science, the institution of civil society, government, and laws,
to the intervention of the gods. It remained for the
Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern successors,
the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first cause,
believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own
unassisted efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out
of the primitive state, and institute what in modern times is
called civilta, civility, or civilization.

The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which
men have emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of
civil society, forget that if government is not the sole
condition, it is one of the essential conditions of progress.
The only progressive nations are civilized or republican nations.
Savage and barbarous tribes are unprogressive. Ages on ages roll
over them without changing any thing in their state; and Niebuhr
has well remarked with others, that history records no instance
of a savage tribe or people having become civilized by its own
spontaneous or indigenous efforts. If savage tribes have ever
become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age.
Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people
to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized. But
the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and
asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the
savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe
that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or