Liberté compatible avec la manière de vivre des peuples sauvages.

CHAP. 5: Liberty compatible with the way of life of savage peoples.

§ 1. If it is true that liberty is in proportion to civilization, the peoples called savages must be the least free of all peoples; for they are precisely the least civilized. At this first age of social life, men know how to make neither an extended use, nor a well-understood use of their forces; they have learned neither to provide amply for their needs, nor to satisfy them with measure, nor to content them without doing each other mutual harm. They do not know how it is possible for numerous populations to subsist simultaneously in the same place without harming each other; and when the natural productions of a country can no longer suffice for the needs of the tribes that inhabit it, the only means they conceive of to increase their resources is to exterminate one another, and to reduce by war the number of consumers. One can say that, in this infancy of society, men have as yet no inkling of the conditions under which it is possible to be free.

§ 2. By what singular reversal of ideas, then, have philosophers of the last century affected to present this social state as the most favorable to liberty? The more uncultivated a people was, the more they declared it free. A Frenchman, an Englishman, a civilized man of their time was a slave [^86] ; a Roman was a free man, all the more reason a German; all the more reason a Tartar, a nomad. Finally, the freest of men, in their eyes, was a savage, an Algonquin, an Iroquois, a Huron.

"When one knows how to dig a canoe, to beat the enemy, to build a hut, to live on little, to make a hundred leagues in the forests, with no other guide than the wind and the sun, with no other provision than a bow and arrows; it is then," says Raynal, "that one is a man [^87] ."

"So long as men," says Rousseau, "were content with their rustic huts; so long as they confined themselves to sewing their clothes of skins with thorns or fish-bones; to adorning themselves with feathers and shells; to painting their bodies with various colors; to carving with sharp stones a few fishing canoes or a few crude musical instruments; in a word, so long as they applied themselves only to works that a single person could make, and to arts that did not need the concurrence of several hands, they lived free, healthy, good, and happy as much as they could be by their nature...[^88] ."

Elsewhere, the same writer adds that there is no possible oppression among savages.

"A man," he says, "may well seize the fruits that another has gathered, the game he has killed, the cave that served as his shelter; but how will he ever manage to make himself obeyed?... If I am chased from one tree, I am quit of it to go to another; if I am tormented in one place, who will prevent me from passing elsewhere [^89] ?"

§ 3. Thus, a savage is free, according to Rousseau, for the sole reason that he has the faculty, if he is harassed in one place, to take refuge in another. But by that logic, is a civilized man much less free than a savage? does he not also have the faculty to flee? If he is tormented in one place, can he not go to another? And if he finds safety nowhere in the society of men, will he not always have, like Rousseau's savage, the faculty of plunging into the woods and going to live with the beasts?

It will doubtless be said that the civilized man could not take such a resolution; that he is tied to society by too many bonds: but must one then be tied to nothing to be free? Does liberty consist in the necessity of stifling all one's sentiments, of repressing all one's affections? Is it to be free to be at every moment constrained to abandon one's fruit, one's game, one's shelter? What would be worse in being a serf?

Rousseau teaches us how we can be free by consenting to produce nothing, to possess nothing. Have only trees for shelter; cover yourselves only with the skins of animals; attach them only with thorns; forbid yourselves all industry; reduce yourselves to the condition of brutes, and you will be free. Free! to do what? to live more miserably than the beasts themselves? to perish of cold or of hunger? Is it to this that you reduce human liberty? A strange way to procure us liberty, to begin by forbidding all perfection to our forces, all development to our most beautiful faculties!

Men are not free in proportion to their power to suffer, but in proportion to their power to satisfy themselves. Liberty consists not in knowing how to live by abstinence; but in being able to satisfy one's needs with ease, and in knowing how to content them with moderation. It consists not in being able to flee, as Rousseau says, or in knowing how to beat the enemy, as Raynal says; but in knowing how to direct one's forces in such a way that it is possible to live peacefully together; in such a way that one is not reduced to fleeing or to killing one another. Liberty, finally, consists not in making oneself a beast, for fear of becoming a wicked man; but in striving to become, as much as possible, an industrious, reasonable, and moral man.

