CHAPTER IV.
SOME SINGULAR FORMS OF SEXUAL ASSOCIATION.
I. Primitive Sexual Immorality.—Origin of modesty—Absence of modesty in the savage—Loan of wives in Melanesia and among the Bochimans—Absence of modesty in the Esquimaux, the Redskins, and Polynesians—Right of the husband in Polynesia—Loan or barter of wives—Erotic training of little girls in Polynesia—Society of the Areoïs—Man in a state of nature—Unnatural love in New Caledonia, in the two Americas, among Asiatic peoples, and in Greco-Roman antiquity—The erastes of Crete.
II. Some Strange Forms of Marriage.—Coarseness of primitive marriage—Horror of incest artificially created—Incest among various peoples—Artificial defloration—Experimental marriages among the Redskins, the Otomies, the Sonthals, the Tartars, and in Ceylon—Temporary marriages among the Jews of Morocco and the Tapyres—Free unions—Partial marriages and marriages for a term among the Arabs—Marriage and the right of the strongest in savage countries—Savage coarseness and civilised depravity.
I. Primitive Sexual Immorality.
In a former work[112] I have attempted to trace the genesis of a sentiment peculiar to humanity—the sentiment of modesty. It would be inexpedient here to treat the subject afresh in detail, but I will recall the conclusions arrived at by that investigation. Modesty is par excellence a human sentiment, and is totally unknown to the animals, although the procreative need inspires them with desires and passions essentially identical with what in man we call love; it is therefore certainly an artificial sentiment, and comparative ethnology proves that it must have resulted from the enforced chastity imposed on women under the most terrible penalties. In reality, primitive marriage hardly merits the name; it is simply the taking possession of one or several women by one man, who holds them by the same title as all other property, and who treats adultery, when unauthorised by himself, strictly as robbery. This ferocious restraint has resulted, especially in the woman, in the formation of particular mental impressions, corresponding psychically to the sentiment of modesty, and inducing a certain sexual reserve which has become instinctive. But this moral inhibition is still very weak in races of low development, and, taking the whole human species, it exists chiefly in the woman; it is a sexual peculiarity of character, and is of relatively recent origin.
If we keep well in mind these preliminary considerations, we shall not be much surprised at the forms of sexual association which we are about to consider, although they are singularly repulsive to our ideas of morality. We shall be still less surprised at them when we are acquainted with the extreme licence permitted in many savage and barbarous societies.
There is nothing more difficult for us to realise, civilised as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation as regards what we call par excellence “morality.” It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, we cannot help attaching a certain shame, do not in the least shock the still imperfect conscience of the primitive man. On this point facts are eloquent and abundant; I will quote a few of them.
In Tasmania it way thought an honour for women to prostitute themselves to Europeans, who were ennobled in the eyes of the natives by the prestige of their superiority.[113] The Australians, who were a little more developed than the Tasmanians, willingly lent or hired out their women—at least those that were their own property—to their friends.[114]
The women were not less bestial than their males. They often engaged, says Peltier, in furious combats, fighting with spears, for the possession of a man. This is a peculiar case, and is an entirely human instance of that law of battle of which I have spoken in regard to animals. Like the females of animals also the Australian women adored strength, and when the men of their own horde were beaten in battle they sometimes went over to the camp of the conquerors of their own accord (Mitchell).[115] In these facts there is nothing exceptional, and we may change the country without changing the customs. Thus the Bochimans treat their wives as simple domestic animals, and offer them willingly to strangers,[116] as do also the Australians.
In the Andaman Islands and elsewhere the women give themselves up before marriage—that is, before becoming the property of one man—to the most unbridled prostitution,[117] and yet the most innocent, according to the morality of the country.
Among the Esquimaux the laxity of sexual customs, both for men and women, is extreme. The husbands feel no shame in selling, or rather hiring out, their wives; and the latter, as soon as their proprietors are gone to the chase or to fish, abandon themselves to an uncontrolled debauch, taking care to post their children outside the hut to warn them in case of the unexpected return of the master.[118] Sexual morality does not yet exist among the Esquimaux, and an Aleout said quite simply to the missionary Langsdorff, “When my people couple they do it like the sea-otters.”[119] In fact, if the cold permitted, the Esquimaux would not be any more clothed than the sea-otters. In their common houses, where two or three hundred people are crowded together, and a high degree of temperature is maintained, they throw off their clothing without distinction of age or sex.[120] They go further still, and, like many savages, practise what is called Socratic love openly and without shame. Thus, among the Inoits, well-favoured boys are brought up with care, dressed as girls, and sold at a high price towards the age of fifteen,[121] without any harm being seen in it.
