nconsistent with it. When the Ashantee
offers a human sacrifice, it is in order to secure blessings from his
gods. When the Hindoo exposes his sick parent in the Ganges, he thinks
he is putting him out of pain by a charmed death. When Sand stabbed
Kotzebue, he believed he was punishing and getting rid of an enemy and
an obstacle to the welfare of his nation. When the Georgian planter
buys and sells slaves, he goes on the supposition that he is preserving
the order and due subordination of society. All these notions are shown
by philosophy to be narrow, superficial, and mistaken. They have been
outgrown by many, and are doubtless destined to be outgrown by all; but,
acted upon by the ignorant and deluded, they are very different from the
wickedness which is perpetrated against better knowledge. But these
things would be wickedness, perpetrated against better knowledge, if the
supposition of a universal, infallible Moral Sense were true. The
traveller who should consistently adhere to the notion of a Moral Sense,
must pronounce the Ashantee worshipper as guilty as Greenacre: the
Hindoo son a parricide, not only in fact, but in the most revolting
sense of the term: Sand, a Thurtell: and the Georgian planter such a
monster of tyranny as a Sussex farmer would be if he set up a
whipping-post for his labourers, and sold their little ones to gipsies.
Such judgments would be cruelly illiberal. The traveller who is
furnished with the more accurate philosophy of Conscience would arrive
at conclusions, not only more correct, but far less painful; and,
without any laxity of principle, far more charitable.

So much for one instance of the advantage to the traveller of being
provided with definite principles, to be used as a rallying point and
test of his observations, instead of mere vague moral notions and
general prepossessions, which can serve only as a false medium, by which
much that he sees must necessarily be perverted or obscured.

SECTION IV.

The traveller having satisfied himself that there are some universal
feelings about right and wrong, and that in consequence some parts of
human conduct are guided by general rules, must next give his attention
to modes of conduct, which seem to him good or bad, prevalent in a
nation, or district, or society of smaller limits. His first general
principle is, that the law of nature is the only one by which mankind at
large can be judged. His second must be, that every prevalent virt