5 
mentally renovated by means of colonization, or missionary 
effort, like the Sandwich Islanders and New Zealanders. 
The issue has often been raised on the one side, and has 
never been fairly met on the other. 
Our preliminary position, therefore, in this controversy 
stands thus. As far as any testimony is to be gained from the 
facts which have been recorded, either by our own experience 
or by authentic history, races once civilized have a natural 
tendency to deterioration and barbarism, whenever they are 
separated from the rest of mankind, and are left to the 
debasing influence of their own evil passions; while races, 
once thoroughly degraded and rendered savage, have a 
natural tendency when left to themselves to remain so; 
seldom, if ever, showing symptoms of self-culture, or advancing 
to civilization. 
Hence, simply reasoning upon the condition of pre-historic 
times, from facts which come within the range of actual 
experience and history, it seems far more logical to conclude 
that primeval man was first civilized, and afterwards became 
degraded, than that he should have been originally savage, 
and have subsequently become self-elevated. We are quite 
willing to allow that this reasoning is only in the direction of 
what is probable. It is not positive and decisive. In a 
complex question of this sort, however, where all the evidences 
under review are necessarily imperfect, we must be content 
with a general balance of probabilities. Let us now see how 
these arguments from probability run, when we leave the 
course of authentic history, and get among antiquarian 
remains, and mythological or traditional beliefs. 
We are sometimes pointed to the discovery of flint imple- 
ments fashioned by man, which have been found lying with 
the bones of extinct animals in gravel beds and caverns, as 
well as to other evidences of human antiquity ; all of which, 
it is alleged, stand in immediate connection with primeval 
barbarism. 
But this conclusion is by no means necessary. For, putting 
aside the question of excessive antiquity, which it is not my 
purpose in this place to discuss, the mere fact of our dis- 
covering such extremely pre-historic remnants of barbarism 
carries along with it no necessary negation of a contempora- 
neous epoch of civilization. Have we not a stone age still 
existing in this the 19th century of our Christian era? Are 
not flint implements and stone weapons now synchronous in 
Polynesia and other parts of the world, with the highest 
forms of civilization in Europe and elsewhere ? Have we not, 
therefore, a perfect right to argue that, inasmuch as the 