The Redskins of the extreme north are scarcely more modest than the Esquimaux. Carver relates that among the Nandowessics a woman was particularly honoured because she had first entertained and then treated as husbands the forty chief warriors of the tribe.[122]
But it is especially in Polynesia that the naïve immodesty of primitive peoples was displayed with the greatest indifference to the opinions of others.
“The principal difficulty of the missionaries in the Sandwich Isles,” says M. de Varigny, “consisted in teaching the women chastity; they were ignorant of the name and of the thing. Adultery, incest, and fornication were common things, approved by public opinion, and even consecrated by religion.”[123]
These customs are of ancient date in Polynesia. The travellers of last century had observed them still the same. The Tahitian women, if they were free, openly bartered their persons, and the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sometimes the husbands, often brought them to the European sailors and hired them out, after a lively bargaining, for nails, red feathers, etc.[124]
At Noukahiva “the young girls of the island,” says Porter, “are the wives of all those who can buy their favours, and a beautiful daughter is considered by her parents as a means of procuring them for a time riches and plenty. However, when they are older, they form more lasting connections, and seem then as firmly attached to their husbands as women of any other country.”[125]
In the same archipelago, the surgeon Roblet says that the French sailors were frequently offered girls of eight years; “and,” he adds, “they were not virgins.”[126]
“Virtue,” says Porter, “such as we understand it, was unknown among them, and they attached no shame to acts which they regarded not only as natural, but as an inoffensive amusement. Many parents thought themselves honoured by the preference given to their daughters, and showed their satisfaction by presents of pigs and fruits, which, on their part, was an extreme of munificence.”[127]
In Polynesia public opinion forbade married women to yield themselves without the authorisation of their owners, and this was almost the only strict rule of morals existing; but the husbands trafficked in their wives without scruple. “Tawee,” says Porter, “was one of the handsomest men of the island, and loved to adorn his person; a bit of red stuff, some morsels of glass, or a whale’s tooth, had irresistible charms for him, and in order to procure these objects he would offer any of the most precious things he possessed. Thus, though his wife was of remarkable beauty, and he was the tenderest of husbands, Tawee offered his wife more than once for a necklace.”[128]
To offer a woman to a visitor to whom one would do honour was, for that matter, a simple act of courtesy in Polynesia, and the same courtesy prescribed the immediate acceptance of the offer, coram populo (Bougainville). It was frequently his own wife that the husband thus gave up to his guest, and the case of Porter, which I have just quoted, had nothing exceptional in it. A similar thing happened to Captain Beechey,[129] and to many other travellers. This conjugal liberality was one of the customs of the country; the friend, or tayo, acquired conjugal rights over the wife or wives of his friend. Between brothers and relations the exchange of wives was frequent,[130] to such a degree that at Toubouai, etc., Moerenhout tells us the women were nearly held in common, and that in the Marquesas a woman had sometimes as many as twenty lovers.[131]
For the Polynesians the pleasures of sensual love were the chief business of life; they neither saw evil nor practised restraint in them. The women were trained with a view to amorous sports;[132] they were fattened on a soup of bread fruit, and from earliest infancy taught by their mothers to dance the timorodie, a very lewd dance, accompanied by appropriate words.[133] The conversation also was in keeping with the morals. “One thing which particularly struck me,” says Moerenhout, “as soon as I began to understand their language, was the extreme licence in conversation—a licence pushed to the limit of most shameless cynicism, and which is the same even with the women; for these people think and talk of nothing but sensual pleasure, and speak openly of everything, having no idea of the euphemisms of our civilised societies, where we use double meanings and veiled words, or terms that are permitted in mentioning things which would appear revolting and cause scandal if plainly expressed; but these islanders could not understand this, and the missionaries have never been able to make them do so.”[134]
Lastly, the existence of the religious and aristocratic society of the Areoïs, in Tahiti and other archipelagoes, finishes the picture of the mental condition of the Polynesians as regards morals. Without describing afresh this curious association, I shall only remind my readers that it had for its object an unrestrained and public abandonment to amorous pleasures, and that, for this reason, the community of women and the obligation of infanticide were decreed.
