NATURAL HISTORY OF SOCIETY.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

WHEN We attempt to take a comprehensive survey of the actual condition of humanity, our attention is not less forcibly arrested by the moral than by the physical differences which offer themselves to our view. One race is in a state of continuous and progressive improvement: it has exchanged rude paths for smooth roads, it is again changing these for railroads; every day of its existence produces some new discovery tending to increase the comforts and conveniences of life; intellectual advancement seems to keep pace with material improvements; problems which in a past generation were the pride of philosophers, are now familiar as household words in the mouth of schoolboys; to want an amount of knowledge, the possession of which would once be esteemed a glory, is now regarded as a disgrace. In fact, a progressive advance is manifest, to which imagination can scarcely assign limits.

A second race appears to have set bounds to itself; the evidences of former progress are abundant, but no traces of a tendency to further and future improvement can be discovered. Every thing in the physical and moral condition of society seems to have assumed

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a stereotype character,-from the model of the meanest domestic utensil to the highest social institution, there is a permanent uniformity. Such, for instance, is the great empire of China, where thought and action are equally forced to accommodate themselves to an unchanging system devised in remote ages.

Passing over many intervening varieties, we arrive at a race which appears little raised above the brute creation; it has few evidences of having ever made progress, and none either of the power or will to advance itself beyond its present condition. There is neither memory of the past, nor foresight of the future: such is the stationary aspect of barbarism, as it is presented to our notice by the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia.

We usually describe these differences as indicating a higher or lower degree in the scale of civilization, and sometimes as the result of different systems of civilization. In either case we speak of civilization as a fact which may not only be understood, but applied as a test, whilst we cannot at the same time fail to recognise that it is a fact exceedingly complex, diverse in its aspects, developing itself sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, and thus hiding the central principle of its unity, which few can see though all can feel. Moral science does not admit of the same precise and rigorous definitions, as those which are connected with matter and its forms; the facts which its terms express, are not invariable existences; they have arisen from varying circumstances; by these circumstances they have been modified and enlarged; our ideas of them are constantly progressive, receiving fresh

accessions from every day's experience. To comprehend the term civilization, we must have recourse to the history of the fact civilization, and see what are the ideas which, by a kind of universal consent, men have agreed to combine in the word.

It has been said, that on some estates in the West Indies the negroes were better treated by their masters than independent labourers in Europe by their employers; that every care was taken to supply their physical wants, that they were protected in all their domestic relations, and that all the rules of justice were strictly enforced. Yet even such a condition of slavery was universally declared adverse to civilization: though oppression was absent, still there was compression,-a direct restraint on the moral and intellectual development of existence.

Among the Hindoos, provision was made for moral and intellectual culture; the wants of the mind were to a certain extent supplied like those of the body: but it was an established rule, that man should not labour to procure this moral food for himself, but should receive it from the Brahmin as the negro did physical sustenance from his master. The common sense of mankind has declared Brahminism hostile to civilization, because it produces a stagnancy in the moral life, and fixes limits to the exercise of intellect.

Feudalism-a condition of society with which we are perhaps better acquainted-was not on the whole unfavourable to individual progress, for it nurtured a spirit of independence and enterprise; but it exercised a blighting influence on the internal economy of society. Of individual and social progress it may justly be said,