Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good
scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,
and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political
economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of
dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on
his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is
concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they
are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and
muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were
hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of
starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of
the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the
helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,
survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent
and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting
off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and
the cunning to become the parents of future generations.
Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors
who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete
savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen
of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all
those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to
make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage.
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