BOOK I. and antiquarian curiosity, to place the commencement of population, art, and knowledge, in the eastern portions of the earth. Here men first appeared and multiplied; and from hence progressively spread into those wilder and ruder districts, where nature was living in all her unmolested, but dreary, vacant, and barbarous majesty. In the plains of warm and prolific climates, which the human race first cultivated, ease, abundance, leisure, and enjoyment, were accompanied by an early civilization, with all its advantages and evils. As the experience of the latter has, in subsequent times, and in our own, driven many from their native soil and patriotic comforts, to pursue the shadows of their hopes in new and uncultivated regions; so it appears to have actuated several to similar emigrations, in the earliest periods of society. In all ages, mankind have grown up into two great classes, which have diverged into a marked distinction from each other. It has been usual to call one of these, in its connected ramifications, the civilized states of antiquity; and to consider the other, with much complacent contumely, as savage and barbarous tribes. THAT the primeval tribes of mankind were savage brutes, is a theory which, although it has been adorned by the poetry of Lucretius and Horace, may be now deemed as credible as the diverging systems of two modern speculators, who have respectively deduced us from fishes and monkeys. The sober truth may rather be considered to be, that the survivors of the antediluvian race, and their immediate déscendants, must have been a cultivated people; that improvement preceded barbarism; and that the wilder tribes were devi I. ations from the more civilized. Hence we may CHAP. reasonably contemplate both these descriptions of society as the same people of whom the Nomadic, or Wandering, radiated like the modern settlers on the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Oronooko, from civilized communities, into new circumstances of life and residence; into desolate solitudes, often grand and picturesque, but for a long time comfortless and appalling: where nature reigned in a state of magnificence, as to her vegetable and animal subjects, but diffused for some time terror, penury, and disease, to all that was intellectual and human. It was impossible for any portion of the civilized population of the world, to wander from their domestic localities, and to penetrate far into these unpeopled regions, without changing the character and habits of their minds; or without being followed by a progeny, still more dissimilar to every thing which they had quitted. In some, the alteration was a deteriorating process, declining successively into absolute barbarism. But in the far greater number it became rather peculiarity than perversion, and a peculiarity not without beneficial operation on the ulterior advances of human society; for it is manifest to the impartial eye, as it calmly contemplates most of the less civilized populations which have come within the scope of our knowledge, that original forms of character, and many new and admirable habits and institutions, often grew up, in these abodes of want, exertion, independence, and vicissitudes. The loss of some of the improvements of happier society, was compensated by energies and principles, which that must necessarily sacrifice, or cannot obtain: and it will be nearer the actual truth, to consider I. BOOK the barbarous and civilized states of antiquity, as possessed of advantages distinct from each other; and perhaps not capable of continuous union, although often becoming intermingled, for a time, with mutual improvement. IN In our late age of the world, the term barbarian is still correctly applicable to many countries which we have visited; but it will be unjust to the ancestors of all modern Europe, not to consider, that the appellation had not anciently a meaning so directly appropriate. The Greeks denominated all nations as barbaroi but their own; although Egypt, Phenicia, Babylon, and Carthage had preceded them in civilization. THE rise of the two ancient grand divisions of mankind may be dated from their dispersion at the confusion of human language. When their unity was by this event broken up, and they had separated from each other to form independent tribes in new and wilder districts, the differences of their manners and social life must have soon afterwards begun. The choice of northern or southern regions-the effects of colder or warmer climatethe preference of indolent pasturage to laborious agriculture, and of changeable abode to the fixed mansions of a monotonous city, must have caused their posterities to become very dissimilar to each other. To many active spirits, it was then more gratifying to hunt the eatable animals in their woods, than to cut down the trees, grub up their roots, erect log-houses, or drain bogs: while some would submit to these patience-needing and slowlyrewarding toils. Hence the hunter state, the shepherd state, the rude first-clearers' state, and the industrious tillage state, would be arising in I. many places simultaneously with each other, and CHAP. with the more stationary and self-indulgent accumulation of city populations in those warmer and longer cultivated localities, where the arts, industry, and enjoyments of regular life under kings, hierarchies, and aristocracies, first appear to the researches of an investigating curiosity. All these conditions of society have been always found too coincident to have been originally converted into each other; and when we consider mankind to have early branched off into unconnected ramifications, separating for ever from their parent root, we shall perceive that their coincidence involves no inconsistency. We even now, at this late age of the world, see the Eskimaux, the wild Indian, the backsettler, and the cultivated Philadelphian, existing at the same time in North America; so did the Egyptian, the Scythian, and the Greek; so did high polish and rude barbarism at all times appear in disparted but coeval existence, whenever the ancient traveller or historian sufficiently extended his geographical inquiries. But all the early great divisions of mankind were not, at once, as strongly unlike, as the New Hollander, or Caffre, is to a modern European. They were at first to each other, what the Dorians were to the Athenians in Greece; the one a settled population, the other migratory and restless. retain the expression of civilization, as the character of the settled races, it will less mislead our imaginations, if we call the other portion of mankind the Nomadic race. These had improvements and civilization of their own, though of a sterner and more hardy nature. They differed in attainments from their more polished relatives; but were not in And though we may BOOK I. all things their inferiors. It is unjust to degrade those with the appellation of barbarians, in the present meaning of the term, from whose minds, institutions, and manners, all that we now possess in civilization, superior to the most cultivated states of antiquity, has been principally derived. Our ancestors sprung from the great barbaric or Nomadic stock; and it may divest us of some of our unreasonable prejudices and false theories about them, if we make a rapid survey of the circumstances by which the two great classes of mankind have been principally distinguished. Of these, THE CIVILIZED were those nations who, from their first appearance in history, have been found numerously and durably associated together; building fixed habitations; cultivating continuously the same soil; and fond of connecting their dwellings with each other into cities and towns, which, as external dangers pressed, they surrounded with walls. They multiplied inventions in the mechanic and manufacturing arts; allowed an individual property in ground and produce, to be acquired and transmitted; and guarded and perpetuated the appropriation, with all the terrors of law and civil power. THEY became studious of quiet life, political order, social courtesy, pleasurable amusements, and domestic employments. They exercised mind in frequent and refined thought; pursued intellectual arts and studies; perpetuated their conceptions and reasonings by sculptured imagery, written language, and an improving literature; and valued those who excelled in mental studies. They promoted and preserved the welfare of their societies by well-arranged governments, which every citizen |