ON HUMAN HAPPINESS. 



439 



tioii. Other animals have instincts that control their appetites, and lead 

 them insensibly to the perfection of tlieir respective kinds ; that inculcate 

 constancy where constancy is necessary, and compel them to provide for 

 and take the charge of their young. Man has no such instincts whatever : 

 he has reason, indeed, a more ennobling and efficient faculty, but it must 

 be called forth, for it is a dormant principle in savage life. And hence, 

 destitute of the one, and uninfluenced by the other, he is the perpetual 

 slave of his ungoverned and ungovernable passions, and is the only ani- 

 mal in the world that has been known to kill or abandon its own offspring 

 in a state of destitute and helpless infancy ; and to murder its own kind 

 tor the purpose of feasting upon it : a fact too well established to be 

 doubted of ; and which, instead of being confined to a single climate or 

 ti single people, has apparently been common to all countries when under 

 the influence of gross barbarism ; which still exists among various tribes 

 in Africa, South America, and Australia, and particularly among the 

 islands of the South Sea, and which, according to the concurrent testimony 

 of the best Greek and Roman writers, as Herodotus, Phny, Strabo, and 

 Pomponius Mela, was formerly to be traced among the Scythians, Tar- 

 tars, and Massagetas of Asia, and the Lestrigons of Europe. Strabo, 

 indeed, ascribes the same practice even to the Irish in his day, and Caelius 

 Rhodriginus to their neighbours of Scotland ; while Tlievenot asserts- 

 that, when he was in India in 1665, human flesh was publicly sold in the 

 market at Debca, about forty leagues from Baroche. 



Consentaneous to this view of the subject are the following remarks 

 of one of the most intelligent circumnavigators of the present day, M. Von 

 Langsdorff, which he gives as the result of a personal and comprehensive 

 survey of different chmates and countries : — ""There is no creature upon 

 the earth, in any climate or zone, that bears such an enmity to its own 

 species as man. Let us only," says he, "cast our eyes over the history 

 of the globe, in the most barren wasted, and in the most fertile countries, 

 in the smallest islands, or on the most extensive continents, among the 

 most savage as well as the most cultivated nations, in short, in every part 

 of the world, wherever man exists, and we shall find him seeking ta 

 destroy his own species : he is every where hy nature harsh and cruel. 

 The observations we made upon these newly discovered islands (the Poly- 

 nesian), which never, to the best of our knowledge, had any intercourse 

 with civilized nations, and u hose inhabitants may be considered as children 

 of nature, and as still in their original condition, aflbrd remarkable exam - 

 ples in confirmation of these assertions. 



" The sweet and tender feelings of aflfection and love, of friendship and 

 attachment, even that of parents towards their children, and of children 

 towards their parents, I have, alas ! very seldom found among a rude anct- 

 uncivilized people. The African hordes not only bring their prisonerb" 

 taken in battle but their own children to market. The same thing is done 

 by the Kirgis, the Kalmucs, and many other inhabitants of the north- 

 western coast of America ; and here at Nakatiwa (one of the islands of 

 the South Sea) a woman would very readily have given a child at her 

 breast, which had been asked by us in jest, in exchange for a piece oF 

 iron."* And he might have added, that it was the exposure of British, 

 or rather perhaps of Saxon children for slaves in the public market -d't 

 Rome, as late as the close of the sixth century-, expressly sold for this 



* Von Langsdorff's Voyages and Travels, cb. vii. {>. 139, 