When one knows how to dig a canoe, build a hut, make a hundred leagues in the forests, it is then that one is a man! Yes, it is then that one is a savage man; but to be really a man, many other things are truly needed: one must know how to make an extended and elevated use of one's forces; one must have developed one's intelligence; and one is all the freer and all the more a man the better one knows how to take advantage of all one's faculties. This results even from Raynal's expressions; for, if one is a man when one knows how to dig a canoe, all the more reason must one be so when one knows how to build a ship; if, when one can erect a hut, all the more reason when one knows how to raise houses, temples, palaces; if finally, when one can make a hundred leagues in the forests, all the more reason when one can make a tour of the earth?

§ 4. The detractors of the civil life find, therefore, like us, that one is all the freer the better one knows how to use one's forces. But then in what respect would it be possible to maintain that the still savage man is freer than the civilized man? Does he prevail by the strength of the body, by the faculties of the mind, by private and social habits? Let us compare them a little from these diverse points of view.

§ 5. The savage life has long been presented as the source of physical vigor.“The body of the savage man,” says Rousseau, “being the only instrument he knows, he employs it for diverse uses of which, for want of practice, ours are incapable; and it is our industry that takes from us the strength and agility that necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had an axe, would his wrist break such strong branches? If he had a sling, would he throw a stone by hand with such force? If he had a ladder, would he climb a tree so lightly? If he had a horse, would he be so swift at running? Give the civilized man time to gather all his machines around him, and there can be no doubt that he will easily overcome the savage man; but if you wish to see a still more unequal combat, place them naked and disarmed opposite one another, and you will soon recognize the advantage of having one's forces constantly at one's disposal, of being always ready for any event, and of carrying, so to speak, his entire self with him always [^90] .”

These are ideas admirably expressed, no doubt; but do they have as much justness as brilliance? I will not deny that the savage life appears fit, in some respects, to develop physical forces. The savage is called by his state to very great exercise, and exercise is the father of vigor. But if moderate exercise fortifies, exercise that is too violent, enervates; and the savage ordinarily overexerts his body rather than exercises it. Add that, if he often acts too much, more often still he eats poorly, and that he is doubly exhausted by fatigue and by fasting.

“The savage,” says Péron, “driven by the imperious need to procure food, gives himself over, for several days, to long and painful runs, taking rest only in the moments when his body falls from fatigue and exhaustion. Does he happen to find abundant pasture? then, a stranger to any movement other than those indispensable for satisfying his voracity, he no longer abandons his prey, he remains near it until new needs recall him to new runs, to new fatigues, no less excessive than the preceding ones. Now, what is more contrary to the regular development, to the harmonic maintenance of forces, than these alternations of extreme fatigue, of automatic rest, of overwhelming privations, of excesses and famelic orgies [^91] ?”

Join to that what the accounts of travelers report of the filth of savage peoples, of the unwholesomeness of their foods, of the stench of their habitations, of the manner in which they sometimes crowd into them, of the diseases, the infirmities to which the whole of this detestable regimen exposes them, and you will recognize that their body is almost always subjected to the action of a more or less numerous confluence of essentially enervating causes [^92] .

It appears therefore very uncertain that in the combat proposed by Rousseau, the savage man would have, in general, over the cultivated man as much advantage as he supposes. Doubtless, if one were to affect to pit against the most puny artisan of our cities a savage chosen from one of the peoples of America or the islands of the South Sea who are most remarkable for height, proportions, and strength of body, it is very probable that the city-dweller would not emerge victorious from the struggle. But to judge which of the civil or savage life is more favorable to the development of physical vigor, one must not make a colossus fight a pygmy, a Swiss or Scottish mountaineer fight an Eskimo, a Kaffir or Carib warrior fight the least robust citizen of London or Paris; nor must one make a man of the study fight a man of war, a man who has never worked anything but his head fight a man who has exercised, since childhood, in wrestling and pugilism: one must place in presence two men equal in respect of race, two men who habitually engage in the same exercises, and between whom there is no difference but that which the manner of living and civilization could have put there. Now, if the struggle is established between two men chosen in this way, one can boldly state as fact that the savage man will be constantly beaten by the civil man.

