never practised with that singleness of devotion which can spring only from having the object of its veneration not merely designated as an idol which can never be mistaken, but separated from every other; it is no wonder to find a people cold, cruel, and perfidious tyrants when in power, and slaves out of authority. It is a fit thing in a moralist of such a nation, to burst into an apostrophe of rapture, in admiration of one whose virtue can resist the temptation to violate a woman who is found alone.* When the first circle of our affections is broken, it would be absurd to expect a Curtius, a Decius, a Codrus, or a Brutus. It is only in a nation capable of producing mothers like Cornelia, and daughters like the Roman heroine, (who is celebrated by Valerius Maximus as having gone every day to the prison in which her father was condemned to starve, for the pious purpose of sustaining an exhausted parent with the milk of her own bosom,) that prodigies of patriotism or friendship can exist. There is no essential, fundamental distinction between the institutions of Asia and Europe, which can explain the very opposite phenomena which they have constantly exhibited through a succession of so many ages, but this of polygamy. Both the Greeks and Romans confined themselves to one wife until the reign of Valentinian, about 370 years after the christian æra. And though his edict allowed a plurality of wives, the privilege seems to have been little used, even while it continued; and the decree was repealed in a few years by Theodosius. It is a pleasure to turn from the disgusting details of eastern voluptuousness and profligacy, to the more refined morality of our European ancestry: And I hope you will pardon me for considering a moment the particular causes which gave this ascendancy to Greece and Rome, and rendered them in fact the authors of the intellectual and moral regeneration of mankind. Ancient Greece, (in which I do not include Macedonia,) was a peninsula, extending between the Archipelago and Ionian sea; the Pelopponesus was very nearly separated from the continent; and the Isthmus between the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs being but a few miles wide, we could not select a spot on the whole map of Europe more fit to be the cradle of its civilization and of its glory. The Greeks could, by the very figure of their country,† easily defend themselves from the barbarians on the north, and on all the other sides they were accessible only by sea. With a genial climate and fertile soil, population increased, civil institutions became necessary; the germ was imported, and every thing being apt for its development, it soon expanded into a luxuriance and maturity which those of few nations have ever attained. Having no exact local sections, the Greeks naturally spoke nearly the same language, *This is actually done by a classical writer of China. See Du Halde and Montesquieu. This idea is suggested by a fine reflection in Burke's fragment of the history of England. and had similar institutions and customs. The nature of their governments, and perhaps the temper of the people, forbad the extension of the same authority over a great surface. They were divided into many small republics. They vied with each other in arms; they were competitors for glory at the Olympic games, where the prowess and genius of many rival nations contended before the eyes of assembled Greece, for every species of distinction. There Pindar and Corinna showed the triumphs of genius in both the sexes-there Herodotus drew tears from Thucydides, as he listened to the recital of his history-there the concentrated public opinion of many nations, animated and exalted by the great theatre on which they acted, established what was tantamount to a national law by substituting moral principle for fraud and violence. This confederacy of emulous states was still farther cemented by the common respect paid to the Delphic oracle. We learn from Thucydides that the Lacedemonians entered into a war to restore the oracle to the Delphians; and that treaties often commenced with a reciprocal vow to protect the liberty of Delphi. For this jealousy there were strong political reasons. The oracle might have been converted into an instrument of oppression, if Delphi had been subjected to the will of a particular state. Greece then was more civilized than surrounding nations, because its people were more intimately associated; and this was, because its climate and soil gave it a considerable population which was on all sides guarded and compressed by physical barriers. Much also, no doubt is due to the early lawgivers, the Solons and Lycurgus' of the several states, who, with a prophetic genius incorporated into their systems those moral elements which liberalize ambition, and expand the heart. But, had Greece been on all sides assailable by the Persians, it could never have reached the power, the refinement, and the splendour, to which it attained. A nation, therefore, must not only have good institutions, but ability to preserve them. Italy had still greater physical advantages than Greece, by its geographical situation. Civilization was carried from Greece to Italy, as