Des rapports observés entre les moyens d’existence et la nature des gouvernements des peuples d’espè

CHAP. 14: > Of the relations observed between the means of existence and the nature of the governments of the peoples of the copper-colored species, of the north of America. — Of the kind of inequality that exists among these peoples. — Of the means of security employed by individuals. — Of the morals that result from the employment of these means.

The means that each people employs to provide for its existence depend, in general, on the development of the intelligence of the individuals of whom that people is formed; and the morals of these individuals are in large part determined by their means of existence; there thus exists an intimate relation between the intellectual development of a nation and its moral perfection. One will see, in this chapter and in the following ones, numerous proofs of this relation: one will see that, if, as peoples become more enlightened, they are better provided with everything, they also have purer and gentler morals, as they know better how to provide for their needs; one will see, moreover, that the forms of their governments, and, if it is permissible to express it thus, their social physiognomy, are determined by the diverse ways in which each fraction of the population provides for its primary needs.In expounding the diverse degrees of intellectual development that the natives of America had reached before the existence of these peoples was disturbed, or their social order overthrown by the invasions of the Europeans, we have seen that at the two extremities of this continent, men lived principally on the products of fishing or hunting; that starting from the north, one only began to perceive some traces of cultivation around the forty-fifth degree of latitude; that cultivation became more considerable as one advanced toward the equator; that one found almost no more hunter peoples in the torrid zone, each living principally on the products of their agriculture; and that the only peoples who had made progress in the arts were found between the tropics or were at least very close to them.

It is not as easy to follow the progress of morals on this continent as the progress of industry. In general, observations on morals require more time and sagacity than observations on the arts. They can only be made on site, and it is impossible to repeat them when the peoples have disappeared or when violent upheavals have modified their existence. It has been sufficient, to judge the intelligence of the tribes that inhabit the two extremities of the American continent, to consider for a few moments their hunting or fishing instruments, and to examine how the clothing or huts that protect them from the cold are made. The products of the arts can be transported far away, and we can often repeat for ourselves, without almost having to move, the observations that travelers have made on site. It is easy for us, for example, to judge whether the descriptions that navigators have given us of the industry of the islanders of the great Ocean are accurate: we need only go to the cabinets in which are deposited the art objects that several of these travelers brought back. Moreover, the products of industry very often outlive the peoples who created them; and thus we can judge, at least partially, without resorting to any description, the industry of the ancient peoples of Italy and Greece. We can judge in the same way the progress that the Mexicans and Peruvians had made in some arts, at the time their country was invaded by the Spanish.

But observations on morals present much more serious and numerous difficulties. If the climate under which a people is placed is very rigorous, as is that of the southern extremity and that of the northern extremity of America, travelers cannot stay there, and are consequently incapable of making any sustained observation on the morals of the inhabitants. Thus, although the peoples who live near the Strait of Magellan, on Tierra del Fuego, and at the mouth of the rivers that flow toward the arctic ocean, have been visited by travelers endowed with much sagacity, we know of them only their stupidity and their excessive misery. We do not know much better the morals of the peoples of central America, who, in the fifteenth century, were the most civilized of this continent, and who were subjugated or destroyed by the Spanish. Conquerors are, of all men, the least capable of judging the morals of the nations they subjugate; because peoples rarely show themselves as they are to foreigners, especially if these foreigners present themselves as enemies. But, when these conquerors are moved only by the passion for riches, and know how to value only gold; when to a profound ignorance they join the most ardent fanaticism and the basest superstition; when they are ignorant of the language of the peoples they subjugate, and aspire only to destroy those they cannot enslave, one can expect from them no observation fit to inspire confidence. We can therefore know very little about the morals of the Mexicans and Peruvians before the conquest; since we possess in this regard only the writings of the Spanish, and it is no longer possible to repeat or extend the observations they contain. However, as imperfect as our knowledge may be, it is sufficient to convince us that the peoples of the north, far from having any moral superiority over the peoples of the same species who live between the tropics, are on the contrary generally inferior to them.