One finds in the account of the voyage of discovery to the southern lands peremptory proofs of what I advance. Péron wished to judge on the spot this great trial of the superiority of brute nature over cultivated nature. He compared the respective forces of the Europeans and the natives of New Holland. He saw sailors from the expedition struggle, body to body, and on several occasions, with savages: the latter were always thrown down. He tested their respective forces with the dynamometer, and the savages were again vanquished. Péron, far from finding in the facts the proof of that greater muscular strength that has been attributed to uncultivated peoples, was led by observation to think that men are, in general, weaker in proportion as they are less civilized. He found that the natives of New Holland, a little less brutish and less miserable than those of Diemen's Land, were a little more vigorous; that those of Timor were stronger than those of New Holland, and the Europeans much stronger than the half-civilized inhabitants of Timor. He remarked that physical vigor, on this scale of civilization, followed the following progression: 50, 51, 58, 69 [^93]; that is to say, that the savages of Diemen's Land had been able, on average, to make the pressure needle of the dynamometer move only up to 50 degrees, those of New Holland to 51, and those of Timor to 58; whereas the French, despite the weakening resulting for them from the fatigues of a very long and very arduous navigation, had made it advance to 69 [^94] .

Perhaps Péron can be reproached for not having taken sufficient account in these experiments of the difference of races. It would be possible, in effect, that the inferiority of the natives of New Holland came in part from their poor natural conformation, and that it did not result solely from the little progress they have made. This I do not know. But, even if one had to grant something to the difference of races, the general consequence drawn by Péron from his experiments would nonetheless remain certain. It would be modified, but not destroyed; and it would still be true to say that civilization is favorable to the development and extension of physical forces [^95] . Civilization does not, doubtless, make civilized men superior to uncultivated men in certain exercises that their position allows them to neglect, and to which savages are, by their very position, obliged to devote themselves habitually; but it does, and this is all I claim here, make them, in general, in better health, healthier, more vigorous, more robust. A highly regarded historian, M. Dulaure, furnishes me with a curious proof of this in his Histoire de Paris.

This writer, speaking of the games in which the inhabitants of that good city engaged in the fifteenth century, recounts that on September 1, 1425, a greasy pole was erected in the rue aux Ours, opposite the rue Quincampoix, which was no more than thirty-six feet high, and he adds that, in the whole course of the day, no one was found who could climb to the top and go unhook the prize that had been hung there [^96] . If the fact is true, and the historian draws it from a good source, it must be agreed that the Parisians of our day could laugh a little at their robust ancestors. Is there, in effect, anything so common in our public festivals as to see people of the common sort nimbly climb to the top of greasy poles, not of thirty-six feet, but of more than sixty? What leads us to believe that civilization tends to make physical man degenerate is the sight of those weak and puny individuals, who are always found in greater or lesser number in rich and very populous countries. But the existence of these individuals is perhaps what best shows to what point civilization is favorable to physical man. All these beings, in effect, are so many forces that civilization conserves, and who, in the savage state, would be doomed to inevitable destruction. In that rigorous state, only individuals born with a very strong constitution can promise themselves to live. All the rest are condemned in advance to perish.

A Spartan would perhaps say that it is one of the bad effects of civilization to thus conserve frail bodies, stunted individuals, rags...

A rag, if you will; but my rag is dear to me,

one would reply with Chrysale. There is no need at all to be built like Hercules to find life sweet and congratulate oneself on enjoying it:

Maecenas was a gallant man. He said somewhere: make me impotent, Legless, gout-ridden, one-armed; provided that, in sum, I live, it is enough; I am more than content.

Besides, it is neither impossible nor rare for weak shoulders to carry a strong head, for an energetic soul to lodge in a slender body. Now, strong heads and energetic souls also have their power, perhaps. There is in the head of Newton or of Blaise Pascal a thousand times more power than in the arms of Alcides. Permitted it is for savages to take account only of the vigor of the loins or the energy of the calf: cultivated men know that man is of value above all for his sentiment and his intelligence [^97] .

