have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives, instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the complete evidence before us.

But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the nature of the case, will probably always remain so. If we want to prove that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appealed to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our very imagination, collapses when aproaching the problem how such a child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished, reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a very old, but a very solid, wall.

Has Kant then written in vain; and is it still supposed that our senses or our reason can ever reach transcendent truths? Has the lesson to be taught again and again that both our senses and our reason have their limits; that we are indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of intellectual strength or suppleness to try to stand on our own shoulders? We are so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception of the true beginning of mankind.

Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for the time to consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to find there the primordial savage.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a question as 'Did man begin as a savage or as a child?' we have a perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words, savage and child?

Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of savage, and to draw a sharp line between a savage and a non-savage? Has anyone ever attempted to define the meaning of child, if used in opposition to savage or brute? Have we been told whether by child is meant a suckling without a mother, or a boy who can speak, and count, and reason without a father? Lastly, are savage and child

really terms that mutually exclude each other? May not a savage be a child, and may not a child be a savage?

How, then, is any one who has given serious thought to the problem of the origin of mankind to answer such a question as 'Tell me, do you hold that man began as a savage or as a child?'

When we read some of the more recent works on anthropology, the primordial savage seems to be not unlike one of those hideous india-rubber dolls that can be squeezed into every possible shape, and made to utter every possible noise. There was a time when the savage was held up to the civilised man as the inhabitant of a lost. paradise-a being of innocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility. Rousseau ascribed to his son of nature all the perfection which he looked for in vain in Paris and London. At present, when so many philosophers are on the look-out for the missing link between man and beast, the savage, even if he has established his right to the name of man, cannot be painted black enough. He must be at least a man who maltreats his women, murders his children, kills and eats his fellow-creatures, and commits crimes from which even animals would

shrink.

This devil-savage, however, of the present anthropologist is as much a wild creation of scientific fancy as the angel-savage of former philosophers. The true Science of Man has no room for such speculations.

Sometimes the history of a name can take the place of its definition, but this is hardly so in our case. The Greeks spoke of barbarians rather than of savages, and the Romans followed their example, though they might possibly have called the national heroes and sages of Germany and Britain not only barbari but feri-that is, savages not very far removed from feræ, or wild beasts. Our own word savage, and the French sauvage, meant originally a man who lived in the woods, a silvaticus. It was at first applied to all who remained outside the cities, who were not cives, or civilised, and who in Christian times were also called heathen-that is, dwellers on the heath.

But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilisation than they established.' The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is the opposite of a civilised man. CivilisaCharles Hawley, Addresses before the Cayuga County Historical Society, 188384, p. 31.

tion is the product of the uninterrupted work of many generations; and if savage meant no more than an uncivilised man, it is no great discovery to say that the first man must have been a savage. No doubt he could not have been acquainted even with what we consider the fundamental elements of civilisation, such as the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. His dress must have been very scanty, his food very primitive, his dwelling very uncomfortable, his family life very unrestrained. And yet, for all that, he might have been very far removed from the brute; nay, he might have been a perfect man, doing his duty in that state of life into which it pleased God to call him.

Civilisation, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery. When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilisation, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were iλóßioi, dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander who has been brought into contact with European civilisation, his former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days: 2—

In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory; we lived in pas placed high upon the mountains. The men looked to war as their only occupation, and the women and the young people cultivated the fields. We were a strong and a healthy people then. When the Pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest, and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds-every tree was full of them. Then we had pigeons and everything in plenty; now many of the birds have died out. . . . In those times the fields were well tilled, there was always plenty of provisions, and we wore few clothes-only our own mats of feathers. Then the missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and taught them to sing hymns: they changed their minds, and the fields were untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty stomach. Then came the war between the Pakeha and the Maori that split up our homes, and made one tribe fight against the other; and after the war came the Pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught us to drink and to smoke, and made us wear clothes that brought on disease. What race could stand against them? The Maori is passing away like the Kiwi, the Tui, and many other things, and by-and-by they will disappear just like the leaves of the trees, and nothing will remain to tell of them but the names of their mountains and their rivers!

