Not to mention the Miaou-tse in China, and other relics of Asiatic races, the same phenomenon is more impressively presented to us among the Red Men of America, where the old race is seen dying out beneath our very eyes. Year by year they are melting away. Of the millions which once peopled the vast regions on this side of the Mississippi River, all have vanished, but a few scattered families; and it is as clear as the sun at noonday, that in a few generations more, the last of the Red Men will be numbered with the dead. Why, is it asked, are they thus doomed? In the suburbs of Mobile, or wandering through its streets, you will see the remnant of the Choctaw tribe, covered with nothing but blankets, and living in bark tents, scarcely a degree advanced above the beasts of the field. No philanthropy can civilise them,—no ingenuity can induce them to do an honest day’s work. The life of the woods is struck from them,—the white man has taken their hunting-grounds; and they live on helpless as in a dream, quietly abiding their time. They are stationary, they will not advance; and, like everything stationary, the world is sweeping away. They sufficed for the first phase of humanity in the New World. As long as there was only need for man to be lord of the woods and of the animal creation, the Red Man did well; but no sooner did the call come for him to perfect himself, and change the primeval forest into gardens, than the Red Man knew, by mysterious instinct, that his mission was over,—and either allowed himself, in sheer apathy, to sink out of existence among the pitiless feet of the new-comers, or died fighting fiercely with the apostle of a civilisation which he hated but could not comprehend.