ADAM SMITH. 129 



North American Indians. " The same contempt of 

 death and torture prevails among all the savage nations. 

 There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does 

 not in this respect possess a magnanimity which the soul 

 of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of con- 

 ceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire 

 on mankind, than when she subjected this nation of 

 heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches 

 who possess the virtues neither of the countries which 

 they come from nor of those which they go to, and whose 

 levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to 

 the contempt of the vanquished." (Vol. II. p. 37.) 



How well has he painted the man of system, and how 

 many features of this portrait have we recognized in Mr. 

 Bentham, and others of our day! " He is apt to be very 

 wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with 

 the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, 

 that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any 

 part of it. He goes on to establish it completely, in all 

 its parts, without any regard either to the great interests 

 or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He 

 seems to imagine that he can arrange the different 

 members of a great society with as much ease as the 

 hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. 

 He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess- 

 board have no other principle of motion beside that 

 which the hand impresses upon them ; but that in the 

 great chess-board of human society, every single piece 

 has a principle of action of its own, altogether different 

 from that which the legislature might choose to impress 

 upon it. If these two principles coincide and act in the 

 same direction, the game of human society will go on 



K 



