A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agricultural Indios of Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty. B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY. The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming an other-worldly chance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint. But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities. A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian, mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews and Moriscos in an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.