There are not wanting here, who defend this strange attachment of some of their countrymen to this savage life, on principles independent of the reason of state, for encouraging its subjects to spread and gain footing amongst the savage nations, by resorting to their country, of which they, at the same time, gain a knowledge useful to future enterprizes, by a winning conformity to their actions, and by intermarriages with them.  They pretend, that even this savage life itself is not without its peculiar sweets and pleasures; that it is the most adapted, and the most natural to man.  Liberty, they say, is no where more perfectly enjoyed, than where no subordination is known, but what is recommended by natural reason, the veneration of old age, or the respect of personal merit.

The chace is at once their chief employment and diversion; it furnishes them with means to procure those articles, which enter into the small number of natural wants.  The demands of luxury, they think too dearly bought with the loss of that liberty and independence they find in the woods.  They despise the magnificence of courts and palaces, in comparison with the free range and scope of the hills and vales, with the starry sky for their canopy:  they say, we enjoy the Universe only in miniature, whilst the savage-rovers enjoy it in the great.  Thus reason some of our admirers here of the savage-system of life, and yet I do not find that these refining advocates for it, are themselves tempted to embrace it.  They are content to commend what themselves do not care to practise.  Those who actually do embrace it, reason very little about it, though no doubt, the motives above assigned for their preference, are generally, one may say instinctively, at the bottom of it.  Their greatest want is of wine, especially at first to those who are used to it; but they are soon weaned from it by the example of others, and content themselves with the substitution of rum, or brandy, of which they obtain supplies by their barter of skins and furs.  In short, their hunting procures them all that they want or desire, and their liberty or independence supplies to them the place of those luxuries of life, that are not well to be had without the sacrifice in some sort of it.

It is more difficult to find an excuse for the shocking cruelties and barbarities, exercised by the savages on their unhappy captives in war.  The instances, however, of their inhumanity, are certainly not exagerated, nor possible to be exagerated, but they are multiplied beyond the limits of truth.  That they put then their prisoners to death by exquisite tortures, is strictly true; but it is as true too, that they do not serve so many in that manner as has been said.  Numbers they save, and even incorporate with their own nation, who become as free as, and on a footing with, the conquerors themselves.  And even in that cruelty of theirs, there is at the bottom a mixture of piety with their vindictiveness.  They imagine