We have seen previously that the peoples situated at the northern extremity of the American continent, beyond the sixty-sixth degree of latitude, live principally on the products of fishing, and that hunting furnishes them only accidentally a supplement to the subsistence they draw from the sea or from rivers. The peoples who live between the sixty-sixth and the forty-fifth degree of latitude, on the contrary, find their principal means of existence in the products of hunting. Although the lakes and rivers furnish them a part of their subsistence, this part is less considerable than that which land animals furnish them. From the forty-fifth degree of latitude down to around the thirtieth, on the Gulf of Mexico, the population lives on the products of hunting, fishing, and agriculture. The land is cultivated only in a very imperfect manner; it is divided among the tribes; but it is not shared among individuals or among families; cultivation is done in common, and the products are deposited in public storehouses. Finally, between the tropics, one finds almost no more hunter peoples: the territory occupied by each tribe is almost everywhere divided into private properties. Each cultivates his own as he sees fit, and enjoys exclusively the products he derives from it [344].

A nation that possesses very varied means of existence is, in general, less exposed to a lack of food than one that possesses only a single kind. If a people that, by its local position or by any other cause, can draw its subsistence only from fishing, goes several days without catching fish, or if it does not catch enough to make its accustomed provision, it is necessarily assailed by famine or at the very least by scarcity. One that combines the art of catching fish with the art of hunting game can find in the one the supplement for what was lacking in the other: it is half as exposed to perishing from hunger. One that combines these two means with the art of cultivating a field is even less exposed: two of these resources can fail it, without it running the danger of perishing. Finally, one that, while engaging in cultivation, knows how to vary its products, so that the season that causes a certain kind of plant to fail causes another to prosper, has even fewer risks to run: if it is exposed to experiencing scarcities, it is almost impossible for it to be assailed by famine.

The population that is most exposed to a lack of subsistence is at the same time the one that needs to occupy the most extensive territory, and to take the most trouble to acquire the food necessary for it. If one supposes, for example, a tribe living almost exclusively on the fish it draws from a lake or a river, it will have to traverse its entire expanse to find few resources there; it will be necessary, moreover, that very vast lands carry their waters toward the same point, to form the river or the lake by means of which the fish can exist. If one supposes a tribe living exclusively on the product of the hunt, it will have to occupy a territory that will be scarcely less extensive; the quantity of game that a country left to its natural fertility can nourish must be evaluated, in effect, not by the food that the earth offers to animals in the most favorable season of the year, but by that which it presents to them in the most rigorous season. Supposing, for example, that the annual consumption of a family is six hundred head of game, this family will need to occupy a territory sufficient to nourish a similar number of animals during the winter, and moreover a sufficient number to perpetuate the species, and to replace those that accidents may remove from man's consumption. An individual who lives only on the product of the hunt therefore needs an immense expanse of land: the territory necessary for each savage of North America has been estimated at about two square leagues; but it is doubtful that this expanse would be sufficient for his existence, if the rivers or lakes furnished him no resource, and if he engaged in no kind of cultivation. One can judge from this what expanse of territory is necessary for the existence of a somewhat numerous horde of savages [345].

