Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/133

Rh method by which he has treated his theme. Believing the savages to have shared in the disaster of the “fall” of our first human parents, he finds among them the traces of an original revelation, with its corruptions and steady deterioration; and he illustrates all their customs by parallelisms from classic history and the usages prevailing among other barbarous peoples. He follows this illustrative method through all the ideas, superstitions, observances, feasts, sacrifices, and bacchanalian orgies of the savages, as having an intimate affinity with those of other peoples of our fallen race in all ancient times. Still, he is very indignant with the romancing Baron La Hontan and others, who, “seeing among the savages neither temple, altars, idols, nor regular worship, very unadvisedly concluded that their spirits did not go further than their senses; and too lightly pronounced that, living as the beasts without knowledge of another life, they paid no divine honor to anything visible or invisible, made their God of their belly, and bounded all their happiness within the present life.”

Doubtless one misleading element of our notions of the red men, as they first appear in our history, comes from the early use of the names, the titles, and the state of royalty as attached to forest chieftains, the formalities and etiquette to be observed with them. This is the more strange, as those who first used such high terms of language had known real potentates and real courts, and were well aware that such were characterized by personal cleanliness and by an excess of apparel and draperies rather than by an entire lack of them. Good Roger Williams frankly tells us about the filthy, smoky dens and the vermin-covered persons of the natives, and of their disgusting food and habits, wholly unconscious of common decency. Yet even he freely scatters about the titles of king, queen, and prince, of court and state, among them. The element of the incongruous and the ridiculous in this is well brought out when from worthy old John Smith in Virginia, downwards, we