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of things, a save tribe, cut off from all communication with more polished nations, will, by the efforts of their own genius, invent, and gradually perfect the arts of civilized life, let him point out the instance. Following the lights of history, we frequently see rude and barbarous people prompted and assisted in their progress to refinement by the example and influence of nations who have advanced far before them in this career. The Greeks were polished by the Asiatics, and Egyptians ; the Italians by the Greeks, and by the colonies from the Lesser Asia ; and Italy extender her arts to Germany and Gaul. But history presents to us no tribe originally and perfectly savage who has voluntarily sought from abroad, and introduced among themselves, the manners, and the arts of any civilized nation ; much less has invented those arts, and cultivated those manners, from the operation of any causes arising solely within themselves, or any tendencies in human nature, while existing in such a state of society, towards further improvement. The unsuccessful efforts of the United States to introduce among the tribes of savages, who skirt along our western frontiers, only a few of our arts, most obviously tending to their own advantage, demonstrate that the genius of savagism

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is obstinately opposed to the labours, the restraints, and industrious habits required in civilized society. Hardly has any individual savage ever been induced to adopt our manners. Such, on the other hand, is the charm of their wandering and independent state, the pleasure of alternately pursuing their game, and reposing in indolence, that many of the citizens of the United States are found voluntarily to renounce all the conveniences of civilization to mingle with the savages in the wilderness, giving the preference to their idle and vagrant habits of life.—Two striking and practical examples which demonstrate, on one hand, with what facility civilized man sinks into the savage, especially in those circumstances which so frequently offered themselves to restless and idle spirits in the early periods of the world ; and on the other hand, what difficulties, almost insurmountable, the savage state opposes to the ascent of human nature, in the contrary progression towards the cultivation of the parts of civilized life.

If such is the genius and character of savagism, as it appears in the aboriginal tribes of America, how much farther removed from teh first elements of

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