Finally, the question here is not to know whether civilization is right or wrong to conserve weakly constituted beings; but rather whether it is or is not favorable to physical vigor. Now this is shown with evidence not only in what it adds to the strength of naturally robust men; but above all in what it gives of life and health to naturally frail bodies; not only in these millions of vigorous beings that it causes to grow, but above all in this multitude of frail existences that it conserves: it is in that for which it is accused of being a cause of decay and death that I find it particularly life-giving.

If a truth so simple, and yet so long misunderstood, needed new proofs, striking ones would be found in the curious researches of M. Villermé on the population of Paris. This judicious observer has taught us that in the epoch in which we live, the general annual mortality in Paris is only one inhabitant in thirty-two, whereas in the seventeenth century it was one in twenty-five or twenty-six, and in the fourteenth, according to data furnished by a manuscript of that epoch, one in sixteen or seventeen. One can judge by this sole fact to what point the progress of civilization tends to increase the average duration of life, and to what point consequently it is favorable to the conservation of physical forces [^98] .

Rousseau was therefore greatly mistaken when he sought to establish that men are more vigorous in proportion as they are more uncultivated. It is precisely the contrary that is the truth. Why, moreover, in pitting a civilized man against a savage, does he wish to strip the former of what makes his principal attribute; of the artificial forces he has known how to add to his own, of the arms, the tools he has appropriated and which have become for him like so many new senses? Naked and disarmed, his superiority is already evident; but it will be immense if to his natural forces you add those he has known how to procure for himself by his art.

§ 6. The true power of the civil man is in his intelligence. It is to it that he owes first his greater bodily vigor; for he is more robust only because he knows better how to maintain his health, because he provides better for all his physical needs. But this greater corporeal strength for which he is indebted to it is nothing in comparison to that which it procures for him besides. It bends to his use all the powers of nature; it adds to the forces that are his own those of animals, those of metals, those of water, of fire, of wind; it raises his power from one to a thousand, to a hundred thousand; it extends it in an indefinite manner.

The cultivated man, already freer than the savage in the use of his limbs, is therefore infinitely freer than him in the exercise of his understanding. In this new respect, there is truly no possible comparison between them. The advantage that the civilized man draws from the faculties of his mind is immense; the use that the savage man makes of them is nothing; his intelligence is only just beginning to gleam; and one can judge by the time we have taken to dissipate a little the thick fog that enveloped ours, how many centuries must pass before his shines with any brilliance.

Not only is the savage's intelligence not developed, but there are in his way of life almost insurmountable obstacles to its making any perceptible progress. The savage, a hunter and warrior by state, exhausts all his activity in the violent exercises to which his condition condemns him; and when he returns from the hunt or from war, he feels only the need to repair his forces with food and sleep. There is room in his life only for physical action; there is none for the work of the mind. For him to become capable of reflection, his existence would have to not be divided between a disordered activity and an almost lethargic rest; he would have to provide for his subsistence by means that required less force and more calculation; that is to say, he would have to change his way of life; but so long as he remains a hunter and warrior it appears impossible for his intelligence to form, and no people has been seen, in this state, whose ideas were not excessively limited.

Such is the ignorance of the savage, that he is incapable of providing for the simplest needs of life. One knows in what state the natives of Diemen's Land and New Holland were recently found. They were, says Péron, without arts of any kind, without any idea of agriculture, of the use of metals, of the subjugation of animals; without fixed habitations, without other retreats than obscure underground passages or miserable bark windbreaks, without other arms than the assegai and the club, always wandering in the heart of the forests or on the shore of the sea [^99] . Cook found the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego dying of cold and hunger, covered with filth and vermin, and placed under the harshest climate without having known how to discover any means of softening its rigor [^100] . The savage, in general, knows how to draw from the earth only what it produces spontaneously, and such is sometimes his stupidity that to gather the fruit that feeds him, he cuts down at its base the tree that gives it to him [^101] . He remains exposed to the cruelest privations on lands that the most imperfect culture would make fertile, and he feeds there on the most disgusting dishes, he suffers there hideous famines when the least industry could shelter him from need [^102] . He loses, for want of cleanliness, the advantage of occupying extensive and naturally healthy regions, and sometimes entire hordes are carried off by epidemics that the least prudence could have prevented [^103] . He receives, finally, almost no aid from his intelligence; it leaves him at the mercy of all the elements and under the yoke of a multitude of necessities with which the most vulgar industry among us would trifle.

