fellow creatures, we cannot help seeing that degeneration has full 

 play in the world as well as upward development. Empires, 

 nations, societies, brotherhoods, and individuals — all are subject to 

 the action of both forces. On the one hand the nation that is 

 conscious of its opportunities, and makes use of its God-given 

 advantages to do the duty that lies nearest to it, surely has 

 " Excelsior" inscribed upon its banners, surely presses onward and 

 upward to its full stature, to a high dignity among its compeers ; 

 but on the other, so surely as it neglects these advantages, and 

 yields itself to laissez-faire or worse, and most surely of all, if it 

 ceases to depend on its own exertions, and in selfish isolation wor- 

 ships the god of non-intervention, or, it may be, tries to live by and 

 on the efforts of others, it sinks lower and lower, till it loses the 

 semblance of a nation altogether. 



So too, with the individual. He who, born to high opportunities 

 and entrusted with many talents, throws them aside, one after 

 another, because the effort to use them is too great for his indolent 

 soul, falls from one stage to another in society, becoming at last a 

 mere dependent — a parasite — a failure. 



K inclined to do so we might well confine our attention this 

 evening to degraded forms of human life — national, or social, or 

 individual. We might draw our examples from many sets of 

 people who seem to have missed their way in the world. It has, 

 as you know, been frequently a subject of dispute about savage 

 tribes — whether they have sunk down from an originally high 

 condition to their present state or whether they represent now 

 what the whole human race was once, and have failed to rise like 

 others have. Both opinions are probably true. It is a curious fact 

 bearing on this point that the most degraded human tribes are to 

 be found inhabiting the extremities of continents, both in the Old 

 and New Worlds, as if they had been edged out, as it were, from 

 society, e.g., the Patagonians and Esquimaux, the Austrahans, 

 Tasmanians, and Samoyedes. Concerning such the Duke of 

 Argyll says : " We should be safe in assuming them to represent 

 the widest departure from that earliest condition of our race, 

 which, on the theory of Development, must of necessity have been 

 associated at first with the most highly favourable conditions of 

 external nature." We must look upon the Eskimo, according to 

 Max Muller " either as a withering offshoot of the American mound- 

 builders or as a weak descendant of Siberian nomads." There are 

 progressive and retrogressive savages, developing and degenerating 

 tribes, though the latter appear to predominate. 



And it must be so. We are subject to the same surroundings, 

 influences, and circumstances as other creatures, and though we 

 have a power within us by means of which we can rise superior to 



