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individual ; but the retrospect of a century shows vast changes in 

 our condition as a race for example. 



Each step in retrogression will appear more and more marked. 



Go back a century, where are our railroads, our telegraphs, our 

 steam- vessels, our rifled cannon ? 



Still further, and we have not our colonies, and the world is only 

 half -known. 



Further still, and we have not learned Christianity, and worship 

 idols ; we are ignorant, superstitious, and cruel. Still further, and 

 behold the savage depending on the chase, trusting to his instincts to 

 supply his wants. And now to ignorance, superstition, and cruelty, 

 he has added dirt ; for he is not at all particular about his abode, 

 provided he be dry, warm, and his hunger appeased. His life was 

 not one constant state of alarm — indeed, he was happier in this re- 

 spect than his black representative of to-day. The Negro lives in a 

 stockaded village in terror. Why ? Because, although slavery is at 

 an end in North America, it is not quite ended elsewhere ; and the 

 cruel passions that ardent spirits and vice have engendered in the 

 slave-trading population of the coast, seek gratification in acts of 

 cruelty and violence, often of a far more terrible nature than any 

 pre-historic savage would have invented. 



There can be little doubt that the designation, " the noble savage," 

 belongs almost entirely to the past. If we except the New Zea- 

 landers, the savage races of to-day are probably, as a whole, less 

 civilised than the men of the French caves and the Swiss pile- works. 

 Witness the Andaman Islander, the Terra del Fuegian, and the 

 Australian native. 



The old Cave-men represented the population of the less-civilised 

 portions of the globe, as these aborigines do now in our own day ; 

 for there never was a time in the Earth's past history when a 

 uniform condition of things obtained, unless in pre-Silurian epochs. 



Faunas slowly but constantly migrate, a part becoming extinct, 

 some races improving, some remaining persistent. 



Peoples migrate — some are exterminated (witness the native races 

 dying out before the over- mastering effects of a too-advanced white 

 civilization) — the remainder in part improve (being, as individuals. 