This is the view which a so-called savage takes of the benefits of European civilisation as contrasted with the contentment and happiness in which his forefathers had passed through this life. Let us now hear what a highly educated American, a scholar and a philosopher, Mr. Morgan, says of the character of the Iroquois, who are often quoted as specimens of extreme savagery :—

No test of friendship was too severe; no sacrifice to repay a favour too great; no fidelity to an engagement too inflexible for the red man. With an innate know

2 The King Country; or, Explorations in New Zealand, by T. H. Kerry; sce Nicholls in the Academy, Aug. 23, 1881, p. 113.

H

ledge of the freedom and dignity of man, he has exhibited the noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest deeds of humanity, in those sylvan retreats we are wont to look upon as vacant and frightful solitudes.

No one would suspect Morgan of exaggeration or sentimentality. And if it should be objected that these were private virtues only, and no proof of true civilisation or a well-organised society among the Iroquois, the same writer tells us : 3

They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood for nearly two centuries with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and were capable of self-protection long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.

4

The words of another author also may be quoted, who tells us : Their legislation was simple, and the penalties which gave law its sanctions well defined. Their league stood in the consent of the governed. It was a representative popular government, conceived in the wisdom of genuine statesmanship, and with the sagacity to provide against some of the dangers which beset popular institutions. It is said that the framers of our own (the American) government borrowed some of its features from the Iroquois league. Whether or not this be true, it is a matter of history that as early as 1755 a suggestion came from the Iroquois nation to the colonies that they should unite in a confederacy like their own for mutual protection.

It is the fashion to quote against these favourable statements cases of cruelty committed by the Red Indians or the New Zealanders in their wars among themselves and in their resistance to their white enemies. But let us not forget the bloody pages of our own history. We should probably say that the eighteenth century was one of the most brilliant in the history of Europe. We should probably assign to England at that time a foremost place among European countries, and we know how high a position Scotchmen took during the last century in general culture, in philosophy, in science, and statesmanship. Yet, in his 'History of England in the Eighteenth Century,' Mr. Lecky describes the common people of Scotland as broken into fierce clans, ruled by wild chieftains; as thieves and cattle-lifters, kidnappers of men and children to be sold as slaves; as ferocious barbarians, besotted with the most brutal ignorance and the grossest and gloomiest superstitions, possessed of the rudest modes of agriculture, scratching the earth with a crooked piece of wood for a plough, and for a harrow a brush attached to the tail of a horse, otherwise devoid of harness; their food, oatmeal and milk, mixed with blood drawn from the living cow; their cooking, revolting and The League of the Iroquois, p. 12. 4 Hawley, l.c., p. 17. I

VOL. XVII.-No. 95.

filthy, boiling their beef in the hide, and roasting fowls in their feathers, with many like customs and demoralising habits unknown to aboriginal life among the Red Indians.

It will be clear after these few specimens, which might have been considerably increased, that we shall make no step in advance if we continue to use the word savage so vaguely as it has been hitherto used. To think is difficult, but it becomes utterly impossible if we use debased or false coin. I have been considered too inquisitive for venturing to ask anthropologists what they meant by a fetish, but I must expose myself once more to the same reproach by venturing to ask them to state plainly what they mean by a savage.

Whatever other benefits a study of the science of language may confer, there is one which cannot be valued too highly—namely, that it makes us not only look at words, but through words. If we are told that a savage means an uncivilised man, then, to say that the first man was a savage is saying either nothing or what is selfevident. Civilisation consists in the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of men, and to say that the first generation of men was uncivilised is therefore pure tautology. We are far too tolerant with respect to such tautologies. How many people, for instance, have been led to imagine that such a phrase as the survival of the fittest contains the solution of the problem of the survival of certain species and the extinction of others? To the student of language the survival of the fittest is a mere tautology, meaning the survival of the fittest to survive, which is the statement of a fact, but no solution of it.

It is easy to say that the meaning of savage has been explained and defined by almost every writer on anthropology. I know these explanations and definitions, but not one of them can be considered as answering the requirements of a scientific definition.

Some anthropologists say that savage means wild and cruel. But in that case no nation would be without its savages. Others say that savages are people who wear little or no clothing. But in that case the greatest philosophers, the gymnosophists of India, would have to be classed as savages. If it means people without a settled form of government, without laws and without a religion, then, go where you like, you will not find such a race. Again, if people who have no cities and no central government are to be called savages, then the Jews would have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, the ancient Germans, and other of the most important races in the history of the world. In fact, whatever characteristics are brought forward as distinctive of a savage, they can always be met by counterinstances, showing that each definition would either include races whom no one dares to call savage, or exclude races whom no one dares to call civilised. It used to be imagined that the use of letters was the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without