These desires, by a fixed law of the human mind, must be a constant source of temptation--they clamor for gratification. If the indulgence should not be restrained, either by a system of laws which reached the case, or by the motives which a state of civilization supplies, they would inevitably result in a disregard of the rights of property, and a general depravation of morals. They are without the latter, for they are uncivilized. Hence the demands of their position must be met by laws appropriate to an uncivilized people. The laws appropriate to a state of civilization, coöperating as they do with the motives supplied by that state, are not more than equal to the task of restraining the passions of civilized men. To rely upon them in the case of uncivilized men would be the grossest folly. Hence if it were not our duty to share our political rights with such a people, dwelling upon our border, in a separate state, for a much stronger reason it is not our duty to do this for those dwelling in our midst. If it is not our duty to do it, it cannot be their right to claim it; for rights and duties are always reciprocal. But, on the contrary, for the same general reasons by which it becomes the duty of a civilized state to place all its minors under the despotism of parental control, as before defined, it is the duty of the state to place an uncivilized race which may chance to dwell within its borders, under a similar form of government. This despotism need not be oppressive in the one case any more than in the other. It is the proud boast of all our native citizens that they have always lived under a free government; and yet they were brought up to the age of twenty-one under a pure despotism. But this does not deprive them of their right to boast. True, the government conferred almost absolute control upon the parent, or guardian, or master of the apprentice! These might have oppressed them. But the government, which stood ready to vindicate their rights, did not do it. The government, in what it did, only accorded them their natural rights, as we have seen--provided to confer on them the highest amount of freedom of which their condition would admit. It was to them essentially a free government, though in one of the forms of despotism. So in that form of despotism appropriate to a race of uncivilized people dwelling in the midst of a civilized people, if adapted to their condition, or securing to them (as in the case of minors) their natural rights, it is, _for_ them, and _to_ them, a _free government_. So far from being a curse, as many of our philosophers teach, it is a blessing, which their essential rights entitle them to claim. Any other form of government would be, in their case, as well as in that of minors, a practical denial of their rights; because it would result in the annihilation of their essential rights; that is, the enslavement of their wills to the basest passions of fallen nature.