Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/111

Rh and high art had carried a classic people beyond our present stage in one range of civilization: and allowances would also need to be made for arrests and reversionary processes in the advance of a progressive race caused by conquest, by change of masters, and by the risks attending emigration to new countries. Yet there is no question but that we overestimate the average of intelligence in the ordinary human stock. We take our standard at too high a level. The mass of men and women, even in a favored and generally advanced community, are not so well furnished in mind or wisdom as we assume that they are or ought to be. The “common sense” which in compliment to the large majority we suppose to be in possession and use by them, is often missed where we expected to find it. The credulity, the narrowness of view, the facility with which they yield themselves to stark delusions and to appeals to their ignorance and prejudice, often warn us against setting so high as we do the average human intelligence. As a general thing we expect and demand too much of our fellow-men, seeing that they are what they are and as they are. The clear-headed and practical sage, Dr. Franklin, observing in one of his long journeys abroad the shiftlessness, thriftlessness, and bungling of a number of persons on whose ways his searching eyes glanced, wrote down this rather caustic remark: “I am persuaded that a very large number of men and women would have got along much better if they had been furnished with a good, respectable instinct — like animals, birds, and insects — instead of with the intelligence of which they boast so much, but of which they make so little use.”

Acute writers who have wrought upon the theme have confessed themselves unable to draw at any point a sharp dividing line, or to define any one single trait, quality, or condition which shall distinguisli between a state of civilization and a state of barbarism or savagery.

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