Surveying the W farm.
Parker, the Shaker that was, my assistant, says that the first year he came to live with W, he worked on the farm, and that when he was digging potatoes on that jog (of about an acre) next to the site of the old Lee house, he found snakes' eggs in many hills, perhaps half a dozen together, he thinks as many as seventy in all. He did not perceive that they were united as he hoed them out, but may have separated them. When he broke the eggs, the young snakes, two or three inches long, wriggled out and about.
Had the experience of losing a pin and then hunting for it a long time in vain.
What an evidence it is, after all, of civilization, or of a capacity for improvement, that savages like our Indians, who in their protracted wars stealthily slay men, women, and children without mercy, with delight, who delight to burn, torture, and devour one another, proving themselves more inhuman in these respects even than beasts, — what a wonderful evidence it is, I say, of their capacity for improvement that even they can enter into the most formal compact or treaty of peace, burying the hatchet, etc., etc., and treating with each other with as much consideration as the most enlightened states. You would say that they had a genius for diplomacy as well as for war.
Consider that Iroquois, torturing his captive, roasting him before a slow fire, biting off the fingers of him alive, and finally eating the heart of him dead, betraying not the slightest evidence of humanity; and now behold him in the council-chamber, where he meets the representatives of the hostile nation to treat of peace, conducting with such perfect dignity and decorum, betraying such a sense of justness.
These savages are equal to us civilized men in their treaties, and, I fear, not essentially worse in their wars.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 30, 1856
No comments:
Post a Comment