"
The Jesuit Father, Venegas, remarks, discouragingly: "It is not easy
for Europeans who were never out of their own country to conceive an
adequate idea of these people. Even in the least frequented quarters
of the globe there is not a nation so stupid, of such contracted ideas,
and weak, both in body and in mind, as the unhappy Californians. Their
characteristics are stupidity and insensibility, want of knowledge and
reflection, inconstancy, impetuosity, and blindness of appetite,
excessive sloth, abhorrence of all fatigue of every kind, however
trifling or brutal,--in fine, a most wretched want of everything which
constitutes the real man and makes him rational, inventive, tractable,
and useful to himself and others." All of which goes to show that
climate is not everything, and that contact with other minds and other
people, with the sifting that rigorous conditions enforce, may outweigh
all the advantages of the fairest climate. The highest development
comes with the fewest barriers to migration, to competition, and to the
spread of ideas.
The destruction of the missions and the advent of our Anglo-Saxon
freedom has been for the Indian and his kind only loss and wrong.
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