But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilisation than they established.[10] The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is the opposite of a civilised man. Civilisation is the product of the uninterrupted work of many generations; and if savage meant no more than an uncivilised man, it is no great discovery to say that the first man must have been a savage. No doubt he could not have been acquainted even with what we consider the fundamental elements of civilisation, such as the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. His dress must have been very scanty, his food very primitive, his dwelling very uncomfortable, his family life very unrestrained. And yet, for all that, he might have been very far removed from the brute; nay, he might have been a perfect man, doing his duty in that state of life into which it pleased God to call him. Civilisation, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery. When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilisation, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were ὑλόβιοι dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander who has been brought into contact with European civilisation, his former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days:[11]—