FROM SAVAGE TO CIVILIZED LIFE. 209 



bable, from the circumstance that the horse and the ox were not known in Ame- 

 rica till a late period that at the point where the continents approach, and stroll- 

 ing hunters might pass from the one into the other, there are some animals 

 common to both and that all the traditions of the different tribes refer to ances- 

 tors more civilized, from whom they have descended. 



The numerous remains of a more civilized people than the present races in 

 North and South America remains of the same nature in the wilds of Tartary 

 and Siberia the tombs, the tumuli, and fragments of ancient art, found all over 

 both continents, demonstrate not only the identity of the races, but the degra- 

 dation that has followed since their original settlements. 



" The barbarism that prevails throughout these different regions," says HUM- 

 BOLDT, " is perhaps less owing to a primitive absence of all civilization, than to the 

 effects of a long degradation. The greater part of the hordes which we designate 

 under the name of savages, descend probably from nations more advanced in cul- 

 tivation."* And in another place he says, " Savages are for the most part de- 

 graded races, remnants escaped from a common shipwreck, as their languages, 

 their cosmogonic fables, and a crowd of other indications seem to prove." 



If such has been unquestionably the downward progress of the human race 

 in all past ages, and in regard to even the most civilized and greatest communities 

 which have ever existed, the cause of that declension is a subject for the deepest 

 consideration, in regard to the stability of our own unparalleled state of social 

 life. What is calculated, in our case, to arrest us in the^climax of our national 

 greatness to stop the flowing tide that has swept away the arts and civilization 

 of every former people ? At the pinnacle of power, " beyond all Greek, beyond 

 all Roman name," is it inevitably necessary that we should decline ! that our 



I 



sun should go down as theirs and all our arts and sciences, and improvements, 

 be lost in a flood of barbarism ! It is the business of the philosopher, the duty of 

 the statesman the object of all to inquire into the causes of the apparently 

 fated decline of all human communities ; and to ascertain whether moral degra- 

 dation, like the same cause among the antediluvians, may not be the forerunner 

 of national ruin. 



* Personal Narrative, iii. 208. " How can we distinguish the prolonged infancy of the human race," 

 says HUMBOLDT, " if it anywhere exists, from that state of moral degradation in which solitariness, want, 

 compulsory misery, forced migrations, or the rigour of the climate, obliterate even the traces of civiliza- 

 tion ? If every thing 1 which is connected with the primitive state of man, and the first population of a 

 continent, could from its nature belong to the domain of history, we should appeal to the traditions of 

 India, to that opinion so often expressed in the laws of Menore and in the Kamajan, which considers sa- 

 vages as tribes banished from civil society, and driven into the forests." HUMBOLDT'S Personal Narra- 



O * 



tive, iii. 203. 



VOL. XV. PART I. 3 K 