Rousseau finds that liberty does not suffer, so long as one thus depends only on things [^104] . This is to be strangely mistaken. Things, in many cases, do not act upon us with less violence than men, and it is no sweeter to depend on them than to be under the yoke of the most formidable tyrants. Not only is this no sweeter, but it is no more noble. We depend on things on the same grounds as on men. We belong to them, as to despots, by our ignorance, our carelessness, our cowardice. There is a case where a man may not have to blush for his indigence; but for a people, in general, to be poor is just as shameful as to be a slave, and I know a certain country that is no less blighted by its misery than by the little security enjoyed there. A people is destitute, wherever nature is not too contrary to it, only because it lacks activity and courage; it is in servitude or anarchy only because it lacks justice and equity. All this proceeds from the same general causes, that is to say, from a lack of culture. But let us return to our subject.

§ 7. I was saying, then, that in the savage state man as yet knows how to draw almost no advantage from his intelligence and his forces: he is not much more skillful at directing his sentiments. He has not yet learned to put measure into his actions with regard to himself and toward his fellows; and there are in his mode of existence as many obstacles to the formation of his morals as to the development of his ideas.As the manner in which he provides for his needs frequently exposes him to the horrors of hunger, it is natural that he eat with voracity when the occasion presents itself, and intemperance is an almost inevitable consequence of his situation [^105] . On the other hand, as hunting peoples require immense terrains to feed themselves, it is very difficult, however few in number they may be, that they not dispute the space; and war, with all the passions it ignites and feeds, is again, so to speak, a necessary consequence of their state [^106] . Intemperance and the penchant for hostility are thus two vices inseparable from the savage's way of life; and certainly, these two vices are quite sufficient to prevent in him the development of all good personal and relational morals.

§ 8. The savage, considered in the portion of his conduct that relates only to himself, seems almost entirely destitute of morality. The moral man knows how to resist the seductions of the moment; he knows how to deprive himself of a pleasure in foresight of the evil that may be its consequence. The savage appears entirely incapable of calculation; he yields without resistance to the impulse of his appetites; and such is still the imperfection of his morals, that he does not even blush at his immorality; he gives himself over to his vices with candor and confidence, without appearing to suspect that there is anything fatal and shameful in this conduct.

It would be easy for me to find in the accounts of the best travelers what is needed to confirm these general remarks. One can see the details they contain on the personal habits of the still uncultivated man; on his voracity, his drunkenness, his incontinence, his idleness, his apathy, his excessive improvidence; and one will easily judge how far his morals are from that character of innocence and purity that some have wished to make the appanage of barbarous peoples, and which truly belongs only to the best portion of highly cultivated societies [^107] .

§ 9. The relational morals of the savage man are no better than his personal morals. He appears to be guided in his relations with others only by passions, just as he is guided toward himself only by appetites; and he yields to his affections as to his appetites, remarks Fergusson, without thinking in the least of the consequences of his acts [^108] .

His conduct, observed in the relations of father, husband, child, is filled with brutal and cruel actions. To abandon the child one can no longer feed, the old parent who can no longer walk, and not only to abandon them, but to destroy them, are, according to the accounts of travelers, ordinary acts at this epoch of social life [^109] . Women above all are mistreated there. The word servitude is too gentle to render the state to which they are reduced; they perform at once the office of servants and of beasts of burden. Péron, speaking of those of New South Wales, says that one remarks in them I know not what of the anxious and downcast, which tyranny always imprints on the brow of its victims, and he adds that almost all are covered with scars, sad fruits of the mistreatment of their ferocious husbands [^110] .

There is no age in which society is more given over to the empire of force. We are wounded by the inequalities it still presents: it then offers ones far more cruel; it generally leaves the weak at the mercy of the strong; it abandons to each the care of avenging his injuries and of defending himself as he can against his particular enemies [^111] .

