Those were bad days when a magnate could with impunity kill peasants, when barons and counts, with their bands of henchmen, engaged in highway robbery! Those were, finally, bad days when famine and plague, in a single year, swept away millions of people!...
Thus we have found that human history shows a certain movement toward the better: as it were, an enormous current of discoveries and inventions which, with each century, gains in strength, increases the prosperity and activity of every successive generation, and gradually takes almost all of humankind ever closer toward perfection. This current of discoveries and inventions is most marked among peoples of the white race inhabiting Europe and America; and those peoples are at the forefront of civilization and draw after them the peoples of the yellow and black races. Unfortunately, though, not all peoples can be said to be advancing toward perfection; on the contrary, some have been losing ground.
In America, and still more so in Australia, there are tribes so indigent that they live in hovels, go about naked, and consume even dead rotting fish and animals. There are tribes so savage that they eat not only their enemies but even their own children. These people are so limited that their language possesses barely a few hundred words, they cannot count beyond a hundred, and in conclusion they appear incapable of accepting European civilization. Sad is the lot of these hapless and unfortunate peoples.
On the day that they beheld the first European banner on their shores, their ruin began. From the moment of their first contact with the civilized peoples, they lost their freedom or were driven into the hinterlands of their islands, into the most desolate regions of the land.
