NO. IV.

NATION-MAKING.

All theories as to the primitive man must be very uncertain. Granting
the doctrine of evolution to be true, man must be held to have a common
ancestor with the rest of the Primates. But then we do not know what
their common ancestor was like. If ever we are to have a distinct
conception of him, it can only be after long years of future researches
and the laborious accumulation of materials, scarcely the beginning of
which now exists. But science has already done something for us. It
cannot yet tell us our first ancestor, but it can tell us much of an
ancestor very high up in the line of descent. We cannot get the least
idea (even upon the full assumption of the theory of evolution) of the
first man; but we can get a very tolerable idea of the
Paulo-prehistoric man, if I may so say--of man as he existed some short
time (as we now reckon shortness), some ten thousand years, before
history began. Investigators whose acuteness and diligence can hardly
be surpassed--Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor are the chiefs among
them--have collected so much and explained so much that they have left
a fairly vivid result.

That result is, or seems to me to be, if I may sum it up in my own
words, that the modern pre-historic men--those of whom we have
collected so many remains, and to whom are due the ancient, strange
customs of historical nations (the fossil customs, we might call them,
for very often they are stuck by themselves in real civilisation, and
have no more part in it than the fossils in the surrounding
strata)--pre-historic men in this sense were 'savages without the fixed
habits of savages;' that is, that, like savages, they had strong
passions and weak reason; that, like savages, they preferred short
spasms of greedy pleasure to mild and equable enjoyment; that, like
savages, they could not postpone the present to the future; that, like
savages, their ingrained sense of morality was, to say the best of it,
rudimentary and defective. But that, unlike present savages, they had
not complex customs and singular customs, odd and seemingly
inexplicable rules guiding all human life. And the reasons for these
conclusions as to a race too ancient to leave a history, but not too
ancient to have left memorials, are briefly these:--First, that we
cannot imagine a strong reason without attainments; and, plainly,
pre-historic men had not attainments. They would never have lost them
if they had. It is utter