It is true that one does not yet seek there to enslave one another; one has no interest in that: what would one do with slaves [^112] ? men, at this age, do not yet know how it is possible to make of man an instrument. But if they are ignorant of how he can become a tool, they know very well how he is an obstacle, and if they do not seek to enslave one another, it is because they find it more to their advantage to exterminate one another.

Not cultivating the land, and its natural productions being able to suffice only for the needs of a very small number of individuals, it is a question of who will have the little that it gives without culture, and they are, as Cook says, ceaselessly occupied with destroying one another, as their only resource against famine and death [^113] .

The more difficult it is to live in this state, the easier it is to be divided. Each tribe guards its game with a jealous attention: the slightest appearance of strangers on its lands is enough to put arms in its hands. The simple growth of a neighboring tribe is regarded as an act of aggression [^114] . War, ignited by the need to defend one's subsistence, is maintained by the desire for revenge, the most violent of the sentiments that the savage man appears to experience; the greater the interest in it, the more impetuous are the sentiments that push toward it, and the more furiously it is waged. Add that it is further envenomed by the natural ferocity of the savage, a passion so carried away, says Robertson, that it resembles rather the instinctual fury of animals than a human passion [^115] .

Divided thus by cruel, implacable, eternal hatreds, men, in the state I am describing, enjoy much less security than at any other age of civilization.

“I am led to believe,” says Cook, “from my own observations and the information furnished me by Taweiarooa, that the inhabitants of New Zealand live in perpetual fear of being massacred by their neighbors. There is no tribe that does not believe it has experienced from some other some injustice or some outrage for which it is ceaselessly occupied with taking revenge... The manner in which these dark projects are executed is always the same: one falls, by night, upon the enemy one wishes to destroy, and if he is surprised defenseless, everything is killed, without distinction of age or sex... This perpetual state of war,” adds Cook, “and the destructive manner in which it is waged, produce in these peoples such a habit of circumspection, that, by night or by day, one sees no individual who is not on his guard [^116] .”

Such are the relations of savage men: this is how they use their faculties among themselves; they employ them to subjugate women, to crush weakness, to wage atrocious and uninterrupted wars against one another.

§ 10. From whatever point of view, therefore, one considers them, it is visible that they are infinitely less free than the cultivated man. They are less so physically: they have less bodily strength, and are not capable, by a great deal, of drawing the same advantage from their forces. They are less so intellectually: they have incomparably less mind, industry, knowledge of every kind. They are less so morally: they have not, in any respect, learned as well to regulate their sentiments and their actions. They are less so, in a word, in their entire manner of being: they are exposed to a multitude of privations, miseries, infirmities, violences from which the civil man knows how to preserve himself by a more extended, more just, and more reasonable use of his faculties. See the savage in the most ordinary situations of his life, a prey to the famine that his ignorance and his laziness make him suffer, in the state of stupid immobility in which his inertia holds him, in the midst of the brutal drunkenness into which his intemperance has plunged him, surrounded by the perils he has provoked by his furies; and you will recognize that at no other age of social life does man make of his forces a use so limited, so sterile, so violent, so damaging, and that, consequently, at no other age does he enjoy so little liberty.

§ 11. However, if one does not find liberty in the savage state, one discovers its elements there; one perceives there some beginnings of industry, of morals, of justice. Man is not exclusively occupied there with destroying; he also sometimes gives himself over to peaceful and productive labor; he builds a hut; he furnishes it with a few crude utensils; he sometimes cultivates the soil that immediately surrounds it; he exchanges for foodstuffs, tools, ornaments, the spoils of the animals he has taken in the hunt. Let him direct his activity more into these channels; let agriculture, commerce, the arts, become his principal means of existence, and we shall see his liberty grow insensibly. His new way of life requiring more reflection and study, his mind will become more inventive; his exercises being more moderate, his inertia will be less profound; his subsistence being more assured, he will eat with more moderation; life becoming easier for him, he will have fewer subjects of dispute, he will threaten his neighbors less, and will be less threatened by them; finally, the use of his forces extending and becoming by degrees less prejudicial, his liberty will grow in the same proportion.