During the last century sentimentality invaded the brains of thinkers and writers like an epidemic, and gave rise to the belief that primitive man, or “man in a state of nature,” as the phrase went, was the model of all virtues. But we must discount much of this. As we might naturally expect, the uncultivated man is a mammal of the grossest kind. We have already seen that his sexual morality is extremely loose, and necessarily so; we are, however, surprised to find him addicted to certain aberrations from nature which the chroniclers of the Greco-Latin world have accustomed us to regard as the result of a refined and depraved civilisation,—an opinion which is quite erroneous, as comparative ethnography irrefutably proves. Nothing is more common among primitive races than what is called Socratic love, and on this point I will briefly quote a few facts, without pausing longer on them than my subject requires. In the vast sociological investigation which I am undertaking, moral bestiality must not discourage scientific analysis any more than putrefaction arrests the scalpel of the anatomist; it does not therefore follow that we take delight in it.
As a matter of fact, many human races have practised, from the first, vices contrary to nature. The Kanaks of New Caledonia frequently assemble at night in a cabin to give themselves up to this kind of debauchery.[135] The New Zealanders practised it even among their women.[136] It was also a widely-spread custom throughout Polynesia, and even a special deity presided over it. In the whole of America, from north to south, similar customs have existed or still exist. We have previously seen that the Esquimaux reared young boys for this purpose. The Southern Californians did the same, and the Spanish missionaries, on their arrival in the country, found men dressed as women and assuming their part. They were trained to this from youth, and often publicly married to the chiefs.[137] Nero was evidently a mere plagiarist. The existence of analogous customs has been proved amongst the Guyacurus of La Plata, the natives of the Isthmus of Darien, the tribes of Louisiana, and the ancient Illinois, etc.[138]
The two chief forms of sexual excess of which I have been speaking, unnatural vice and the debauchery of girls or free women, are habitual in savage countries; and later, when civilisation and morality have evolved, the same inveterate inclinations still persist for a long time, in spite of public opinion and even of legal repression.
The Incas, according to the chronicler Garcilaso, were merciless in regard to these sexual aberrations, and the Mexican law was equally severe, but all without much effect, if we may believe the accounts of Garcilaso himself, Gomara, Bernal Diaz, etc. I have elsewhere related how the ancient legislations of the great Asiatic states repressed these base aberrations of the procreative sense, and nevertheless, at the present day, the Arabs frequently give way to them, even in the holy Mosque at Mecca;[139] and other Eastern peoples, Hindoos, Persians, and Chinese, are also very imperfectly reformed on this point.
When we remember that morality is essentially relative, and that ancestral impressions are extremely tenacious in the human brain, we shall not be much surprised to see these low tendencies persist as survivals in the midst of civilisations already far advanced. Nevertheless, the theoretic morality of all the great nations of the East has for centuries condemned these repugnant excesses, which our European ancestors, both Celts and Teutons, have early reproved and repressed. It is all the more singular to find the most intelligent race of antiquity, the ancient Greeks, practising the greatest tolerance on this subject, so much so that the names of Socrates and Plato, those fathers of ethereal spiritualism, are attached to amours the mere thought of which now excites disgust in a civilised European.
A very slight acquaintance with Greco-Roman literature furnishes abundant information on this matter. I have no need, therefore, to dwell on it, but I must quote a curious passage of Strabo, from which we learn that the ancient Cretans associated with so-called Socratic amours the ceremonial of marriage by capture, of which I shall soon have to speak. This strange passage is as follows:—“It is not by persuasion, but by capture, that they obtain possession of the beloved object. Three days or more in advance the erastes apprises the friends of the young boy of his project of abduction. It would be considered the greatest disgrace for them to conceal the child, or prevent him from passing by the road indicated. By so doing they would appear to confess that he did not merit the favours of such a distinguished erastes. What do they do therefore? They meet together, and if the ravisher is equal or superior in rank and all other respects to the family of the child, they are content in their pursuit to comply with the idea of the law, and to make a semblance of attack only, allowing the child to be carried off, and even testifying their satisfaction; but if, on the contrary, the ravisher should be of greatly inferior rank, they invariably rescue the child from his hands. In any case the pursuit comes to an end when the child has crossed the threshold of the andrion of his captor.” We may doubtless presume, from this passage, that the ancient Cretans were no longer in the state of bestial coarseness of the New Caledonians. With them the capture was a symbol or comedy. It was a mark of esteem, paid less to the beauty of the child than to his valour and propriety of manners. In fact, the boy had the legal right to revenge himself, if he had suffered any violence in his capture; and in restoring him to liberty his ravisher loaded him with presents, some of which were obligatory and legal, namely, a warrior’s cloak, an ox, and a goblet; it was a kind of initiation in virility, and it was considered a disgrace for a young boy not to obtain an erastes.[140]
But even if we admit that all the ceremonial of this singular platonic marriage among the Cretans was perfectly innocent, it arose, none the less, from a moral laxity, plainly showing that ancient morals were gross in the extreme.
