Page:Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin (1793).djvu/267

257 We are however not the leſs obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it; and to ſhow our grateful ſenſe of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will ſend us a dozen of their ſons, we will take great care of their education, inſtruct them in all we know, and make men of them."

Having frequent occaſions to hold public councils, they have acquired great order and decency in conducing them. The old men fit in the foremoſt ranks, the warriors in the next, and the women and children in the hindmoſt. The buſineſs of the women is to take exact notice of what paſſes, imprint it in their memories, for they have no writing, and communicate it to their children. They are the records of the council, and they preſerve tradition of the ſtipulations in treaties a hundred years back; which, when we compare with our writings, we always find exact. He that would ſpeak, riſes. The reſt obſerve a profound ſilence. When he has finiſhed, and ſits down, they leave him five or ſix minutes to recollect, that, if he has omitted any thing he intended to ſay, or has any thing to add, he may riſe again and deliver it. To interrupt another, even in common converſation, is reckoned highly indecent. How different this is from the conduct of a polite Britiſh Houſe of Commons, where ſcarce a day paſſes without ſome confuſion, that makes the ſpeaker hoarſe in calling to order; and how different from the mode of converſation in many polite companies of Europe, where, if you do not deliver your ſentence with great rapidity, you are cut off in the middle of it by the impatient loquacity of thoſe you converſe with, and never ſuffered to finiſh it!

The politeneſs of theſe ſavages in converſation, is, indeed, carried to exceſs; ſince it does not