improvement from this early state of society to that of the highest state
of civilisation or refinement may, I think, be easily deduced from the
exertions of reason assisted by the influence of the moral powers and of
physical circumstances. Accident, I conceive, must have had some
influence in laying the foundations of certain arts; and a climate in
which labour was not too oppressive, and in which the exertion of
industry was required to provide for the wants of life must have fixed
the character of the activity of the early improving people; where nature
is too kind a mother, man is generally a spoiled child; where she is
severe, and a stepmother, his powers are usually withered and destroyed.
The people of the south and the north and those between the tropics
offer, even at this day, proof of the truth of this principle; and it is
even possible now to find on the surface of the earth, all the different
gradations of the states of society, from that in which man is scarcely
removed above the brute, to that in which he appears approaching in his
nature to a divine intelligence. Besides, reason being the noblest gift
of God to man, I can hardly suppose that an infinitely powerful and all-
wise Creator would bestow upon the early inhabitants of the globe a
greater proportion of instinct than was at first necessary to preserve
their existence, and that he would not leave the great progress of their
improvement to the development and exaltation of their reasoning powers.

_Amb_.--You appear to me in your argument to have forgotten the influence
that any civilised race must possess over savages; and many of the
nations which you consider as in their original state, may have descended
from nations formerly civilised; and, it is quite as easy to trace the
retrograde steps of a people as their advances; the savage hordes who now
inhabit the northern coast of Africa are probably descended from the
opulent, commercial, and ingenious Carthaginians who once contended with
Rome for the empire of the world; and even nearer home, we might find in