I here conclude my enumeration. Short as it has been, for I have purposely limited my facts to a small number, it is sufficient to prove that for an immense period man has been a very coarse animal. We may, therefore, expect to find him adapting without scruple forms of marriage or sexual association quite unusual among Europeans, and which it now remains for me to describe briefly.
II. Some Strange Forms of Marriage.
In savage societies, where no delicacy yet exists in regard to sexual union, and where, on the other hand, woman is strictly assimilated to things and domestic animals, marriage, or what we please to call so, is an affair of small importance, which is regulated according to individual caprice. More generally the parents, and sometimes the friends or the chiefs, pair the young people as they think fit, and quite naturally they have little regard for monogamic marriage, to the strictness of which, even in civilised societies, man finds it so difficult to bend.
The young people, on their part, have hardly any individual preferences. The young boys of the Redskins, as Lafitau tells us, never even troubled to see, before marriage, the wife chosen for them by their parents.[141] In Bargo, according to R. and J. Lander, they marry with perfect indifference; “a man does not care any more about choosing a wife than about which ear of corn he shall pick.” There is never any question as to the sentiments of the contracting parties.[142]
It is quite certain, also, that during the first ages of the evolution of societies, the ties of kinship, even those we are accustomed to regard as sacred, and respect for which seems to be incarnate in us, have not been any impediment to sexual unions. Like the sentiment of modesty, the horror of incest has only been engraved on the human conscience with great difficulty and by long culture. Scruples of this kind are unknown to the animal, and before they could arise in the human brain it was first necessary that the family should be constituted, and then that, from some motive or other, the custom of exogamous marriage should be adopted. Now, as we shall see later, the family has at first been matriarchal or rather maternal, and with such a familial system, the children have no legal father; the prohibitions relative to incest could therefore, at the most, only exist in regard to the female line, and, in fact, we find it to be so in many countries where this system of filiation prevails. But primitive morals, existing before the formation of a morality condemning incest, have left many traces in the past, and even in the present. “The Chippeways,” says Hearne, “frequently cohabit with their mother, and oftener still with their sisters and daughters.”[143] And yet he is speaking here of Redskins, a people reputed to be fanatical on the matter of exogamy. Langsdorff says the same of the Kadiaks, who unite indiscriminately, brothers with sisters, and parents with children.[144] It is well known, besides, that in the matter of sexual unions no race has fewer prejudices than the Esquimaux. The Coucous of Chili, and the Caribs also, willingly married at the same time a mother and daughter. With the Karens, too, of Tenasserim, marriages between brother and sister, or father and daughter, are frequent enough, even in our own day.[145]
But these unions, though incestuous for us, have not been practised amongst savages and inferior races only. According to Strabo, the ancient Irish married, without distinction, their mothers and sisters.[146]
We are told by Justin and Tertullian[147] that the Parthians and Persians married their own mothers without scruple. In ancient Persia, religion went so far even as to sanctify the union of a son with his mother.[148] Priscus relates that these marriages were also permitted among the Tartars and Scythians, and it is reported, too, that Attila married his daughter Esca.[149]
Whether from a survival of ancient morals, or the care to preserve purity of race, conjugal unions between brother and sister were authorised, or even prescribed, in various countries, for the royal families. The kings of ancient Egypt were obliged to marry their sisters, and Cleopatra thus became the wife of her brother Ptolemy Dionysius. The Incas of Peru were subject to a similar law; and at Siam also, when the traveller La Loubère visited it, the king had married his sister.[150] But I shall have to return to the subject of marriage between relations in treating of the endogamic régime which has been, or is, in force among many peoples.
