In those days--our latest posterity _loquitur_--the people were not entirely freed from the savage instincts of their ancestors, the anthropophagi, those ferocious contemporaries of the deluge and such great inundations of the world. True, they did not still eat their enemies, nor break their skulls with clubs; they did not pierce their bodies with arrows of bone and flint; but they did the work more delicately, entirely according to the rules of art, with the precision of a surgeon who cuts off a limb, or the coolness of a butcher who bleeds a sheep. By dint of inventions, calculations, and trials of every kind, they fabricated, at last, most ingenious tools, very convenient and very simple, and which they handled with equal dexterity. They were not instruments of natural philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, or mathematics; our fathers possessed, it is true, objects of this kind, but they did not think it proper to put them in the hands of the people. Their thermometers, microscopes, telescopes, and electrical machines remained in the shade of libraries or the cabinets of the learned. The people were ignorant of their names and uses, while they well understood the management of the tools of which I speak. So you will suppose these were very useful articles, as they were so generally employed in every clime and nation, and their object to moralize and instruct mankind, as governments consented to their gratuitous distribution among their subjects--went farther, even, and imposed their use. But alas! no; they were only tools of death and carnage, worthy to figure among the arms and instruments of torture of preceding ages; for while some shot off bullets, others threw to enormous distances balls of brass and steel, that made holes in human walls, burnt up towns, and sunk ships. {131} The men of this time were called _"civilized"!_ Strange to say, they had abolished torture, and wished to do away with the pain of death. The scaffold horrified them, and the sight of the gallows gave them a vertigo! They had journals and books filled with beautiful phrases in honor of peace and civilization. But they did not comprehend the sense of aphorisms which they repeated incessantly and inscribed everywhere, on the fronts of their temples, and the first page of their constitutions. Their age to them was the age of light, and they seemed ready to burst with pride when they considered their enormous riches, the fame of their arts, and the extent of their sciences. And, in appearance, one might have believed them wise, and as good as the beings who inhabit the more favored planets of our solar system. They had noble aspirations and a generous ardor.