tem of life, and yet I do not
find that these refining advocates for it, are themselves tempted to
embrace it. They are content to commend what themselves do not care to
practise. Those who actually do embrace it, reason very little about it,
though no doubt, the motives above assigned for their preference, are
generally, one may say instinctively, at the bottom of it. Their
greatest want is of wine, especially at first to those who are used to
it; but they are soon weaned from it by the example of others, and
content themselves with the substitution of rum, or brandy, of which
they obtain supplies by their barter of skins and furs. In short, their
hunting procures them all that they want or desire, and their liberty or
independence supplies to them the place of those luxuries of life, that
are not well to be had without the sacrifice in some sort of it.

It is more difficult to find an excuse for the shocking cruelties and
barbarities, exercised by the savages on their unhappy captives in war.
The instances, however, of their inhumanity, are certainly not
exagerated, nor possible to be exagerated, but they are multiplied
beyond the limits of truth. That they put then their prisoners to death
by exquisite tortures, is strictly true; but it is as true too, that
they do not serve so many in that manner as has been said. Numbers they
save, and even incorporate with their own nation, who become as free as,
and on a footing with, the conquerors themselves. And even in that
cruelty of theirs, there is at the bottom a mixture of piety with their
vindictiveness. They imagine themselves bound to revenge the deaths of
their ancestors, their parents, or relations, fallen in war, upon their
enemies, especially of that nation by whom they have fallen. It is in
that apprehension too, they extend their barbarity to young children,
and to women: to the first, because they fear they may grow up to an
age, when they will be sure to pursue that revenge of which the spirit
is early instilled into them; to the second, lest they should produce
children, to whom they would, from the same spirit, be sure to inculcate
it. Thus, in a round natural enough, their fear begets their cruelty,
and their cruelty their fear, and so on, _ad infinitum_. They consider
too these tortures as matter of glory to them in the constancy with
which they are taught to suffer them; they familiarize to themselves the
idea of them, in a manner that redoubles their natu