Aboriginal Race of America. 147 
graphic view of the present state 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 excommuni- 
cation with regard to each other, strike the eye of the ob- 
server like the fragments of a vast ruin, to which the his- 
tory of the other nations of the earth furnishes no analogy. 
“This disruption of all the bands by which society was 
anciently held together, accompanied by a Babylonish con- 
fusion 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 gene- 
rally 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 pro- 
perty, and the vague simplicity of their religious observances, 
—which, for the most part, are devoid of the specicus aid of 
idolatry,—we must admit them to possess a peculiar and ec- 
centric moral constitution. 
If we turn now to the demi-civilized nations, we find the 
dawn of refinement coupled with those barbarous usages 
which characterize the Indian in his savage state. We see 
the Mexicans, like the later Romans, encouraging the most 
bloody and cruel rites, and these, too, in the name of religion, 
in order to inculcate hatred of their enemies, familiarity with 
danger, and contempt of death; and the moral effect of this 
system is manifest in their valorous, though unsuccessful, 
resistance to their Spanish conquerors. 
Among the Peruvians, however, the case was different. 
The inhabitants had been subjugated to the Incas by a com- 
‘bined moral and physical influence. The Inca family were 
looked upon as beings of divine origin. They assumed to be 
the messengers of heaven, bearing rewards for the good, and 
punishment for the disobedient, conjoined with the arts of 
