The infancy of the race, if there is any justice in the analogy assumed, is the age of growth, of progress; but nothing is less progressive, or more strictly stationary, in a moral and intellectual sense, than the savage state. Since history began, there is not only no instance on record of a savage tribe rising by indigenous effort to civilization, but none of a purely savage tribe having ever, even by foreign assistance, become a civilized nation. The Greeks in the earliest historical or semi-historical times, were not savages, and we have no evidence that they ever were. The Homeric poems were never the product of a savage people, or of a people just emerging from the savage state into civilization, and they are a proof that the Greeks, as a people, had juster ideas of religion, and were less superstitious in the age of Homer than in the age of St. Paul. The Germans are a civilized people, and if they were first revealed to us as what the Greeks and Romans called _barbarians_, they were never, as far as known, savages. We all know how exceedingly difficult it is to civilize our North American Indians. Individuals now and then take up the elements of our civilization, but rarely, if they are of pure Indian blood. They recoil before the advance of civilization. The native Mexicans and Peruvians have, indeed, received some elements of Christian civilization along with the Christian faith and worship; but they were not, on the discovery of this continent, pure savages, but had many of the elements of a civilized people, and that they were of the same race with the savages that roamed our northern forests, is not yet proved. The historical probabilities are not on the side of the hypothesis of the modern progressivists, but are on the side of the contrary doctrine, that the savage state belongs to the old age of the race--is not that from which man rises, but that into which he falls.