found within the wide range of the Indian islands.
In these regions, the more abject the state of man
in the scale of social improvement, the freer the
form of his government; and in proportion as he
advances in civilization, is that freedom abridged,
until, at the top of the scale, he is subjected to a
tyranny where not a vestige of liberty is discoverable.
In short, he enjoys freedom when he has
nothing else worth enjoying ; and when the comforts
of civil life accumulate around him, he is deprived
of the liberty of benefiting by them. No
nation, indeed, inhabiting a warm climate has ever
known how to reconcile freedom and civilization.
In that portion of the globe there is hardly any
medium between the unbounded • I T licence of savas’e independence and uncontrolled despotism. Man
there no sooner acquires a little industry and a
little property, than he is made a slave on account
of them, just as he himself enslaves the docile and
laborious animals, while the useless savages of the
desert or forest enjoy their freedom.
The cause of this phenomenon is in a good measure
to be sought for in the softness and fruitfulness
of the climate, and the consequent facility of
living with little exertion ; in a word, to the absence
of that wholesome discipline by which man,
in severer regions, is bred to habits of hardihood,
enterprise, and independence, and certainly not in
any imagined innate feebleness of frame, for, on examination,
it will be found that the physical constitution
of every race is best adapted tor the climate
it inhabits.
An example of the very rudest and earliest
form of social polity is afforded in the manners
of the negro tribes which inhabit the mountains
of the Malayan Peninsula. The least improved
of these are the tribes which inhabit the
mountain Jarai, in the territory of the Malayan
Prince of Queda, bordering upon the empire of
Siam. There are not in the whole mountain
above three or four hundred grown persons. This
population is subdivided into hordes of thirty or
forty families eacjh> who roam about the forests of
the mountain, picking up wild roots or honey, and
shooting, witfi 'poisoned arrows, the smaller game.
They seldom stay above fifteen days in one spot,
and their houses consist of a fe\y moveable posts,
and a little occasional thatch. They are in a state
of perfect nakedness, though living in a medium
rather inclement, for their usual station is seldom
lower than the middle height of a mountain probably
six or seven thousand feet high. There is a
perfect equality of rank among them, and they
have, with respect to some descriptions of property,
a community of goods. They acknowledge
no leader, consulting age and experience just when
it suits their purpose, and then only.
Another race of the same people, whose station