196 Distinctive Characteristics of the 



engaged in hot and deadly feud with each other. But what 

 is yet more remarkable, the miserable natives of Terra del 

 Fuego, whose common privations have linked them for a time 

 in peace and fellowship, become suddenly excited by the 

 same inherent ferocity and exert their puny efforts for mutual 

 destruction. Of the destructive propensity of the Indian, 

 which has long become a proverb, it is almost unnecessary to 

 speak ; but we may advert to a forcible example from the nar- 

 rative of a traveller who accompanied a trading party of 

 northern Indians on a long journey ; during which he declares 

 that they killed every living creature that came within their 

 reach ; nor could they even pass a bird's nest without slaying 

 the young or destroying the eggs. 



That philosophic traveller. Dr. Yon Martins, gives a graphic 

 view of the present states of natural and civil rights among 

 the American aborigines. Their sub-division, he remarks, 

 into an almost countless multitude of greater and smaller 

 groups, and their entire exclusion and excommunication with 

 regard to each other, strike the eye of the observer like the 

 fragments of a vast ruin, to which the history of the other 

 nations of the earth furnishes no analogy. '' This disruption 

 of all the bands by which society was anciently held togeth- 

 er, accompanied by a Babylonish confusion of tongues, the 

 rude right of force, the never ending tacit warfare of all 

 against all, springing from that very disrupture, — appear to 

 me the most essential, and, as far as history is concerned, the 

 most significant points in the civil condition of the aboriginal 

 population of America." 



It may be said that these features of the Indian character 

 are common to all mankind in the savage state : this is gen- 

 erally true ; but in the American race they exist in a degree 

 which will fairly challenge a comparison with similar traits 

 in any existing people ; and if we consider also their habitual 

 indolence and improvidence, their indifference to private prop- 

 erty, and the vague simplicity of their religious observances, — 

 which, for the most part, are devoid of the specious aid of 

 idolatry, — we must admit them to possess a peculiar and 

 eccentric moral constitution. 



