Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is
Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration •.
For everything that is given something is taken. Society acqiures new arts and
loses old instincts. What. a contrast between the well-dad, reading, writing thinltina S
American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of change in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an .undiVided
twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and
you shall see that the ·white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller
tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh I 0
shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same
blow shall 'send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a
fine Geneva watch,· but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A
greenwich nautical almanac he has and so beins sure of the information when .
he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice
he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright
calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his
memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number
of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber;
whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by Christianty, entrenched 20
in establishments and forms, some vigour of wild virtue.