s unknown people. Neither
did those who lived three hundred years ago, when America was first
discovered, leave any accounts from which even an hypothesis could be
formed. Tradition--that perishable, yet ever renewed monument of the
pristine world--throws no light upon the subject. It is an undoubted
fact, however, that in this part of the globe thousands of our
fellow-beings had lived. When they came hither, what was their origin,
their destiny, their history, and how they perished, no one can tell.
How strange does it appear that nations have existed, and afterwards so
completely disappeared from the earth that the remembrance of their very
names is effaced; their languages are lost; their glory is vanished like
a sound without an echo; though perhaps there is not one which has not
left behind it some tomb in memory of its passage! The most durable
monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and
nothingness of man.

Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited
by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its
discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians
occupied without possessing it. It is by agricultural labor that man
appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America
lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their
uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage
virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these
nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has
proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing the completion of it.
They seem to have been placed by Providence amidst the riches of the New
World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them. Those coasts,
so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep
rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the Mississippi; the whole
continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation,
yet unborn.

In that land the great experiment was to be made, by civilized man, of
the attempt to construct society upon a new basis; and it was there, for
the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable,
were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by
the history of the past.

Chapter II: Origin Of The Anglo-Americans--Part I

Chapter Summary

Utility of knowing the origin of nations in order to understan