These incestuous marriages astonish us, and certain of them are even revolting to our ideas, as, for example, the union of the mother with the son. Another custom will probably surprise, if not shock us quite as much. I allude to experimental marriages, which are far from being rare. They will appear, however, less singular, if we remember that in societies of low order little value is set on the chastity of young girls; virginal purity is not at all prized, and there are even some peoples, as the Saccalaves of Madagascar,[151] for instance, and also certain indigenous peoples of India,[152] among whom it is regarded as a duty for the mothers themselves to deflower their daughters before marrying them.
With such morals prevailing, experimental marriages seem natural enough. De Champlain, an ancient French traveller in North America, relates that the Redskins of Canada always lived a few days together, and then quitted each other if the trial had not been satisfactory to either of them.[153]
A Spanish chronicler, Herrara, reports that the Otomies of Mexico spent a night of trial with the woman that they desired to marry; they could quit her afterwards, but only on condition of not retaining her during the following day.[154]
Among the Sonthals also, an aboriginal tribe of India, whose marriages are celebrated simultaneously once a year, the candidates for marriage must first live six days together, and it is only after this trial that it is lawful for them to marry.[155] With certain Tartar tribes of Russia in Europe and of Siberia there existed an institution of experimental marriages lasting for a year, if the woman did not become a mother during that period.[156] In the island of Ceylon, according to Davy, there are also provisional marriages, confirmed or annulled at the end of a fortnight.[157]
Among the Jews in Morocco the Rabbis consecrate temporary marriages, for three or six months, according to agreement. The man only engages to acknowledge the child if needful, and to make a certain donation to the mother.[158]
Strabo tells us of an analogous custom prevailing in antiquity among the Tapyres (Parthians), according to which a woman, after having had two or three children by a man, was forced by law to change her husband.[159] This is almost exactly what Marshal Saxe demanded for Frenchwomen in the last century.
We must not confound these experimental marriages, which are regulated, and in some sort legal, with free and easily cancelled unions still more common, as, for example, those of the Nouka-Hivians, that are broken at will, provided there are no children;[160] those of the Hottentots;[161] those of the Abyssinians, who marry, part, and re-marry at will.[162] These last unions, founded merely on individual caprice, have nothing extraordinary about them, and we know that they are not rare in civilised countries.
Much more curious, from a point of view of sexual and conjugal morality, are the partial marriages, which only bind the parties for certain days of the week. This is a rare kind of marriage that seems improbable to us, yet it has been proved to have existed among the Hassinyehs of the White Nile, of Arab or perhaps Berber race.
By an agreement, which is sharply discussed beforehand, the Hassinyeh woman engages to be a faithful wife for a fixed number of days in the week, generally three or four, but this is in proportion to the number of heads of cattle given to the parents by the bridegroom as the price of their daughter, and it is the mother herself who makes the bargain. Naturally, on the days that are not reserved the woman is free, and she has a right to use her liberty as she pleases.[163]
These strange customs amongst the Arabs must surely date from old pre-Islamite ages, and we may class them with other antique customs, as, for example, marriage for a term, called mot’a marriage, which was in use with the Arabs until the time of Mahomet, and which doubtless they imported later into Persia, where it exists in our own day. And again, in the kingdom of Omân, in the fourteenth century, the Sultan could still grant to a woman, indeed to any woman he pleased, the permission to have lovers according to her fancy, and her relations had no right to interfere.[164]
The partial marriage of the Hassinyeh Arabs is therefore not so surprising as it seems at first sight when isolated from other practices of the same kind. And it must be confessed that, immoral as it may appear to us, it is superior to the other modes of primitive conjugal association in use among the greater number of savage peoples. Doubtless it denotes an extreme of moral grossness, but at the same time it shows a certain respect for feminine independence, contrasting strongly with the animal subjection imposed on women in the greater number of societies of little or no civilisation. The situation of the woman who is owned and treated as a simple domestic animal, hired out or lent to strangers or to friends, according to the caprice of her master, but not allowed, at the peril of her life, to be unfaithful to her owner without his leave, is surely far more abject still.
