Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/171

Rh. "For, all experience proves that men, left in the lowest, or even anything approaching to the lowest, degree of barbarism in which they can possibly subsist at all, never did and never can raise themselves, unaided, into a higher condition." This view, it may be remarked in passing, serves as a basis for a theory that, though races arrived already at a moderate state of culture may make progress of themselves, such races must have been started on their way upwards by a supernatural revelation, to bring them to the point where independent progress became possible. Now, the denial to the low savage of the power of self-improvement is a broad statement, requiring, to justify it, at least a good number of cases of tribes who have had a fair trial under favourable circumstances, and have been found wanting. As definite statements of this nature, the two following are considered by Archbishop Whately as sufficient to give substance to his argument; and even these will not bear criticism.

"The New Zealanders, . . . whom Tasman first discovered in 1642, and who were visited for the second time by Cook, 127 years after, were found by him exactly in the same condition." Now Tasman never set foot in New Zealand. The particulars he recorded of the civilization of the natives, as seen from his ship, occupy a page or so in his journal. He mentions fires seen on shore; a sort of trumpet blown upon by the natives; their dressing their hair in a bunch behind the top of the head, with a white feather stuck in it; their double canoes, joined above with a platform; their paddles and sails; their clothing, which was (as it seemed) sometimes of matting, and sometimes of cotton (he was wrong as to this last point, but very excusably so, considering how little opportunity he had of close examination); their spears and clubs; a white flag carried by a man in a boat; and the square garden-inclosures seen on Three Kings' Island. This meagre account is all the basis Whately had for asserting that the condition of the New Zealanders in Tasman's time was exactly the same as in Cook's time. In point of fact, how does it prove that civilization may not have