but a feint to save the pain of uttering bors to make an audience, an impromptu that one word, and that the meeting will supper had to be arranged for, and ihe never be ! Should possibilities be worse day was one of continual bustle and ex. to bear than certainties?” So all who citement, and the rehearsals were the love him, and who know the painful dis- greatest fun imaginable. A dear old like he had to that word, are thankful friend volunteered to undertake the muthat he was spared the agony of that last, sic, and he played delightfully all through long farewell.

the acting. These charades made one of Almost the pleasantest times at Gad's the pleasantest and most successful of Hill were the winter gatherings for Christ. New Year's evenings spent at Gad's Hill. mas aod the New Year, when the house But there were not only grown-up guess was more than full, and the bachelors of invited to the pretty, cheerful home. In the party had to be “put up." in the vil. a letter to a friend Charles Dickens lage. At these times Charles Dickens writes : “Another generation begins to was at his gayest and brightest, and the peep above the table. I once used !! days passed cheerily and merrily away. ihink what a horrible thing it was to be He was great at games, and many of the a grandfather. Finding that the calamity evenings were spent in playing at yes and falls upon me without my perceiving any no, proverbs, Russian scandal, crambo, other change in myself, I bear it like a dumb crambo - in this he was most ex-man.” But as he so disliked the name of quisitely funny - and a game of memory, grandfather as applied to himself, those which he particularly liked.

grandchildren were taught by him to call The New Year was always welcomed him “Venerables." And to this day with all honors. Just before twelve some of them still speak of him by this o'clock everybody would assemble in the self.iovented name. hall, and he would open the door and Now there is another and younger famstand in the entrance, watch in hand - ily who never knew “Venerables,” but how many of his friends must remember have been all taught to know his likeness, him thus, and think lovingly of the pic. and taught to know his books by the pic. ture !- as he waited, with a half-smile on tures in them, as soon as they can be his attentive face, for the bells to chime taught anything, and whose baby hands out the New Year. Then his voice would lay bright flowers upon the stone in West. break the silence: with “A Happy New minster Abbey, every June 9 and every Year to us all.” For many mioutes there Christmas Eve. For in remembrance of would be much embracing, hand-shaking; his love for all that is gay in color, none and good wishing; and the servants would but the brightest flowers, and also some all come up and get a hearty shake of the of the gorgeous American leaves, sent by hand from the beloved “master.” Then a friend for the purpose, are laid upon the hot spiced wine would be distributed, and grave, makiog that one spot in the midst good health drunk all round. Sometimes of the vast and solemn building bright there would be a country dance, in which and beautiful. the host delighted, and in which he in- In a letter to Plorn before his departure sisted upon every one joining, and he for Australia, Charles Dickens wriies: “I never allowed the dancing and real hope you will always be able to say in dancing it was too-to flag for an iostant, afier life, that you' had a kind father." but kept it up until even he was tired and And to this hope, each one of his chil. out of breath, and had at last to clap his dren can answer with a loving, grateful hands, and bring it to an end. His thor. heart, that so it was. ough enjoyment was most charming to witness, and seemed to infect every one present.

One New Year's Day at breakfast, he proposed that we should act some cha.

From The Nineteenth Century. rades, in dumb show, that evening. This

THE SAVAGE. proposal being met with enthusiasm, the There are people in the world who are idea was put joto train at once. The very tond of asking what they call point. different parts were assigned, dresses blank questions. They generally profess were discussed, “properties were col to hate all shilly.shallying, and they are at lected, aod rehearsing went on the whole no pains to hide their suspicion that any day long. As the home visitors were all one who declines to say yes or no to any to take part in the charades, invitations question which they choose to ask has had to be sent to the more intimate neigh either his intellect clouded by metaphysics

a

can

ever

or has not the courage of his opinions. I the case, will probably always remain so. The idea that it is often more difficult to If we want to prove that man began as a ask a sensible question than to answer it, child, what evidence can we produce? If and that a question, however pointed it we appeal to history, history is impossible may sound, may for all that be so blunt before the invention of language; and and vague that no accurate and honest what language could the primitive child thinker would care or dare to answer it, have spoken, what life could it have lived, never enters their mind; while the thought without a father and without a mother? that there are realms of knowledge where If we give up history and appeal to our indefinite Janguage is more appropriate, inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our and in reality more exact and more truth. very imagination, collapses when ap. ful than the most definite phraseology, is proaching the problem how such a child scouied as mere fencing and intellectual could have been born, how such a child cowardice.

