Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people
to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized. But
the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and
asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the
savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe
that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or
feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals,
law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there
is a reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged
state of nature have none.
The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting
into their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and
capacities of the civilized man. It is, perhaps, not difficult
for men who have been civilized, who have the intelligence, the
arts, the affections, and the habits of civilization, if deprived
by some great social convulsion of society, and thrown back on
the so-called state of nature, or cast away on some uninhabited
island in the ocean, and cut off from all intercourse with the
rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and re-establish
and maintain civil government. They are civilized men, and bear
civil society in their own life. But these are no
representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of
nature.
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