64 



badly fed, or not fed at all, her young perish: and if 

 both male and female be reduced to like want, genera- 

 tion becomes less active, less productive. To the ob- 

 stacles then of want and hazard, which nature has op- 

 posed to the muUiplication of wihl animals, for the 

 purpose of restraining their nund)ers within certain 

 bounds, those of labour and of voluntary al)ortion are 

 added with the Indian. No wonder then if they multi- 

 j)ly less than we do. Where food is regularly supplied, 

 a single farm will show more of cattle, than a whole 

 country of forests can of buffaloes. The same Indian 

 women, when married to white traders, who feed them 

 and their children plentifully and regularly, who exempt 

 them from excessive drudgery, who keep them station- 

 ary and unexposed to accident, produce and raise as 

 many children as the white women. Instances are 

 known under these circumstances, of their rearing a 

 dozen children. An inhuman practice once prevailed 

 in this country, of making slaves of the Indians. It is a 

 fact well known with us, that the Indian women so 

 enslaved produced and raised as numerous families as 

 either the whites or blacks among whom they lived. 

 It has been said, that Indians have less hair than the 

 whiles, except on the head. But this is a fact of which 

 fair proof can scarcely be had. With them it is dis- 

 graceful to be hairy on the body. They say it likens 

 them to hogs. They therefore i)luck the hair as fast as 

 it apf)ears. But the traders who marry their women, 

 and prevail on them to discontinue this practice, s.-iy, 

 that nature is the same with them as with the whites. 

 Nor, if the fact be true, is the consequence necessary 

 which has been drawn from it. Negroes have noto- 

 riously less hair than the whites; yet they are more ar- 

 dent. But if cold and moisture be the agents of nature 

 for diminishing the races of animals, how comes she all 

 at once to suspend their operation as to the physical 

 man of the new world, whom the Count acknowledges 

 to be * a peu pres de meu)e stature que riiouune de notre 

 monde,' and to let loose their inHuence on his moral 

 faculties ? How has this * combination of the elements 



