Yet this depraved fury does not appear to have been natural to the soil,
climate, or the native races, as observed by the early navigators;
although Ponce de Leon received his death-wound from them when he sought
the fountain of youth in the everglades of Florida, and De Soto
encountered fierce opposition from the red men of the forest when he
pursued his way towards the Appalachian mountains in search of the mines
of gold. But nevertheless the Europeans were treated almost always with
kindness whenever they approached the Indian with good intentions.
Contrast the present time and the people with the period and the natives
when the great Navigator discovered the adjacent isles. "Nature is here,"
he exclaims, "so prolific, that property has not produced the feelings of
avarice or cupidity. These people seem to live in a golden age, happy and
quiet, amid open and endless gardens, neither surrounded by ditches,
divided by fences, nor protected by walls. They behave honorably towards
one another, without laws, without books, without judges. They consider
him wicked who takes delight in harming another. This aversion of the good
to the bad seems to be all their legislation."
These people with natural sentiments have passed away, and new races, with
strange and repulsive ideas, have taken their place. "Like the statue of
Glaucus, that time, the sea, the storms have so disfigured that it
resembles less a god than a ferocious beast, the human soul, altered in
the bosom of society by a thousand causes rising without cessation, by the
acquisition of a multitude of creeds and errors, by the changes produced
in the constitution of bodies by the continual shock of passions, has
caused a change in appearance almost unrecognizable; and we sooner find,
instead of the being acting always by certain and invariable principles,
instead of that celestial and majestic simplicity in which the Creator has
left his impress, the deformed contrast of the understanding in delirium,
and of the passion which pretends to reason."