Note 47 — Chapter V

Those philanthropic individuals who think to change the habits of these savage tribes, expecting those who have lived from the earliest period of their existence on the produce of the chase, to abandon their wandering life, and settle down to cultivate the soil—an employment to which they are quite unaccustomed—can never have reflected how difficult, even in our boasted civilized state, it is to change habits acquired in early childhood. “Men,” observes Hartley, in his Essays on Man, (page 190,) “are brought to any thing almost sooner than to change their habit of life, especially when the change is either inconvenient or made against the force of natural inclination, or with the loss of accustomed indulgences. It is,” he continues, “the most difficult of all things to convert men from vicious habits to virtuous ones, as every one may judge from what he feels in himself as well as from what he sees in others.” “It is almost,” says Paley, after making the above quotation in his Evidences of Christianity, “like making men over again.”