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Show HH KEEP DOING. HswB Scientists agree that no savage tribe, without bHbsh ' outside help, has ever emerged from barbarism. sssSBu At least, not one instance of the kind is found HHI ' in history. HBBB i parwin visited Terra del Fuego and said of Hi Bl the people there that "they in one respect resemble resem-ble the brute animals, inasmuch as they make no improvements. Their canoe, which is their most skillful work of art and a wretched canoe it is is exactly the same as it was two hundred and fifty years ago." That is, as the lark builds one form of nest and the sparrow another, and neither, through generations, changes the form, so a savage sav-age race continues savage until aroused from the outside; it has inherently no active germ out of which advancement is evolved. This fact is the strongest visible proof of the truth of writings of sacred authors which ascribe the first advancement of mortals to a divine cause. But this inherent inertia is not alone common to savages. Take a colony of peasants from any European Euro-pean State, any State where the English language is not generally spoken, plant them in any unoccupied unoc-cupied territory within our Republic, leave them to themselves and go there five years or fifty years later, and the people and their occupations will be found an exact counterpart of the people and the occupations of the people of their native country coun-try at the time they left it. We take it, then, that man must have strong incentives in order to awaken and keep awake within him a desire to improve himself. This same fatal inertia which attaches to man's nature makes provincials of the men of a region where there are few newcomers and where the residents do not go out to mingle with their outside fellow-men. fellow-men. Such people, too, cherishing a natural self-esteem, self-esteem, are not only content with their condition, but grow at length into a belief that they contain con-tain within themselves virtues and attainments which make them a select few. It was to smash this ludicrous self-complacency that the late Cecil Rhodes provideu means to have Oxford jostled out of its ancient stupid and indolent egotism by the introduction into it of some live American and German students. This same disposition to think and to investigate keeps men and women, generation genera-tion after generation, accepting the religion of their fathers and keeps the Democrats in the pine-woods pine-woods still voting for General Jackson. The lesson of it all is that the one thing which men should most cultivate is a desire to progress and at the same time to investigate every proposition propo-sition and try to advance on true and honest lines. A man was the other day speaking of a famous family in the East, the founder of which was a sterling old rustler and who left his descendants a great and steadily increasing fortune. "Why," he said, "they are every one degenerates, a disgrace dis-grace to the founder of their line." But, after all, it is but natural. They could have inherited no high desire from the old man except to accumulate accumu-late money; he left them all they could legitimately legiti-mately use, the knowledge of that fact took from them the necessity to work: the fatal indolence which is inherent in most men broke down any native desire to excel and, in three generations, made them degenerates. From all of which the warning shines out to all men to do the best they can and to keep doing. |