od confined to milk and
flesh, and their constant exposure to famine and to violence, we shall
be inclined to think those who are lowest in modern society richer than
the chiefs of their rude predecessors. And if we consider that the same
space of ground which afforded an uncertain subsistence to a hundred, or
probably fewer, savages, now supports with ease more than a thousand
labourers, and, perhaps, a hundred individuals beside, each consuming
more commodities than the labour of a whole tribe of Ancient Britons
could have produced or purchased, we may at first be led to doubt
whether our ancestors enjoyed the same natural advantages as ourselves;
whether their sun was as warm, their soil as fertile, or their bodies as
strong, as our own.

But let us substitute distance of space for distance of time; and,
instead of comparing situations of the same country at different
periods, compare different countries at the same period, and we shall
find a still more striking discrepancy. The inhabitant of South America
enjoys a soil and a climate, not superior merely to our own, but
combining all the advantages of every climate and soil possessed by the
remainder of the world. His valleys have all the exuberance of the
tropics, and his mountain-plains unite the temperature of Europe to a
fertility of which Europe offers no example. Nature collects for him,
within the space of a morning's walk, the fruits and vegetables which
she has elsewhere separated by thousands of miles. She has given him
inexhaustible forests, has covered his plains with wild cattle and
horses, filled his mountains with mineral treasures, and intersected all
the eastern face of his country with rivers, to which our Rhine and
Danube are merely brooks. But the possessor of these riches is poor and
miserable. With all the materials of clothing offered to him almost
spontaneously, he is ill-clad; with the most productive of soils, he is
ill-fed: though we are told that the labour of a week will there procure
subsistence for a year, famines are of frequent occurrence; the hut of
the Indian, and the residence of the landed proprietor, are alike
destitute of furniture and convenience; and South America, helpless and
indigent with all her natural advantages, seems to rely for support and
improvement on a very small portion of the surplus wealth of England.

It is impossible to consider these phenomena without feeling anxious to
account for them; to discover whethe