Perhaps a question preliminary even to this is: What is civilisation? He who has seen the Euromerican and the Indian side by side can be at no loss as to the difference between civilised and uncivilised man. But is he therefore at liberty to conclude that the element which so markedly distinguishes the White- from the Red- man of the New World is an attribute peculiar to the former, rather than the development of innate powers common to both, and in the possession of which man differs from all other animals? DOMESTICATION is, for the lower animals, the subjection of them to artificial conditions foreign to their nature, which they could not originate for themselves, and which they neither mature nor perpetuate: but, on the contrary, hasten to throw off so soon as left to their own uncontrolled action. CIVILISATION is for man development. It is self-originated; it matures all the faculties natural to him, and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable. Of both postulates the social life alike of the forest and of the clearings of the New World seems to offer proofs; and to other questions involved in an inquiry into the origin of civilisation and man’s relations to it, answers may also be recovered from the same source. There the latest developments of human progress are abruptly brought face to face with the most unprogressive phases of savage nature; and many old problems are being solved anew under novel conditions. The race to which this is chiefly due had been isolated during centuries of preparatory training, and illustrates in some of the sources of its progress the impediments to the civilisation of savage races brought in contact with others at so dissimilar a stage. The very elements for Britain’s greatness seem to lie in her slow maturity; in her collision with successive races only a little in advance of herself; in her transition through all the stages from infancy to vigorous manhood. But that done, the Old Englander becomes the New Englander; starts from his matured vantage-ground on a fresh career, and displaces the American Red-man by the American White-Man, the free product of the great past and the great present.