The rigor of the climate of the northern extremity of America has not permitted the Europeans who have penetrated there to make a long enough sojourn to acquire a perfect knowledge of the morals of the inhabitants; they have only observed the nature of their foods, the form of their clothing and their huts, and their relations with other peoples; but one can judge their morals, either by those of their neighbors, or by those of other peoples who have adopted the same way of life. The Eskimos live, in large part, on fish; they drink water, and whale oil: they eat sea calf, walrus, rotten fish, and even more disgusting foods. It is impossible to doubt that they often lack even these crude foods, when, on the one hand, one sees, on the same continent, peoples living under a less rigorous climate and having a less limited industry, often assailed by famine; and when one knows, on the other hand, that the natives of New Holland and of Van Diemen's Land, who live principally on fish and shellfish, slaughter one another over the rotten remains of a whale to fight over the scraps: if, under a temperate climate, fishing offers only uncertain and fortuitous resources, it can offer only more uncertain ones still under a climate whose rigor is excessive. Now, a habitual scarcity, and the other calamities inseparable from savage life, can only produce in them the effects they produce on all hordes that are in a similar position. According to Ellis, these peoples are cunning, treacherous, suspicious, groveling, and cruel [346]. According to Charlevoix, their morals are as barbarous and ferocious as those of the wolves and bears with which their deserts are filled: they differ from brutes only in their form [347]. They take advantage, says Mackenzie, of every opportunity to attack those who are unable to defend themselves; joining perfidy to cruelty, they fall unexpectedly upon the men to whom they have sworn friendship, and massacre them [348].

The resources that hunting offers to the peoples nearest to the Eskimos are scarcely less uncertain than those offered by fishing; sometimes they are even more so. Herbivorous animals, which are the only ones that present men with considerable food, almost always travel in herds. A horde of hunters must sometimes traverse a space of ten or twelve leagues to encounter a few of them [349]. Often it even traverses, for three or four days, an immense expanse of country, without reaching a single animal on which it can feed [350]. Men thus end up contracting, like beasts of prey, the habit of going several days without eating, or of contenting themselves with an extremely limited quantity of food [351]. If they have the good fortune to encounter and surround a herd of animals, they slaughter all they can reach; each then devours as much meat as his stomach can hold. A savage who has long endured hunger consumes as much food as six men with good appetites could consume. Among them, one is equally honored for enduring a long abstinence and for eating to excess [352].

Peoples who live by hunting or fishing, being exposed to frequent scarcities or even famines, take up the habit of feeding on crude and repulsive foods. The natives of the north of America, when hunting and fishing furnish them nothing, eat the bark of certain trees, boiled moss, grass, rotten fish, and worms [353]; they eat their shoes and the skins they trade, after having pulled out the hair, even when they are half-rotten; they eat the vermin that covers them and the insects that attach to the skin of animals; finally, when they have no other resources, they eat their own children or devour one another [354]. The foods on which these peoples feed in times of scarcity or famine differ little from those on which civilized peoples have fed in similar circumstances. We find in the history of all nations several examples where famine has led men to devour objects that would have inspired them with horror in a less miserable situation. But, among industrious peoples, these are extremely rare cases, which exist only for a small number of individuals, and which can have no influence on national morals or habits. Among hunter or fisher peoples, on the contrary, these are frequent and almost habitual events, which affect entire tribes, and which have a great influence on their morals.

A people among whom there exists only a single profession for all individuals, and among whom individual property is almost unknown, knows scarcely any inequality other than that which results from skill or strength; and it needs a chief only at the moment when it is a question of acting in common, either for attack or for defense. When a tribe of savages prepares to surround the prey it has long pursued, or to surprise an enemy with which it is at war, it submits to the direction of that one of its members whom it has recognized as the most skillful hunter or the most skillful warrior. The subordination is then as perfect, the submission as complete as in the best-disciplined army; each makes his individual interest depend on the general interest, with unreserved devotion; the entire body appears animated by a single will [355].

But, outside of these occasions, there exists no common authority among these hordes. A man who commands his wives and children as a master has no authority outside his family [356]. His children themselves obey him only as long as they depend on him for their subsistence: as soon as they have the same skill or the same strength as he, they are his equals [357]. The deliberations that the members of the tribe take, either to go hunting or to attack an enemy, have no authority in themselves: any individual who disapproves of them is free not to conform to them [358]. Finally, the individuals who direct the expeditions, and whom, for this reason, we consider as the chiefs, have neither a better hut, nor better clothing, nor better food than the other members of the tribe; if they happen to be better provided for, it is by virtue of their individual strength, and not by virtue of the authority with which they are vested [359]. There exists, therefore, within a tribe, no authority to settle the disputes that may arise among the members of which it is composed [360].