It suffices, therefore, that the savage man make, in some respects, a useful and non-offensive use of his forces, for one to discover the first elements of liberty in his way of life. I have said that it existed in germ in the little industry he possesses: it exists also in his impatience with all factitious supremacy, with all unjust domination. The savage willingly submits to the chief he has chosen to lead him to war or to direct the hunts undertaken in common; but he would not, in general, bear that one of his equals should wish to arrogate some authority over his person, and undertake to subject his conduct to his directions. As this age is that in which there is the least security, it is naturally that in which man is most disposed to resistance, in which he shows himself most fierce, most hostile to all subjection. This passion for individual independence, this individuality of the savage is one of his most energetic sentiments, at least in the good races; it makes him capable of heroic actions; it arms him with an invincible patience in the midst of torments. There is no torture that a savage prisoner will not bear, rather than admit himself vanquished; and it is not only a passive courage that this virtue inspires in him, it sometimes gives him as much valor as resolution. The war of independence that the Araucanians sustained against the Spanish, says the historian Molina, is comparable to all that the ancient and modern histories of Europe offer of the most admirable in this genre. “When the Americans,” says Robertson, “saw that the Spanish treated them as slaves, a great number of them died of grief or killed themselves in despair [^117] .”

§ 12. The continuation of our researches will teach us how this sentiment is modified in the subsequent ages of society, and in general how the germs of liberty that we have just perceived in the savage life develop.

