Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/110

90 crowned with glory and honor.” The greatest of poets has expanded this high strain: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God!” But we have to say, using one of the trickeries of language of our time, “There are men, and there are men.” If we should search for the lowest specimen of humanity to offset the topmost one, whether ideal or real, we should by no means find that lowest specimen in an average North American Indian. Stanley would furnish us from the interior of Africa lower grades than have ever been classified before. The archipelagoes of the Pacific, especially the Fijian, revealed the lowest known to us. In one point of view, from Mr. Darwin's position, it would seem as if the evolution theory might prove itself from the fact that there are really no “missing links” in the gradations from brute to man. Yet, not so. The line between human beings and brute creatures may be blurred; but it is not obliterated or untraceable. This, however, is certain, — that there are now hordes and tribes and groups of such beings as we have nevertheless to call human, which present to us man far, far below the average type of the North American savage when he first came to the knowledge of Europeans.

The full, fair product of a civilized human being is the result of all possible favoring circumstances of place, opportunity, and advantage in a long lapse of time. Some English essayist has dropped what he would call the clever remark, that it takes a hundred years to work up a perfect, smooth, grassy lawn, and three hundred years to breed a lady or a gentleman. After the same manner we may say that it has taken six thousand historic years to produce a race of humanized, civilized, and thoroughly developed men and women; and that the process is not yet complete. It might be argued that, two or three thousand years behind us, the refining influences of intelligence and culture