ous tribes are
unprogressive. Ages on ages roll over them without changing any thing
in their state; and Niebuhr has well remarked with others, that history
records no instance of a savage tribe or people having become civilized
by its own spontaneous or indigenous efforts. If savage tribes have
ever become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age. Nothing
in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of
itself from the savage state to the civilized. But the primitive man,
as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage. The lowest, most
degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered
has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social
state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in
superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of true religion;
but the people in the alleged state of nature have none.

The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting into
their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of
the civilized man. It is, perhaps, not difficult for men who have been
civilized, who have the intelligence, the arts, the affections, and the
habits of civilization, if deprived by some great social convulsion of
society, and thrown back on the so-called state of nature, or cast away
on some uninhabited island in the ocean, and cut off from all
intercourse with the rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and
re-establish and maintain civil government. They are civilized men,
and bear civil society in their own life. But these are no
representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of nature.
These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no conception
even of civilized life, or of any state superior to that in which they
have thus far lived. How then can they, since, on the theory, civil
society has no root in nature, but is a purely artificial creation,
even conceive of civilization, much less realize it?

These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete
abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they feel
they could do in case civil society were broken up, what men may do and
have