l true progress
must bring nearer. What is this ideally perfect social state towards
which mankind ever has been, and still is tending? Our best thinkers
maintain, that it is a state of individual freedom and self-government,
rendered possible by the equal development and just balance of the
intellectual, moral, and physical parts of our nature,--a state in which
we shall each be so perfectly fitted for a social existence, by knowing
what is right, and at the same time feeling an irresistible impulse to
do what we know to be right., that all laws and all punishments shall
be unnecessary. In such a state every man would have a sufficiently
well-balanced intellectual organization, to understand the moral law in
all its details, and would require no other motive but the free impulses
of his own nature to obey that law.

Now it is very remarkable, that among people in a very low stage of
civilization, we find some approach to such a perfect social state. I
have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East,
who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the village
freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his
fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place.
In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are cone of those wide
distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master
and servant, which are the product of our civilization; there is none of
that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases
wealth, products also conflicting interests; there is not that severe
competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense
population of civilized countries inevitably creates. All incitements to
great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by
the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of
justice and of his neighbour's right, which seems to be, in some degree,
inherent in every race of man.

Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage state in
intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in morals. It
is true that among those classes who have no wants that cannot be easily
supplied, and among whom public opinion has great influence; the rights
of others are fully respected. It is true, also, that we have vastly
extended the sphere of those rights, and include within them all the
brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say, that t