could have been nourished, reared, and One of those point-blank questions protected from wild animals and other which has been addressed to ine by sev. dangers. We feel we have come to the eral reviewers of my books is this, • Tell end of our tether, and are running our us, do you hold thai man began as a sav. head against a very old, but a very solid, age or not?” To say that man began as a wall. savage, and that the most savage and de- Has Kant then written in vain; and is graded races now existing present us with it still supposed that our senses or our the primeval type of man, seems to be the reason,

reach transcendent shibboleth of a certain school of thought, truths ? Has the lesson to be taught a school with which on many points 1 again and again that both our senses and sympathize, so long as it keeps to an ac. our reason have their limits; that we are curate and independent inquiry into facts, indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of and to an outspoken statement of its dis intellectual strength or suppleness to try coveries, regardless of all consequences, to stand on our own shoulders? We are but from which I totally dissent as soon so made that neither can our senses pero as it tries to make facts subservient to ceive nor can our reason conceive the real theories. I am told that my own utter. beginning and end of anything, whether ances on this subject have been ambigu. in space or in time. And yet we imagine

Now even granting this, I could we can form a definite conception of the never understand why a certain hesitation true beginning of mankind. in answering so difficult a question should Then what remains ? There remains rouse such angry feelings, till it began to the humbler and yet far nobler task of dawn on me that those who do not unre. studying the earliest records of man's life servedly admit that man began as a sav. on earth: to go back as far as literature, age are supposed to hold ihat man was language, and tools will allow us, and for created a perfect and almost angelic being the time to consider that as primitive This would amount to denying the gospel which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or of the day, that man was the offspring of as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we a brute, and hence, I suppose, the anath can reach, and seems at the same time so ema.

simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to Now I may say this, that though I have require no further antecedents. That is hesitated to affirm that man began as a the true work of the historian, and of the savage, whatever that may mean, I have philosopher too; and there is plenty of been even more careful not to commit work left for both of them before they myself to the opinion that man began as dive into the whirlpool of their inner conan angel, or as a child, or as a perfect sciousness to find there the primordial rational being. I strongly object to such savage. alternatives as that if man did not begin Instead of allowing ourselves to be as a savage he must have begun as a child. driven into a corner by such a question as It would be dreadful if, because there is “ Did man begin as a savage or as a no sufficient evidence to enable us to form child ?” we have a perfect right to ask a decided opinion on any given subject, the question, What is meant by these two we were to be driven into a corner by such words, savage and child alternatives, instead of preserving our Has any one ever attempted to define freedom of judgment until we have the the meaning of savage, and to draw a complete evidence before us.

sharp line between a savage and a non. But in our case the evidence is as yet savage ? Has any one ever attempted to extremely scanty, and, from the nature of define the meaning of child, if used in op

Ous.

position to savage or brute? Have we | tion than they established. The first been told whether by child is meant a discoverers of India called the naked Brah. suckling without a mother, or a boy who mans savages, though they could hardly can speak and count and reason without have followed them in their subtle argu. a father ? Lastly, are savage and child ments on every possible philosophical really terms that mutually exclude each topic. Even by us New Zealanders and other? May not a savage be a child, and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet may not a child be a savage ?

a Zulu proved a match for an English How, then, is any one who has given bishop; and some of the Maori poems serious thought to the problem of the and proverbs may rightly claim a place by origin of mankind to answer such a ques. the side of English popular poems and tion as

" Tell me, do you hold that man proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said began as a savage or as a child ? "

that a savage is the opposite of a civilized When we read some of the more recent man. Civilization is the product of the works on anthropology, the primordial uninterrupted work of many generations; savage seems to be not unlike one of and if savage meant no more than an un. those hideous india-rubber dolls that can civilized man, it is no great discovery to be squeezed into every possible shape, say that the first man must have been a and made to utter every possible noise. savage. No doubt he could not have been There was a time when the savage was acquainted even with what we consider held up to the civilized man as the inhabi. the fundamental elements of civilization, tant of a lost paradise - a being of in- such as the arts of reading, writing, and nocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility: arithmetic. His dress must have been Rousseau ascribed to his son of nature all very scanty, his food very primitive, his the perfection which he looked for in vain dwelling very uncomfortable, his family in Paris and London. At present, when life very unrestrained. And yet, for all so many philosophers are on the look out that, he might have been very far removed for the missing link between man and from the brute ; nay, he might have been beast, the savage, even if he has estab. a perfect man, doing his duty in that state lished his right to the name of man, can- of life into which it pleased God to call not be painted black enough. He must him. be at least a man who malireats his wom- Civilization, as it is well known, is as en, murders his children, kills and eats vague a term as savagery. When Alex. his fellow.creatures, and commits crimes ander, the pupil of Aristotle, the represen. from which even animals would shrink. tative of Greek civilization, stood before

This devil-savage, however, of the pres- the naked philosophers of India, who were cot anthropologist is as much a wild crea. úkóBlol, dwellers in the forest, can we hesi. tion of scientific fancy as the angel-savage tate to say which of the two was the true. of former philosophers. The true science savage and which the sage? To the New of man has no room for such speculations. Zealander who has been brought into con.

