7 
fellow creatures, we cannot help seeing that degeneration has full 
play in the world as well as upward development. Empires, 
nations, societies, brotherhoods, and individuals—all are subject to 
the action of both forces. On the one hand the nation that is 
conscious of its opportunities, and makes use of its God-given 
advantages to do the duty that lies nearest to it, surely has 
‘« Excelsior” inscribed upon its banners, surely presses onward and 
upward to its full stature, to a high dignity among its compeers ; 
but on the other, so surely as it neglects these advantages, and 
yields itself to laissez-faire or worse, and most surely of all, if it 
ceases to depend on its own exertions, and in selfish isolation wor- 
ships the god of non-intervention, or, it may be, tries to live by and 
on the efforts of others, it sinks lower and lower, till it loses the 
semblance of a nation altogether. 
So too, with the individual. He who, born to high opportunities 
and entrusted with many talents, throws them aside, one after 
another, because the effort to use them is too great for his indolent 
soul, falls from one stage to another in society, becoming at last a 
mere dependent—a parasite—a failure. 
If inclined to do so we might well confine our attention this 
evening to degraded forms of human life—national, or social, or 
individual. We might draw our examples from many sets of 
people who seem to have missed their way in the world. It has, 
as you know, been frequently a subject of dispute about savage 
tribes—whether they have sunk down from an originally high 
condition to their present state or whether they represent now 
what the whole human race was once, and have failed to rise like 
others have. Both opinions are probably true. It is a curious fact 
bearing on this point that the most degraded human tribes are to 
be found inhabiting the extremities of continents, both in the Old 
and New Worlds, as if they had been edged out, as it were, from 
society, ¢.g., the Patagonians and Esquimaux, the Australians, 
Tasmanians, and Samoyedes. Concerning such the Duke of 
Argyll says: ‘‘ We should be safe in assuming them to represent 
the widest departure from that earliest condition of our race, 
which, on the theory of Development, must of necessity have been 
associated at first with the most highly favourable conditions of 
external nature.” We must look upon the Eskimo, according to 
-Max Muller “ either as a withering offshoot of the American mound- 
. builders or as a weak descendant of Siberian nomads.” There are 
progressive and retrogressive savages, developing and degenerating 
tribes, though the latter appear to predominate. 
And it must beso. We are subject to the same surroundings, 
influences, and circumstances as other creatures, and though we 
have a power within us by means of which we can rise superior to 
