DIVERSITY OF EACES. 175 



but reproduced this same sad feature of enslavement, tlie Euro- 

 pean has unceasingly fostered the principles of freedom, and 

 every governmental change, from the earliest times to the 

 present, has served but to make more republican his civil insti- 

 tutions. This same democratic element we find in the municipal 

 structures of the Greek and Roman republics, as also in the laws 

 of the ancient Briton and German ; and beyond this race the 

 world presents no other such spectacle. Men in early stages of 

 society have wrought out for themselves two distinct forms of 

 natural religion; and these, if any thing can, must indicate 

 original character. We find then the most prevalent to be a 

 symbolical idolatry, a gross materialism, which formed the cum- 

 brous machinery of the worship of the brutes, of " stocks and 

 stones," or of the celestial orbs. Such are Fetich ism, Shamanism, 

 Boodhisrn, and the varied forms of Pantheism and Sabeism. 

 The other is a personified mythology, a beautiful idealism ; in 

 which alone is recognized the existence of an extra-mundane 

 God. This religion, whether figured under its Saturn or Zeus, 

 its Odin or Veli-bog, is the only and peculiar creation of the 

 white man.* Over all the East, the South, and the West, polyg- 

 amy and sensuality have reigned with unbridled license. How 

 different, how chaste and pure comparatively, has been society in 

 Europe from the very infancy of its nations ! Here too, on the 

 soil of this small continent, mind has cast off its shackles and 

 widened its realm, till now the very elements of nature and the 

 attributes of force are subservient to its uses and pleasure. By 

 the beautiful art of stamping thought, the dead live on in all 

 their former greatness. By simply poising the magnet, the 

 trackless ocean at once lost its terrors, and New Worlds loomed 

 up beyond it. The lawless vapor of the sky is bolted in, and 

 made to bear man's burdens. The sun stoops to paint his image, 

 and the lightning does his errands. The recesses of thought, 

 too, open to the light of day their own dark caverns, and mind 

 explores the mystery of mind. But beyond his native home, 

 wherever the white man has appeared to assert his supremacy of 



intellect, . the spectacle is still the same. Long ages back he mys- 



. 



* Prichard, vol. 3, p. 12. 



