Mr. Wilson, however, does not reason in this manner.  He has found, from his own observation,—­the only source of knowledge, if such it can be called, on which he is willing to place much reliance,—­that the Ojibways and Iroquois are savages, and he rightly argues that their ancestors must have been savages.  From these premises, without any process of reasoning, he leaps at once to the conclusion, that in no part of America could the aboriginal inhabitants ever have lived in any other than a savage state.  Hence he tells us, that, in all statements regarding them, everything “must be rejected that is inconsistent with well-established Indian traits.”  The ancient Mexican empire was, according to his showing, nothing more than one of those confederacies of tribes with which the reader of early New England history is perfectly familiar.  The far-famed city of Mexico was “an Indian village of the first class,”—­such, we may hope, as that which the author saw on his visit to the Massasaugus, where, to his immense astonishment, he found the people “clothed, and in their right minds.”  The Aztecs, he argues, could not have built temples, for the Iroquois do not build temples.  The Aztecs could not have been idolaters or offered up human sacrifices, for the Iroquois are not idolaters and do not offer up human sacrifices.  The Aztecs could not have been addicted to cannibalism, for the Iroquois never eat human flesh, unless driven to it by hunger.  This is what Mr. Wilson means by the “American standpoint”; and those who adopt his views may consider the whole question settled without any debate.

But there are some slight difficulties to be overcome, before we can embrace these views.  Putting human testimony aside, there are witnesses of the past that still give their evidence to the fact, that parts of this continent were once inhabited by races who had other pursuits besides hunting and fishing, and whose ideas and manners differed widely from those of the “red men” of the North.  Ruined cities, defaced temples, broken statues,—­relics such as on the Eastern Continent, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the shores of the Ganges, mark the sites of fallen empires and extinct civilizations,—­relics such as we should have expected, from a priori reasoning, to meet with in the corresponding latitudes of the New World,—­lie scattered through their whole extent, proclaiming themselves the works of men who lived in settled communities and under regular forms of government, who had some knowledge of architecture and some rude notions of the beautiful and the sublime, who had strong feelings and vivid conceptions in regard to the agency of supernal powers in the control of human affairs, but who clothed their conceptions in uncouth forms, and worshipped their deities with absurd and debasing rites.  Some of these remains being known to Mr. Wilson, on the evidence of the only pair of eyes in the universe which, in his estimation, have the faculty of seeing, he