it had been before carried from Egypt to Greece. The Alps fenced out for many ages the flood of northern invasion. Had not this barrier been interposed the Romans could not so long have defied the envy and the hatred of these Barbarians, who afterwards subverted the empire. The refinement which Rome imported from Greece, and which in many respects she improved,* was spread over Europe in seven centuries of civilizing conquests. When that great empire was dismembered, Europe resolved itself by new political affinities into many small monarchies. The universal dominion of Rome enabled it to throw off all responsibility to human opinion. There was no neutral territory in which the victim of imperial despotism might claim the protection due to persecuted innocence. The equality subsisting be * Both Polybius, and Dionysius Halicarnasseus, admit the superior domestic morality of the Romans. tween the governments of modern Europe rendered the rulers of each in some degree responsible to the judgment of surrounding nations. Separated as these monarchies were by natural boundaries and political institutions, they were still united by the christian religion; and though their respective populations were never, like the Greeks, blended together in olympic games; the crusades, the pilgrimages, the celebrated universities, the common respect paid to the pope, &c. offer d points of adhesion sufficient to diffuse the spirit and refinement which had revived in Italy, throughout the continent. These general causes operated more rapidly and more successfully in particular portions of Europe, than in others, from the great qualities of their early rulers. Thus the genius and heroic enterprise of Charlemagne accelerated the progress of the arts in France in the eighth century, and contributed to diffuse, though faintly, the rays of civilization beyond the Rhine. But to return to the Cherokees. Being now nearly surrounded by the descendants of Europeans, they are no longer in danger of incursions from barbarous enemies: and it is not to be supposed that there is any such difference between the varieties of the human race as that any portion of it is utterly unsusceptible of civilization. Let us at least adopt the hypothesis most favourable to them, and endeavour to infuse into them the true spirit of refinement. For it is manifest, that to attempt the reformation of savages by teaching them the arts, which are often the irksome effects. of civilization, will be to begin at the wrong end. He who should pretend to teach surveying in a country where there was no property in land, or navigation where there were neither ships, seamen, nor water, would be looked upon as little better than a madman. Yet they who are at infinite pains in teaching the Indians to read, commit nearly the same absurdity. There is no intercourse among them which renders letters necessary, and to love letters for the pleasure they afford, is one of the last refinements of intellectual improvement. The arts are for the gratification of our wants; they must feel the wants before they can value the arts which supply them. Nature has made us sufficiently careful of our individual interests. The morality which it is the part of education to inculcate, refers principally to our relation with others. It teaches us to respect the rights both of person and of property of every individual. The first personal relation in the order of nature, and the nearest which individuals can have, is that of husband and wife; which gives rise to the next, of parent and child. Here our moral obligations have their origin, and flowing as from a fountain, stream and branch into the order of our duties, connecting individuals, and families, and nations, and generations. As I have before said, neither of these relations subsists among the Cherokees. The father does not know his child, nor consequently the child his father. Reformation must therefore begin by instituting marriage as a solemn and inviolable compact. Respect for it will impose salutary restraints on the brutal propensities of savage man. It is it which teaches us to sacrifice an apparent self interest to a liberal and honorable feeling: if not the creator of moral sentiment, it purifies and exalts it. In marriage, self interest and social duty are first interwoven in that exquisite tissue which leads us as with a clue, unconsciously to tread the mazes of the one while we imagine we are following directly the other. A wife and children humanize the heart, not only by the immediate intercourse which must subsist between husband and wife, parent and child, but incidentally also, by extending and multiplying those relations which leave it more in the power of every individual to do us injuries and favours. At the same time they make us more happy; they make our happiness depend more on others, and consequently render it our interest to conciliate their good opinion by reciprocal kindness and affection. The truth of this is strikingly illustrated in civilized life, where those who have grown old without forming such connexions are proverbially selfish, morose, and ill natured; though there are certainly cases in which particular individuals of