Out of small tribes in course of ages grew great nations. Men could now manufacture weapons of destruction with which they could procure food and destroy their enemies; thus little by little were built up the nations of the earth. All advance, all progress towards civilisation made by primitive man was made by opposing with all his strength and skill the destructive forces of nature, and by strenuous attempts at improving upon human nature itself. Was man then inherently depraved and prone to evil continually? Not so. The germs of evil and good were alike sown in his nature; and if either of these was developed by favorable circumstances an evil or a good result followed of necessity. That man was not depraved by nature is seen by the fact that in the general evolution of things, instead of growing worse he has continued to improve--from the low, brutal and immoral creature of the past, to the purer, loftier, nobler being--the highest that can be found to-day. In his natural state, it is true, man was a wicked being. He had no intuitive knowledge of right and wrong. He had to perform an act, and he was never sure until he felt the results whether it was good or bad. In his natural state he was dirty, untruthful, unjust. No god came to tell him that "cleanliness was next to godliness;" nor admonish him to be truthful and just in all his dealings. He was left alone to use his own unaided intelligence as best he might. To test the truth of these assertions one has only to turn to savage races existing to-day. It will be found on investigation that not only are they unclean in their habits and destitute of any idea of justice, but for the most part they are unblushing liars and ingenious thieves. All the characteristics in human nature that are called virtues are purely of artificial growth, and result from man's cultivation of his better self; or, in other words, from his improvement upon nature's spontaneous course of action. In support of this view I may here quote J. S. Mill, who says ("Essay on Nature," p. 48): "Children and the lower classes of most countries seem to be actually fond of dirt: the vast majority of the human race are indifferent to it: whole nations of otherwise civilised and cultivated human beings tolerate it in some of its worst forms, and only a very small minority are consistently offended by it. Indeed, the universal law of the subject appears to be that uncleanliness offends only those to whom it is unfamiliar, so that those who have lived in so artificial a state as to be unused to it in any form, are the sole persons whom it disgusts in all forms. Of all virtues this is the most evidently not instinctive, but a triumph over instinct. Assuredly neither cleanliness nor the love of cleanliness is natural to man, but only the capacity of acquiring a love of cleanliness." On page 57 the same writer declares that "Savages are always liars. They have not the faintest notion of truth as a virtue."