forced to confess herself vanquished by such strong proofs of love, and to become his wife. The course of the union is quite consistent with the commencement: the wife of the Australian savage is a degraded slave;to her share fall the meanest and most toilsome functions of subsistence, while life and limb depend on the caprice of her savage master.

Where wives are purchased they are scarcely better off than where they are plundered; they become the absolute property and the slaves of those who buy them. They are not bound to the offices of domestic economy alone, but are compelled to perform every laborious and fatiguing service as beasts of burden. So grievous is the lot of the female among savage tribes, that some women in a wild emotion of female tenderness, have destroyed their daughters in infancy, in order to rescue them from the painful and inevitable bondage to which they were destined. Hence, population is almost always stationary in a savage state; the vigour of the female constitution is easily broken down by toil; the nurture of a numerous progeny is too severe an aggravation of other labours; infanticide becomes almost a necessary evil, and it is practised without the slightest compunction or remorse. This fearful slaughter of innocent children, whether in barbarous or semi-civilized lands, has a strange tendency to perpetuate itself. When once the emotions of parental tenderness are stifled in a mother's bosom, it would seem as if they could be restored by nothing short of a miracle. It is notorious, that the British government has made great efforts to abolish female infanticide among the Rajpoots in India, and that they have

failed more from the resistance of the wives than of the, husbands. Mrs. Postans, in her excellent work on Cutch, adds what may well be deemed an aggravation of the horror. The mother commits the murder by rubbing poison on her breast, and the infant drinks the potion of death from the source where nature had planted the streams of life.*

Not less remarkable is the moral degradation of females in other respects: chastity in most savage tribes is little regarded; the early voyagers in the South Seas found the Polynesian islanders utterly regardless of female honour, and the same remark is applicable at the present day to the women of Australia. Cruelty is also too general an attribute of savage females. Though Ledyard and Mungo Park received kind attention at their hands, yet Holden's Narrative of his Adventures in Lord North's Island, declares-" the female portion of the inhabitants outstrip the men in cruelty and savage depravity, so much so that we were frequently indebted to the tender mercies of the men for escapes from death at the hands of the women." In all the accounts of the horrid tortures and mutilations inflicted by the Indians of North America on their unfortunate prisoners, we find the squaws the principal agents in the work of torture, instigating the men both by exhortation and example to increase the bitterness of death by the most bitter insults and agonizing inflictions.

See "Ellis's Christian Researches" for a description of the great change wrought on maternal feelings by the beneficial influence of Christianity. Nothing can be more affecting than the picture of the converted mothers turning from the assembly to hide their tears for the loss of those children whom they destroyed during their state of heathenism.

It has been questioned whether man has been improved by the progress of arts and civilization in society; but never have philosophers in the wildness of their speculations and the wantonness of their disputations raised a doubt on the advantages that women have derived from every advance in civilized life. Contempt, degradation, harshness, and neglect, are the lot of the female sex among barbarous nations in every part of the globe. These demoralizing influences have produced their necessary effects, in infanticide, infidelity and ferocity. On such a picture it is painful to dwell: it would be easy to add many darker and deeper shades, but the fact of female degradation and demoralization in the barbarous state of society is so well known and universally acknowledged, that the horrors of further illustration may well be spared.

Unequal to the civilized man in his physical powers, far his inferior in intellectual capacity, and still more decidedly in his knowledge and use of the first great element of social happiness, the domestic relations, it is difficult to comprehend how the savage, rather than the brute, became the subject of eulogy with admirers of what they were pleased to call the state of nature. Indeed, the lowest animals would seem to have a better claim to the sensibility of this school of philosophers, for with them there is no decided inequality between the female and the male; but in the savage state of humanity, the comforts of one sex are based on the misery of the other, and to call such a condition a state of nature is to assert that nature was at enmity with one half of the human species. There can be no doubt that the domestic union is a state to which all

are naturally prompted; civilization tends to render that union equal, to form habits of gentleness and tenderness, to raise woman without humbling man. Barbarism establishes a cruel distinction between the sexes; renders the one harsh and unfeeling, consigns the other to servility and subjection. It is conceded on all hands that the union is natural; can it then be doubted which of the two conditions of union are most in accordance with nature?

"There is a place on the earth," says St. Lambert, "where pure joys are unknown, from which politeness is banished, and has given place to selfishness, contradiction, and half-veiled insults. Remorse and inquietude, like fumes that are never weary of assailing, torment the inhabitants. This place is the house of a wedded pair who have no mutual love, nor even esteem.-There is a place on the earth to which vice has no entrance, where the gloomy passions have no empire, where pleasure and innocence live constantly together; where cares and labours are delightful-where every pain is forgotten in reciprocal tenderness-where there is an equal enjoyment of the past, the present, and the future. It is the house, too, of a wedded pair, but who in wedlock are lovers still."

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CHAPTER III.

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND TENDENCIES OF

BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION.

FROM the preceding considerations, it sufficiently appears that barbarism is not the natural state of man, that it is not the state best suited to the development of his physical or intellectual powers, and that it is not calculated to form, promote, or preserve his moral purity or domestic felicity. It is necessary, however, to carry the investigation farther; and to shew that civilization gives effect to another and not less important principle natural to man, which barbarism tends to weaken, if not to destroy-namely, his sociality. From the fallacies which we have laboured to expose, many able writers have deduced very erroneous views of the origin of society, and ascribed to the free action of ripe judgment and forecast, the formation of all states and communities. Horace, in a passage already quoted, declares that the first men united into societies for the purpose of mutual protection and assistance, and the same opinion has been strenuously maintained by the celebrated economist, M. Say. Such a proceeding would infer a most extraordinary degree of sagacity and foresight, and a vast amount of knowledge antecedent to experience in each and all of the individuals who thus formed a social