Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/613

Rh among men and women whose ways and habits are uncivilized. Amusing measurements and estimates have been drawn by some amateur travellers and adventurers, as if they had a scale of degrees towards the vanishing line of civilization; as, for instance, from one of our seaboard cities to the distant West. They measure and judge by the gradual disuse of, or the dispensing with, the appliances, conveniences, usages, manners, and decencies of civilized life. They mark on their scale the last hotel where boots are blacked, the last stage where white clothes are worn and washed, where people eat with knives and forks, where there comes into service one common washbowl and towel, comb and brush; and then the stage where one takes leave of these, exchanging crockery for a tin plate, and then for a chip, and the sole occupancy of a bed for bunking in groups or sleeping on skins in shanty, tent, or on the grass. Yet a group of civilized men and women might pass through all these vanishing appliances and decencies, and be forced to live henceforward in the lack of them, and still be civilized.

Our civilization is European, for that is our standard. It is of a peculiar elementary composition, and it bears the stamp and impress of centuries of development, in which the wilfulness, the idiosyncrasies, and the eccentricities of individuals have all been put into solution, tempered, restrained, and adjusted to a common average conventionalism.

When our European form of civilization, in its details and completeness, has been offered to the East Indians and the Turks, they do not adopt it. They prefer their own, which, so far as it differs from ours, is in our opinion so far lacking in civilization.

These suggestions may lead us to modify our expectations and demands as to the form and quality of the civilization which we may expect or exact of Indians. They must recognize, and then appreciate, the nature and