4 
this with the modern condition of the country. The accounts 
given of it by Bruce show the rudest barbarism. He describes 
murders and executions as frequent. He seldom went out 
without seeing dead bodies in the street, left to be devoured 
by dogs and hysenas. While raw flesh was the favourite 
food of the inhabitants, which they ate with the blood still 
warm in the veins. Nor is the state of the country under the 
modern Emperor Theodore one whit better; if possible, 
rather worse. “His troops,” to use an expression of 
Dr. KrapTs, “are like an immense band of tinkers.” His 
towns are a mere collection of reed and mud cabins. 
Here, then, is the existence of a race which has visibly 
degenerated within the historic period. I say a race; for, 
although the ancient Ethiopic and the subsequent Amharic 
kingdoms were in some respects distinct, their ethnological 
unity is sufficiently traced, both by the affinities existing in 
their languages, and by the fact that both of these are far 
more Semitic than African.* 
Our argument, therefore, is once more from the less to the 
greater. We say — if a nation can thus be shown to have 
fallen in its civilization, and to have become so deteriorated 
and degraded that it has lost all order of government, and 
every mark of morality and self-respect — although, through- 
out this process of disintegration, it has been sufficiently near 
to countries in a high state of civilization for all purposes of 
self-improvement; how much more is it likely that tribes 
which, in pre-historic times were civilized, should have 
gradually dropped down into barbarism, when, they fell into 
fierce and bloody conflicts among themselves, and occupied 
positions in which they may have had no close contact with 
other tribes superior to themselves. 
This argument is the more forcible because it is impossible 
to state the converse. Our opponents cannot show that any 
savage races have now risen up towards real civilization within 
the historic period; unless, indeed, they have been instru- 
* Many other minor instances might he enumerated. Some of 
the Snake Indians of North America have become degraded into far deeper 
barbarism than they displayed a hundred years ago, by the tyranny of the 
Blackfeet tribe, who, obtaining guns from the Hudson’s Bay Company, 
shot numbers of them down, took away their hunting-grounds, and have 
driven them to live among the hills, without huts or houses, where they now 
subsist on roots of the earth, under the name of Digger Indians. Then 
there are the Bakalahari tribe in South Africa, mentioned by Dr. Living- 
stone, who are degenerated Bechuanas ; once having possessed large herds 
of cattle, but now reduced to a struggle for bare existence. 