Among those of these peoples who are the least advanced and who are habitually in a state of war, the chiefs are elective; and the individuals who show the most strength in enduring the evils attached to the savage life are those on whom the votes are cast: thus, the candidate who longest endures the pains of hunger, the bites of insects, the smoke with which their huts are usually filled, is assured of being elected, if he possesses besides the talents that war and hunting require [361]. Among the tribes that have made a little more progress, and among which the land has begun to be divided into private properties, there exist chiefs whose authority is hereditary; but this authority is reduced to a few slight marks of regard or deference. The individuals who are vested with it have, in reality, no command; they are obliged to work like the others if they wish to live, and are no better provided for than those who enjoy no authority [362].

Small tribes, which wander ceaselessly in immense forests in pursuit of game, which have for clothing only a few animal skins, for lodging only miserable huts made of earth and tree branches, and for food only the products of hunting or fishing, cannot be subjected to the methodical oppression of an individual or a family; there can exist among them neither royalty, nor an aristocracy of birth or wealth. But one would be mistaken to imagine that fewer acts of oppression or violence are committed among them than are committed among the less barbarous peoples of the south. There exists among these peoples a kind of inequality whose effects nothing tempers: it is that of strength. We shall see how this inequality acts among the tribes that live under the coldest climates.These tribes, engaging in no kind of cultivation, know no other individual property than the weapons, clothing, and ornaments that each possesses; women are also considered to be the property of their fathers or their husbands. The value of a savage's weapons is very small for men who live by agriculture; but, for him, they are priceless; since, if he happens to lose them, he runs the risk of dying of hunger. These properties are, however, little respected, and the strong rarely scruple to despoil the weak; if a band of hunters encounters another that is less powerful, it takes from it not only the game it has killed, the skins it has provisioned, but its hunting and fishing instruments, its daughters, and its women [363]; if a chief happens to die, leaving children less vigorous than himself, the properties that belonged to him pass to those of his companions who have enough strength to seize them [364]; if an individual possesses a thing that tempts a man stronger than himself, the latter despoils him of it and seizes it [365]; sometimes also, he who covets a thing that he cannot obtain by a simple act of violence, makes himself master of it by means of an assassination [366].

Women are the property that the hunters of the north dispute most frequently. He who covets the wife of whom another is in possession challenges him to a fight, and, if he is the victor, the woman belongs to him. If he whose wife is coveted does not yield her voluntarily as soon as he has been overthrown, his friends and relatives represent to him the dangers to which he exposes himself by a longer resistance, and urge him to submit to necessity. An individual endowed with great strength sometimes possesses seven or eight women, while the weakest men have none. Muscular strength, however, does not always decide the ownership of women. It often happens that the man who wants to keep the one he has, or take back the one who has been taken from him, stabs the individual whom he believes he does not have the strength to defeat in a fight; sometimes also the abductor assassinates the first possessor, so as to have nothing more to fear from him. The strongest seize the sustenance of the weakest by the same means they use to seize their women: they consider it an honor to live at the expense of those who have no means of defending themselves [367].

No one having any guarantee other than his personal strength, and that of the individuals to whom he is linked by blood or by friendship, each is the judge of the penalty that the injustices or offenses done to him deserve. From this results, among all the natives of America who are not subject to any regular government, a spirit of vengeance that is extinguished only by the death of the one who is animated by it, or by the assassination of the one who is its object. The slightest quarrel makes them put dagger to hand; a single word judged insulting ignites in their breast a flame that can be extinguished only in the blood of the offender; for an injury is never forgiven in good faith [368]. An individual sometimes dissimulates his vindictive feelings for twenty years, to wait for the opportunity to satisfy them with impunity to present itself [369]. To reach the one who has offended him, he travels several hundred miles through the forests; hides in the hollow of a tree; remains there for several days and nights without eating; and, if his enemy appears, he swoops down on him with the rapidity of a bird of prey, slits his throat, tears off his scalp, and disappears, glorious to be able to recount to his people the triumph he has obtained [370]. Vengeance does not stop with the individual who ignited it; it extends to his children, to the members of his family, to all the persons who belong to his tribe [371]. It is not excited only by personal offenses; it is by those that are done to one's relatives, one's friends, the members of one's horde [372].