Sometimes the history of a name can tact with European civilization, his former take the place of its definition, but this so-called savage life seems to have gained is hardly so in our case. The Greeks little by recent improvements. A grand spoke of barbarians rather than of savages, Maori chief, reputed to have been one of and the Romans followed their example, the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks though they might possibly have called of the old days : tthe national heroes and sages of Germany and Britain not only barbari but feri -- In former times we lived differently ; each that is, savages not very far removed from tribe had its territory; we lived in pas placed fere, or wild beasts. Our own word sav- high upon the mountains. The men looked: age, and the French sauvage, meant orig: and the young people cultivated the fields.

to war as their only occupation, and the women inally a man who lived in the woods, a We were a strong and a healthy people then. silvaticus. It was first applied to all who when the Pakeha came, everything began to remained outside the cities, who were not die away, even the natural animals of the cives, or civilized, and who in Christian country. Formerly, when we went into a times were also called heathen – that is, forest, and stood under a tree, we could not dwellers on the heath.

hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabi. • Charles Hawley, Addresses before the Cayuga taots of America savages, though it is now County Historical Society, 1883-84. P. 31.

The King Country; or, Explorations in New Zea. quite generally conceded that the Spanish land, by T. H. Kerry; see Nicholls in the Academy, conquerors supplanted a higher civiliza. Aug. 23, 1884, p. 113.

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIX 2519

-- every tree was full of them. Then we had | fallen into the condition of dependent nations ; pigeons and everything in plenty; now many and they now stand forth upon the canvas of of the birds have died out. ... In those times Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom the fields were well tilled, there was always of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the plenty of provisions, and we wore few clothes administration of the league, and their courage -only our own mats of feathers. Then the in its defence. missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and taught them to sing hymns :

The words of another author also may they changed their minds, and the fields were be quoted, who tells us: untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty stomach. Then came the ties which gave law its sanctions well defined.

Their legislation was simple, and the penal. war between the Pakeha and the Maori that Their league stood in the consent of the gove split up our homes, and made one tribe fight erned. It was a representative popular govern. against the other; and after the war came the ment, conceived in the wisdom of genuine Pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught statesmanship, and with the sagacity to prous to drink and to smoke, and made us wear vide against some of the dangers which beset clothes that brought on disease. What race

popular institutions. It is said that the framers could stand against them? The Maori is

of our own (the American) government bor. passing away like the Kiwi, the Tui, and many rowed some of its features from the Iroquois other things, and by-and-by they will disappear league. Whether or not this be true, it is a just like the leaves of the trees, and nothing maiter of history that as early as 1755 a sug. will remain to tell of them but the names of gestion came from the Iroquois nation to the their mountains and their rivers !

colonies that they should unite in a confederacy This is the view which a so-called sav.

like their own for mutual protection. age takes of the benefits of European It is the fashion to quote against these civilization as contrasted with the content favorable statements cases of cruelty comment and happiness in which his fore- mitted by the Red Indians or the New fathers had passed through this life. Let Zealanders in their wars among them.

now hear what a highly educated selves and in their resistance to their American, a scholar and a philosopher, white enemies. But let us not forget the Mr. Morgan, says of the character of the bloody pages of our own history. We Iroquois, who are often quoted as speci- should probably say that the eighteenth mens of extreme savagery :

century was one of the most brilliant in No test of friendship was too severe ; no the history of Europe. We should probsacrifice to repay a favor too great ; no fidelity ably assign to England at that time a foreto an engagement too inflexible for the red most place among European countries, man, Wiin an innate knowledge of the free and we know how high a position Scotchdom and dignity of man, he has exhibited the men took during the last century in geo. noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest eral culture, in philosophy, in science, and deeds of humanity, in those sylvan retreats we are wont to look upon as vacant and frightful statesmanship. Yet, in his “ History of solitudes.

England in the Eighteenth Century,” Mr.