I shall not dwell any more on these mere sketches of marriage, free and transient unions broken as soon as made, experimental marriages, three-quarter marriages, and marriages for a term, all of which show the very slight importance attached to sexual union by man in a low stage of development. And yet we must not refuse the name of marriage to these ephemeral and incomplete unions, since they are arranged by means of serious contracts which have been well discussed beforehand, and by agreements entered into at least between the husband and the relatives of the wife. The men of the horde or tribe do not, however, profess a very strict respect for these marriages; the husband is often uneasy in the enjoyment of his feminine property, and although legally obtained, he must always be ready to defend it.
Among the Bochimans, says Liechtenstein, with whom marriage is reduced to its most simple expression, “the strongest man often carries off the wife of the weakest,” because it is the proper thing for him to do, since he is called “the lion.”
In fact, these abuses of strength exist, more or less, in all countries and all races; but among the Redskins of America and the Esquimaux it seems that public opinion ratifies them, and that might has morally become right.
“When a Toski,” says Hooper, “desires the wife of another man, he simply fights with her husband.”
“A very ancient custom,” says Hearne, “obliges the men to wrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and of course the strongest party always carries off the prize. A weak man, unless he be a good hunter and well beloved, is seldom permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice. This custom prevails throughout all the tribes.”[165]
In the same way, among the Copper and Chippeway Indians woman is a property which is little respected, and which the strong may always take from the weak.[166]
Richardson also says that among the Redskins every man has the right to challenge another to fight, and if he is victor, to carry off his wife.[167]
The same customs prevail among the Indians of South America—at least among certain of them. Thus Azara relates that the Guanas never marry before they are over twenty, for earlier than this they would be beaten by their rivals.[168]
It has been attempted to show that these conflicts are the equivalent of what is called in regard to animals “the law of battle,” but the comparison is not exact, for animals seem in this respect much more delicate than men. If they fight it is before pairing, and besides, as we have seen, their combats are often courteous, like the tournaments of our ancestors; frequently, too, the object of these assaults is much less to capture the female than to seduce her by displaying before her eyes the qualities with which they are endowed—courage, force, address, and beauty. On her part, the female for whom they are competing is so little alarmed at their violence that, in general, she tranquilly looks on at the duels, and afterwards gives herself, one may say, freely to the victor. With certain species of birds a lyric tourney is substituted for the fight, and so ardently do the birds engage in it that a competitor will often die of exhaustion.
Lastly, when the tourney is over, the couples paired, and the marriage concluded, all rivalry ceases, the newly-mated birds isolate themselves more or less, and devote all their energies to the production of a family. Now these are delicate refinements unknown to primitive man, whose rivalries on the subject of the possession of women resemble far more the struggles of the old males with the young in the hordes of the gorillas or chimpanzees. We are forced to acknowledge that the sexual morality of primitive man does not much differ from that of anthropoid apes, and it is quite a stranger to the æsthetic and poetic refinements of certain birds.
I here end my short inquiry into the morals of primitive man and the eccentric modes of conjugal union which have preceded the institution of a more durable, exclusive, and solemn marriage.
We are filled with astonishment when we find such complete animal laxity in our undeveloped ancestors, and we can hardly understand the total absence of scruples which are now profoundly incarnate in us.
Those anthropologists who insist on making man a being apart in the universe shut their eyes to these gross aberrations. Evolutionists are not so timid, and do not fear to face the truth.
If, as it is impossible to deny, man is subject to the laws of evolution like all other beings, we are forced to admit that he must have passed through very inferior phases of physical and moral development. Homo sapiens surely descends from an ancient pithecoid ancestor, and this original blot has necessarily been a drawback to his moral evolution.
But here it is important to make a distinction. The resemblance between the moral coarseness of the savage and the depravation of the civilised man is quite superficial. Who thinks of being shocked at the morals of animals? Now those of primitive man are quite as innocent, and the brutality of the savage has nothing in common with the moral retrogression of the civilised man struck with decay.
How unlike is the Aleout, imitating the sea-otter, without thinking any evil, to the European degraded by the vices of our civilisation! For the latter the future is closed; there are some declivities that can never be remounted. The posterity of the savage, on the contrary, may, with the aid of time and culture, attain to great moral elevation, for there are vital forces within him which are fresh and intact. The primitive man is still young, and he possesses many latent energies susceptible of development. In short, the savage is a child, while the civilised man, whose moral nature is corrupt, presents to us rather the picture of decrepid old age.