Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/624

604 the man of the wilderness would, within his range, develop his wealth and capacity of being under training, example, and civilization. He would give us a new style of man, — one born for something better than mere toil, whose conceit or pride would turn to real dignity, and whose acute and cunning instincts would avail for high and keen insight, intelligence, art, and science.

So it has not proved. The savage is really a nobler, a more impressive, a more interesting, and (so to speak) a more capable being in his native than in his civilized state. He does not gain by civilization: he loses by it. The very nobleness which shows in him in the woods, his reserve, his taciturnity, his suppression of feeling, — all disappear under social subjection to white men. His mental gaze, which seemed to be withdrawn or concentrated, now seems wholly vacant and disappears. His special faculties and aptitudes fail because he has no use for them. He despises what we estimate most highly. Our appliances and comforts are a fret and torment to him. He generally becomes abject and mean, like the beast of the woods or the jungle in a menagerie.

There is a remnant, a trace, of savagery — sometimes even a very large and positive ingredient of it — actively present in individual persons under the highest civilization. In this respect, after all that the elevating and refining influences which, through generations struggling upward from barbarism, have done to remove us from primitive rudeness, we none the less may find a parallel in some of our surviving instincts and propensities to manifestations observable in tamed and domesticated animals. Squirrels, birds, and many other pets, born and hatched in their cages, are seen to do things which would be perfectly proper and of use to them in their native, free state which are wholly out of place, aimless, and ridiculous in their artificial condition. The pet dog by our firesides will be seen to turn himself quickly round and round before lying down