Formerly, the long coast of Siberia was well peopled. Under that terribly hard climate, the nomadic natives hunted the richly, the preciously, furred animals which at once fed and clothed them. The Russian despotism, at once strong and senseless, compelled them to adopt the settled life of agriculturists, in a climate, and upon a soil, where agriculture is an absurdity, an impossibility. The consequence is that these peoples have gradually died off. On the other hand, the trading spirit, that greedy and insatiable devourer, has refused to spare the brutes in their breeding seasons, and as a necessary consequence, the brutes have disappeared with the men; and now, for a thousand miles along that coast, you have a terrible solitude, where man hunts not, and where the brutes are not. The winds may whistle shrilly, the frost may be bitter and biting as ever, but there is neither man nor beast to listen to the one or to shudder beneath the other. Had our voyagers to the North been truly wise, their very first care should have been to form a good, firm friendship with the Esquimaux, to mitigate their miseries, to adopt some of their children and have them well instructed in Europe, and thus lay the foundation of a great indigenous race of discoverers. We learn from Captain John Ross, and from not a few others, that they are very intelligent, and very readily acquire the knowledge and the arts of Europe. Marriages would have been contracted between European sailors and the native women; a mixed population would thus have sprung up, to which all that northern portion of the American continent would have been "native and to the manor born." And that would have been the, at once, safe and sure way of discovering the much coveted North-western passage. Thirty years--a single generation--would have done it effectually--and in three hundred years it has been done only uselessly because you have terrified those poor savages; because you have destroyed alike the man of the soil and the _Genius Loci_. What is the use of merely seeing that desert, when, in the very act of seeing it you make it either depopulated or hostile? We may be quite sure that if man, civilized man, has thus ill treated his uncivilized brother man, he has been neither more friendly nor more merciful for the brutes. He has converted the gentlest and the most affectionate of them forever, irreclaimably, into savage and merciless foes to man. And man, civilized man, has done this. All the old authors concur in telling us that when these poor brutes first (most unluckily for themselves!) made the acquaintance of man, they exhibited nothing but the most confident and inquisitive sympathy. He could walk past and through whole families of Sea Cows and Seals, and they never fled from him. The Penguins, and their kindred species, followed him, begged a share of his shelter, yea, even nestled at night beneath his garments.