The celebrated French Essayist, Montaigne, between two or three hundred years ago, wrote as follows:— “I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything I can gather, excepting that every one gives the title of barbarity to every thing that is not in use in his own country: as indeed we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live. _There_ is always the true religion; _there_ the perfect government, and the most exact and accomplished usance of things. They (the Indians) are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in truth, _we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice_ and diverted from the common order.… These nations, then, seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not, _as yet_, much vitiated with any mixture of ours; but in such purity that I am sometimes troubled we were no sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in those natives, does not only surpass all the images with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy estate of man; but moreover the fancy and even the wish of philosophy itself. So native and so pure a simplicity, as we, by experience, see to be in them, could never enter into the imagination of the ancient philosophers, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice. Should I tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate nor political superiority, no use of service, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no proprieties, no employments but those of leisure, no respect of kindred but of common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine, and where so much as the very words which signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, destruction, and pardon were never heard of,—how much would he find his imaginary Republic short of this perfection.”[5]