The multiplication of the human species depends more on society than nature. Men would not have been comparatively so numerous as wild beasts, had they not associated together, and given aid and succour to each other. In North America, the _Bison_[E] is perhaps more frequently to be seen than a man. But though society may be one great cause of population, yet it is the increased number of men that necessarily produces unity. It is to be presumed therefore that the want of civilization in America was owing to the small number of the inhabitants, for though each nation might have manners and customs peculiar to itself; though some might be more fierce, cruel, courageous, or dastardly than others; they were yet all equally stupid, ignorant, unacquainted with the arts, and destitute of industry.
[E] A kind of wild bull, different from the European bull.
To dwell longer on the customs of savage nations would be unnecessary. Authors have often given for the established manners of a community, what were nothing more than actions peculiar to a few individuals, and often determined by circumstances, or caprice. Some nations tell us, they eat their enemies, others burn, and some mutilate them; one nation is perpetually at war, and another loves to live in peace; in one country, the child kills his parent, when arrived at a certain age, and in another the parents eat their children. All these stories, on which travellers have so much enlarged, mean nothing more than that one individual savage had devoured his enemy, another had burned or mutilated him, and a third had killed and eaten his child. All these things may happen in every savage nation; for a people among whom there is no regular government, no law, no habitual society, ought rather to be termed a tumultous assemblage of barbarous and independent individuals, who obey nothing but their own private passions, and who have no common interest, are incapable of pursuing one object, and submitting to settled usages which supposes general designs, founded on reason, and approved of by the majority.
A nation, it may be replied, is composed of men who are no strangers to each other, who speak the same language, who unite, when necessity calls, under the same chief, who arm themselves in the same fashion, and daub themselves of the same colour. With truth might the remark be made, if these usages were established; if savages did not often assemble they know not how, and disperse they know not why; if their chief did not cease to be so, whenever it suited their caprice, or his own; and if their language was not so simple as to be, with little variation, the language of every tribe.