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Notes

[^86]: As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are slaves yourselves...” (Rousseau, Social Contract, book 3, ch. 15.) [^87]: Histoire philosophique et polit. des deux Indes, book 15, p. 20. [^88]: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. [^89]: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. [^90]: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. [^91]: Voyage de découvertes aux terres autrales, vol. I, p. 464. [^92]: See what is said on this, according to the accounts of the best travelers, by the author of the Essay on the Principle of Population, vol. I, ch. 3 and 4. [^93]: I am omitting the fractions. [^94]: In these tests, the English established at Port Jackson made the needle of the dynamometer advance to 71 degrees. But Péron observes that this difference in the English's favor could be due to the difference in the state of health of the individuals of the two nations, some of whom, established in their homes and perfectly well-disposed, enjoyed the fullness of their strength, while the others were barely disembarking from their ships, following a very long and excessively fatiguing navigation. [^95]: See vol. I, pp. 472 to 475, of his voyage, all the facts and authorities he cites in support of this assertion. [^96]: Hist. phys., civ. et mor. de Paris, vol. II, pp. 661 and 662, 1st ed. [^97]: It has been remarked, observes an English writer, that most of the artists, poets, and philosophers who have most honored humanity were of a weak constitution. Pope was forced, by his feeble constitution, to live constantly at the domestic hearth; Pascal, Fontenelle, Samuel Johnson, and many other men of eminent mind spent their lives in a habitual state of suffering. Walter Scott, Lord Byron, are other examples of high intelligence in a puny body. One would be tempted to believe that physical weakness is generally compensated by a greater development of the intellectual faculties, and by the, in a way, indispensable habit of meditation. We are convinced that the perseverance in study that distinguished James Watt, during his long and arduous career, must be attributed, in large part, to the weakness of his temperament. (Rev. Brit., vol. 2, p. 217. Notice on James Watt.) [^98]: M. Villermé's paper was read to the Academy of Sciences on November 29, 1824. Extracts can be seen in the 64th issue, p. 169, of the Rev. encyc. Here are a few more of the observations it contains, all of which support the main proposition that civilization increases the average duration of life. Formerly, the number of deaths exceeded that of births; today, the number of births greatly exceeds that of deaths. Many more people die among the poor than among the rich: the proportion is from one-third to one-half, that is to say that for a number of poor who are only one-third more numerous, the quantity of deaths is double. Many more children are born among the poor than among the rich, and many more are preserved among the rich than among the poor. Whenever the people come to suffer, whatever the causes, the number of deaths increases, that of births decreases, and the average duration of life becomes shorter. Whenever, on the contrary, the people are happy, the number of deaths decreases, that of births increases, and the average duration of life grows longer. — The longer average duration of life, in our time, is due to the progress of civilization, to the more general ease, to healthier air, to a better physical education of children, to better-kept hospitals, to a more enlightened public administration, etc., etc. [^99]: Voyages de découv. aux terres australes, vol. I, p. 463 et seq. [^100]: Second Voyage, vol. II, p. 137. [^101]: Lettres édif., cited by Montesquieu. [^102]: See notably what Péron and other travelers recount of the manner in which the peoples of New Holland sometimes feed themselves. [^103]: See Malthus and the travelers he cites, Essay on the Principle of Pop., book I, ch. 4. [^104]: Emile, book 2. [^105]: Robertson, Hist. of Amer., book 4. [^106]: In America, says Robertson (ibid.), small societies of savage hunters of two or three hundred people often occupy countries more considerable than certain kingdoms of Europe, and although very distant from one another, these small nations are in perpetual wars and rivalries. [^107]: Here are a few traits of the private morals of man in the first age of civilization. — VORACITY. When the natives of New Holland have killed a seal, says Péron, “cries of joy arise from all sides; all thought is now of the feeding frenzy; the ferocious victors group around their victim; it is torn apart from all sides at once; each one eats, sleeps, wakes up, eats and sleeps again. Abundance had united the tribes most hostile to each other, hatreds seemed extinguished; but as soon as the last corrupt scraps of their prey have been devoured, resentments reawaken and murderous combats ordinarily end these disgusting orgies. A few years ago, in the vicinity of Port Jackson, a double scene of this nature took place between the natives of the county of Cumberland, on the occasion of an enormous whale that had washed ashore there, and over whose bones they slaughtered one another.” (Voyage de découv. aux terres australes, vol. II, p. 50.) [^108]: “They acted from affection, as they acted from appetite, without regard to its consequences.” (Essay on the hist. of civ. soc., p. 130, Basil.) [^109]: See Péron and the travelers he cites, vol. I, p. 468 of his account. [^110]: Ibid., pp. 252 and 253. - Women are the slaves of savage life; they form the working class of this state; they perform almost all the useful labor that is done. Wherever there is a beginning of agriculture, it is ordinarily they who plow the land, who sow and harvest the grain, who grind and prepare it (John Heckwelder, work cited, pp. 236 and 237; Robertson, Introduct. to the hist. of Charles V, vol. II, note 18; Hist. of Amer., book 4.) They dry the meat, prepare the hides, gather roots for dyeing (Heckwelder, ib., p. 240). Elsewhere, they go fishing for their husbands (Péron, vol. I, p. 254). On journeys, they carry the young children, the utensils, and all the household goods (Heckwelder, p. 237). Everything they produce is the property of the husband (ib. p. 242). They do not even always have a share in the fruit of their labor. Péron recounts that, in an encounter he had with the natives of New Holland, he saw the men divide among themselves the fish their wives had caught, and eat it without offering them any of it (vol. I, pp. 252 to 256). They prepare their husband's meal; they rock him in his hammock after he has eaten. In general, they do not eat with him. In certain countries, they do not even participate in the games in which it would seem most natural to admit them, for example, dancing. M. de Humboldt, speaking of the women of South America, observes that they would have more vivacity than the men, whose song is lugubrious and melancholic; “but,” he says, “they share the misfortunes of the enslavement to which this sex is condemned among all peoples where civilization is still very imperfect; they do not take part in the dance; they only attend to present the dancers with fermented beverages, which they have prepared with their own hands.” (Polit. Essay on New Spain, vol. I, p. 424). Humiliation and fatigue, such is their lot everywhere in savage life. What especially characterizes this age of society is the state of degradation to which women are reduced. (Roberts., Hist. of Amer., book 4.) [^111]: Robertson, Hist. of Amer., book 4. [^112]: In savage life, one eats, or at the very least, kills one's enemies: the act of enslaving them belongs, as we shall see, to a less barbarous era. [^113]: First voyage, vol. III, p. 45. [^114]: Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Pop., vol. I, ch. 4. [^115]: Hist. of Amer., book 4. [^116]: Third voyage, vol. I, p. 124. [^117]: Hist. of Amer., book 4.