Lecky describes the common people of No one would suspect Morgan of ex. Scotland as broken into fierce clans, ruled aggeration or sentimentality. And if it by wild chieftaios; as thieves and cattle. should be objected that these were private lifters, kidnappers of men and children to virtues only, and no proof of true civiliza. be sold as slaves; as ferocious barbarians, tion or a well-organized society among the besotted with the most brutal ignorance Iroquois, the same writer tells us : * and the grossest and gloomiest supersti

They achieved for themselves a more re. tions, possessed of the rudest modes of markable civil organization, and acquired a agriculture, scratching the earth with a higher degree of influence, than any other race crooked piece of wood for a plough, and of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and for a harrow a brush attached to the tail Peru. In the drama of European colonization of a horse, otherwise devoid of harness; they stood for nearly two ceniuries with an un- their food,' oatmeal and milk, mixed with shaken front against the devastations of war, the blood drawn from the living cow; their blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and cooking, revolting and filthy, boiling their the still more fatal encroachments of a rest beef in the hide, and roasting fowls in less and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in

their feathers, with many like customs independence, and were capable of self-protec- and demoralizing habits unknown to abo. tion long after the New England and Virginia riginal life among the Red lodians. races had surrendered their jurisdictions and It will be clear after these few speci.

• The League of the Iroquois, p. 12.

• Hawley, l. C., p. 17.

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mens, which might have been considera. | are brought forward as distinctive of a bly increased, that we shall make no step savage, they can always be met by coun. in advance if we continue to use the word ter instances, showing that each definition savage so vaguely as it has been hitherto would either include races whom no one used. To think is difficult, but it becomes dares to call savage or exclude races utterly impossible if we use debased or whom no one dares to call civilized. It false coin. I have been considered too used to be imagined that the use of letters inquisitive for venturing to ask anthropol. was the principal circumstance that dis. ogists what they meant by a fetish, but I tinguishes a civilized people from a herd must expose myself once more to the of savages incapable of knowledge or resame reproach by venturing to ask them fection. Without that artificial help, to to state plainly what they mean by a sav. quote the words of Gibbon, “the human age.

memory soon dissipates or corrupts the Whatever other benefits a study of the ideas committed to her charge, and the science of language may confer, there is nobler faculties of the mind, no longer one which cannot be valued too highly - supplied with models or with materials, namely, that it makes us not only look at gradually forget their powers, the judg. words, but through words. If we are told ment becomes feeble and lethargic, the that a savage means an uncivilized man, imagination languid or irregular.” Such then, to say that the first man was a sav. arguments might pass in the days of age is saying either nothing or what is Gibuon, but after the new light that has self-evident. Civilization consists in the been thrown on the ancient history of accumulated wisdom of countless genera- some of the principal nations of the world tions of men, and to say that the first they are no longer tenable. generation of men was uncivilized is there. No one would call the ancient Brahtore pure tautology. We are far too tol. mans savages, and yet writing was unerant' with respect to such tautologies. known to them before the third century How many people, for instance, have been B.C. Homer, quite apart from his blindled to imagine that such a phrase as the ness, was certainly voacquainted with survival of the fittest contains the solution writing for literary purposes. The ancient of the problem of the survival of certain inhabitants of Germany, as described by species and the extinction of others? To Tacitus, were equally ignorant of the art the student of language the survival of of writing as a vehicle of literature ; yet the fittest is a mere tautology, meaning for all that we could not say, with Gibbon, the survival of the fittest to survive, which that with them the nobler faculties of the is the statement of a fact, but no solution mind had lost their powers, the judgment of it.

had become feeble, and the imagination It is easy to say that the meaning of languid. savage has been explained and defined by And as we find that the use of letters almost every writer on anthropology. í is by no means an indispensable element know these explanations and definitions, of true civilization, we should arrive at but not one of ihem can be considered as the same conclusion in examining almost answering the requirements of a scientific every discovery which has been pointed definition.

out as a sine quâ non of civilized life. Some anthropologists say that savage Every generation is apt to consider the means wild and cruel. But in that case measure of comfort which it has reached no nation would be without its savages. as indispensable to civilized life,

but

very Others say that savages are people who often, in small as well as great things, wear little or no clothing. But in that what is called civilized to-day may be case the greatest philosophers, the gym- called barbarous to-morrow. Races who nosophists of India, would have to be abstain from eating the flesh of animals classed as savages. If it means people are apt to look on carnivorous people as without a settled form of government, savages; people who abstain from intoxiwithout laws and without a religion, then, cating drinks naturally despise a nation in go where you like, you will not find such which drunkenness is prevalent. What a race. Again, if people who have no should we say if we entered a town in cities and no central government are to which the streets were neither paved nor be called savages, then the Jews would lighted, and in which the windows were have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, without glass; where we saw no carriages the ancient Germans, and other of the in any of the thoroughfares, and where, most important races in the history of the inside the houses, ladies and gentlemen world. In fact, whatever characteristics might be seen eating without forks and

a