The Footprints of Time: And a Complete Analysis of Our American System of Government, with a Concise History of the Original Colonies and of the United States, in Chronological Order — John Shaqi
The Footprints of Time: And a Complete Analysis of Our American System of Government, with a Concise History of the Original Colonies and of the United States, in Chronological OrderBancroft, Charles
History
The Footprints of Time: And a Complete Analysis of Our American System of Government, with a Concise History of the Original Colonies and of the United States, in Chronological Order
Bancroft, Charles
United States -- History; United States -- Politics and government
2. A tolerably hardy race, which could endure the exposures and overcome
the difficulties that must be greater for the first few generations than
ever afterward, as we have every reason to believe, was first introduced.
It has been common to suppose that man must have been supplied with a
fund of knowledge, and a basis of language, to have successfully met the
difficulties of his condition; but the uniform law that the _faculties_,
the _innate capabilities_ of his race, are conferred on him, and that he
works them out by a process of development is observable in his entire
history, so far as we can trace it. All needful capacities being lodged
in him, with strong appetites and instincts to impel him to the objects
most vitally necessary to his own preservation and the continuance of his
species, and the material from which to work out his predestined ends
being placed within his reach, it is made his indispensable duty and his
glory to realize those ends, soon or late, by his own endeavors. The
evidences of his early activity, unearthed here and there by geologists,
show him to have advanced by degrees from the lowest points, and such
corroborative proof as the earliest forms of language afford are
decidedly in the same direction.
3. Many of the terms employed for the first and most familiar objects
with which the necessities of life brought him in contact, show the very
imperfect extent of his early knowledge and resources, and they gradually
change in a way to indicate, most significantly, a slow and laborious,
but constant enlargement of ideas by experience. He advanced then,
as now, by degrees. The races latest in development, as well as most
vigorous and intelligent, were the Aryan, or Indo-European. They have
left the most definite traces of their early condition and advancement
in the common elements of their various languages, which show very
clearly how much time and toil were required to work out the features of
their first Institution—The Family. The proper family type established
relations of protection and dependence, of care and trust, of purity
and tenderness, of provident foresight, and the shelter and comforts of
Home. Apparently it was many centuries after the other races had begun to
migrate that this last and most valuable stock commenced to be “fruitful
and multiply,” to tame animals for their use, to enclose and render their
habitations comfortable, and to organize and designate their family
relations down to son-in-law and daughter-in-law, as well as to name the
most common domestic animals and occupations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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