slow thing--but how sure! how
inevitable! how beneficent in its results! She never makes worse after
bad--and those weird opium monsters of the foreworlds were unspeakably
bad!--but always she makes of bad better; and of better she has made her
best, at present. In the light of this law, _were any one mad enough to
grope_, he might come to the conclusion that the first man (or race of
men) was anything but a grandee in mind, person, or estate; and that our
seemingly puzzled but at last most wonder-working mother, ycleped
Nature, made some very ugly attempts at man before she reached the
climax of her imagination and her power as it obtains in the man
Caucasian!

I regard all the colored races--and with no malice or evil of any sort
in my heart toward them--as first experiments in the gamut of human
creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my
consciousness--let alone my active intellect--the belief that these were
the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that
the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless
person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of
the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown modern Indian!
It is an _old_ face, as if the accumulated wrinkles of, not 'forty,' but
a hundred 'centuries' had ploughed their marks there. They seem to
belong to the dawn of time; while our Caucasian man is ever young and
beautiful, the born master of all things.

We must deal with races according to their faculty, and credit them
according to their faculty. If we fail, we fail in wisdom--and in
prudence, which is a valuable attribute of wisdom. Expect not grapes
from thistles! Expect no virtue--unless it relates to his own
selfishness or his own tribe--from an Indian, or from very many other
men!

It must not be forgotten, however, that Indians are people who, to say
the least of them, are fashio