“If an European,” says Sir Joshua Reynolds, in one of his Discourses, “when he has cut off his beard, and put false hair on his head, or bound up his own hair in formal, hard knots, as unlike nature as he can make it, and after having rendered them immoveable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity—­if, when thus attired, he issues forth and meets a Cherokee Indian who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid with equal care and attention his yellow and red ochre on such parts of his forehead and cheeks as he judges most becoming, whichever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fashion of his country, whichever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian.”

Granting this, the popular advocates of civilisation certainly are not the most civilised of individuals.  They appear to consider yellow ochre and peacocks’ feathers the climax of barbarism—­marabouts and kalydor the acme of refinement.  A ring through the nose calls forth their deepest pity—­a diamond drop to the ear commands their highest respect.  To them, nothing can show a more degraded state of nature than a New Zealand chief, with his distinctive coat of arms emblazoned on the skin of his face; nor anything of greater social elevation than an English peer, with the glittering label of his “nobility” tacked to his breast.  To a rational mind, the one is not a whit more barbarous than the other; they being, as Sir Joshua observes, the real barbarians who, like these soi-disant civilisers, would look upon their own monstrosities as the sole standard of excellence.

The philosophy of the present age, however, is peculiarly the philosophy of outsides.  Few dive deeper into the human breast than the bosom of the shirt.  Who could doubt the heart that beats beneath a cambric front? or who imagine that hand accustomed to dirty work which is enveloped in white kid?  What Prometheus was to the physical, Stultz is to the moral man—­the one made human beings out of clay, the other cuts characters out of broad-cloth.  Gentility is, with us, a thing of the goose and shears; and nobility an attribute—­not of the mind, but (supreme civilisation!) of a garter!

Certain modern advocates appear to be devout believers in this external philosophy.  They are touchingly eloquent upon the savage state of those who indulge in yellow ochre, but conveniently mute upon the condition of those who prefer carmine.  They are beautifully alive to the degradation of that race of people which crushes the feet of its children, but wonderfully dead to the barbarism of that race, nearer home, which performs a like operation upon the ribs of its females.  By them, also, we are told that “words would manifestly fail in portraying so low a state of morals as is pictured in the lineaments of an Australian chief,”—­a stretch of the outside philosophy which we certainly were not prepared to meet with; for little did we dream that this noble science could ever have attained such eminence, that men of intellect would be able to discover immorality in particular noses, and crime in a certain conformation of the chin.