extraordinary enlargement of mind, and of a sort of sublimity of moral character, extend their sympathies with a general benevolence to all mankind. But it must be remembered that they have been formed in the school of the social virtues. The selfish principle is left to its full operation in savage life, without the salutary counteraction of any opposing one. This explains some of their customs. The prejudice against marrying into the same clan is not a moral aversion, but a mere regulation of policy, designed to extend the connexions, and consequently the influence of the clan. Again; it is, perhaps, a sentiment of filial piety which creates reverence to age, which savages invariably want, though deference to power has been often mistaken for it. I was struck, at a house at which we lodged, with finding a very old warrior seamed and disfigured with scars, nearly consumed by disease, lying on a deer şkin in an open porch. The young persons about him, instead of soothing the sorrows of their dying chief, by cheering the languors of decrepitude and age, amused themselves by singing and dancing near him, as if in mockery of his infirmities. I was the more interested in the fate of the old man, because he was the best antiquarian we found in the nation. By means of an interpreter we extracted from him information, which we asked in vain of another intelligent chief above forty years of age. So soon do traditions perish. It is a melancholy consideration, that the aged of so large a portion of the world are left to die, often from inattention, amidst the unfeeling revelry of the young-and that all the children of many nations are orphans from their birth. All this is owing to the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes; or what is nearly as bad, a plurality of wives, which has ever been so constant a concomitant of the barbarous state, that Tacitus remarks it as a peculiarity of the Germans, that they were content with one wife, and for this very reason perhaps, they were no barbarians.* prope soli barbarorum singulis uxoribus contenti sunt. De Mor. The next necessary element of civilization is respect for property. This is in some degree the result of the social system which follows marriage. Let us, however, accelerate it by wise institutions. Let us teach them permanently to possess, improve, and transmit lands as the most fixed and durable of our possessions. Respect for marriage rites, and property once established, the germ of civilization is complete; a germ which may, like every other, develop itself in an infinite variety of ways, according to the accidental combination of circumstances which accompany its growth; but sufficient of itself to ensure the existence of a regular society under some one of its various modifications. At present the Cherokees look upon marriage as a deplorable servitude of the men,-whom they consider to be the natural masters to the women;-and upon all separate possession of land as a violation of their natural rights. Under such a system, though they may glut every market with bullocks, and spin ever so fine a thread, they will not be more civilized than when Columbus discovered America, and they chased buffalo instead of cattle, and wore panther skins instead of cloth. I shall say nothing of the schemes for converting them to christianity, because the exertions of the missionaries are too disinterested and too honorable to be depreciated. But the institutions of the Indians must be altered before they can be converted to our religion. There is almost a solecism in words when we speak of adultery where there is no marriage-theft where there is no property and murder where it is not only allowable, but praiseworthy to kill. The worthy enthusiasts who have thought to civilize barbarians by the arts, have been grossly deceived in the success of their experiment. The Cherokees have to be sure a few looms, on which the white emigrants for the most part weave a very indifferent cotton cloth. It was particularly injudicious to introduce at the outset, labour so irksome and solitary as that of the loom. We should have given them a more social employment, where the advantages of co-operation would be manifest and striking. It is highly important to bring individuals into friendly contact. Improvement is diffused through the different classes of society nearly in the direct ratio of the intercourse between their members. Commercial information is nearly equal throughout the trading part of the world, because there is constant correspondence between merchants of all countries, while it is not uncommon to see the agriculture of one country 30 or 40 years behind that of an adjoining one, because agriculturists do not correspond with one another, and are from necessity secluded from the world. This want of information is not confined to their agricultural pursuits. They have less knowledge of other subjects than from their leisure they should have. They, more particularly than others, labour under the fatal error of relying entirely upon what is called plain practical sense, to the exclusion of all general principles, which are discarded under the reproachful appellation of theory. These gentlemen |