t century. Since that time
vast additions have been made to the stock of our knowledge of human
nature. Many dark periods of history have since been explored. Many
hitherto unknown regions of the globe have been visited and described by
travellers and navigators not less intelligent than intrepid. We may be
said to stand at the confluence of the greatest number of streams of
knowledge flowing from the most distant sources that ever met at one
point. We are not confined, as the learned of the last age generally
were, to the history of those renowned nations who are our masters in
literature. We can bring before us man in a lower and more abject
condition than any in which he was ever before seen. The records have
been partly opened to us of those mighty empires of Asia[13] where the
beginnings of civilization are lost in the darkness of an unfathomable
antiquity. We can make human society pass in review before our mind,
from the brutal and helpless barbarism of _Terra del Fuego_, and the
mild and voluptuous savages of Otaheite, to the tame, but ancient and
immovable civilization of China, which bestows its own arts on every
successive race of conquerors; to the meek and servile natives of
Hindostan, who preserve their ingenuity, their skill, and their science,
through a long series of ages, under the yoke of foreign tyrants; to the
gross and incorrigible rudeness of the Ottomans, incapable of
improvement, and extinguishing the remains of civilization among their
unhappy subjects, once the most ingenious nations of the earth. We can
examine almost every imaginable variety in the character, manners,
opinions, feelings, prejudices, and institutions of mankind, into which
they can be thrown, either by the rudeness of barbarism, or by the
capricious corruptions of refinement, or by those innumerable
combinations of circumstances, which, both in these opposite conditions
and in all the intermediate stages between them, influence or direct the
course of human affairs. History, if I may be allowed the expression, is
now a vast museum, in which specimens of every variety of human nature
may be studied. From these great accessions to knowledge, law-givers and
statesmen, but, above all, moralists and political philosophers, may
reap the most important instruction. They may plainly discover in all
the useful and beautiful variety of governments and institutions, and
under all the fantastic multitude of usages and rites which have
pre