other.... What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing,
thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his
pocket, and the naked New-Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear,
a mat, and the undivided twentieth part of a shed to sleep under! But
compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal
strength the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike
the savage with a broad-axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch; and the same blow
shall send the white man to his grave."

Were this true, the fact would be fatal. Man is a progressive being,
only on condition that he begin at the beginning. He can afford to wait
centuries for a brain, but he cannot subsist a second without a body. If
civilization sacrifice the physical thus hopelessly to the mental, and
barbarism merely sacrifice the mental to the physical, then barbarism is
unquestionably the better thing, so far as it goes, because it provides
the essential preliminary conditions, and so can afford to wait.
Barbarism is a one-story log-hut, a poor thing, but better than nothing;
while such a civilization would be simply a second story, with a first
story too weak to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven
in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in
a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement. In such a
view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object,
good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain
built on. But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious
merchant-prince in his counting-room, tottering feebly about, his thin
underpinning scarcely able to support what he has already crammed
into that heavy brain of his, and he still piling in more,--one feels
disposed to cry out, "Unsafe passing here! Stand from under!"