Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



good reason. Without committing ourselves to 

 the unlikely theory that the " noble savage " was 

 an ideal human being physically or in any other 

 respect, and while certain that in many points he 

 was decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think 

 we must allow him the superiority in some directions ; 

 and one of these was his comparative freedom from 

 disease. Lewis Morgan, who grew up among 

 the Iroquois Indians, and who probably knew 

 the North American natives as well as any white 

 man has ever done, says (in his Ancient Society^ 

 p. 45), ** Barbarism ends with the production of 

 grand Barbarians." And though there are no 

 native races on the earth to-day who are actually 

 in the latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism ; ^ 

 yet, if we take the most advanced tribes that we 

 know of — such as the said Iroquois Indians of 

 twenty or thirty years ago, some of the Kaffir 

 tribes round Lake Nyassa in Africa, now (and 

 possibly for a few years more) comparatively 

 untouched by civilisation, or the tribes along the 

 river Uaupes, thirty or forty years back, of Wallace's 

 Travels on the Amazon — all tribes in what Morgan 

 would call the middle stage of Barbarism — we 

 undoubtedly in each case discover a fine and (which 

 is our point here) healthy people. Captain Cook 

 in his first Voyage says of the natives of Otaheite, 

 ** We saw no critical disease during our stay upon 

 the island, and but few instances of sickness, which 

 were accidental fits of the colic ; " and, later on, 



2 Say like the Homeric Greeks, or the Spartans of the Lycurgus 

 period. 



22 