The fear of reprisals sometimes obliges these men to dissimulate their vengeance, or to suspend its effects; but when drunkenness has taken from them all foresight, there is no violence to which they do not abandon themselves. Although, in such circumstances, the women take care to hide their husbands' weapons, a horde never plunges into drunkenness without several individuals giving themselves over to murder. Husbands slit their wives' throats, or wives their husbands': children massacre their father, or the father his children. The chiefs themselves are not spared, and fall under the daggers of those who believe they have received from them the slightest offense. Often, individuals get drunk with the secret intention of giving themselves over to their vengeance with impunity, and in the hope that they will be more easily excused. Murders committed in drunkenness do, in fact, excite a less profound resentment than those committed with premeditation. However, even these are often punished by reprisals [373]. The passion for vengeance is not particular to the nations of the north of America; it is common to all the tribes of this continent that belong to the same species, and that enjoy no social guarantee, from those who inhabit the lands beyond Hudson Bay to those who inhabit the Gulf of Mexico; among those who inhabit the west coast, as among those who live on the east coasts [374]. We will see later, however, that this passion is expressed in a less energetic manner among the peoples who live under a mild climate, than among those who live under a rigorous climate.

But however violent the passion for vengeance may be among these peoples, it cannot exceed their perfidy. If they have received an injury, they dissimulate it with profound art, until the moment the opportunity for revenge presents itself. It is at the very instant they are meditating a betrayal or an assassination that they show themselves to be solicitous and flattering. They carry dissimulation to an excess that one would have difficulty believing if one had not experienced it: they know how to join false tears to false caresses, if the need requires it [375]. It is not only to ruin their enemies that they are false and deceitful; it is also to appropriate the objects they desire, and which they cannot obtain by force. They seek to soften the persons to whom they address themselves, by the recital of supposed misfortunes; they affect to be crippled or blind in order to better excite pity. The women especially excel in these artifices; I can affirm, says Hearne, to have seen some whose one side of the face expressed joy, while the other was bathed in tears [376]. If they want to obtain a thing they covet ardently, they suddenly become base, servile, groveling, deceitful, and depraved in every respect [377]. Flattery is an art they possess to the supreme degree. They employ it for as long as their interest prescribes, but never beyond it [378]. The same perfidy that travelers have observed among the peoples furthest to the north is found among the peoples of the northwest. “When they took on a laughing and gentle air,” says La Pérouse, “I was sure that they had stolen something [379].”

These peoples know so well how to hide their vices, they affect frankness and good faith with such naturalness, that only travelers who have lived among them for a long time have been able to judge them. Those who have seen them only for a short time, or who have presented themselves among them with imposing forces and inspired fear in them, have sometimes passed a favorable judgment on them that experience later belied [380].

The North Americans are essentially egoistical, and it does not appear that they have in their language a word to express gratitude [381]. They show themselves to be insensitive to the pains of others, and seem to scarcely know that feeling of compassion that other peoples grant even to the sufferings of animals. The sight of pain, far from exciting feelings of pity in them, only excites their jests or their mockery.

“I saw one of these Indians,” says Hearne, “cause the most violent bursts of laughter in a whole company, whose joy I certainly did not share, by counterfeiting the groans and convulsions of a man who had died amidst the most terrible pains [382].”

All the individuals who belong to this species are, however, very serious and even very taciturn: only the movements of an extraordinary joy can make them depart from their gravity [383].