Papuans of New Caledonia and the communities of European beggars and thieves, we may sadly acknowledge that we have in our midst something worse than savagery. But it is not savagery; it is broken-down civilization. Negatively, the inmates of a Whitechapel casual ward and of a Hottentot kraal agree in their want of the knowledge and virtue of the higher culture. But positively, their mental and moral characteristics are utterly different. Thus, the savage life is essentially devoted to gaining subsistence from nature, which is just what the proletarian life is not. Their relations to civilized life the one of independence, the other of dependence are absolutely opposite. To my mind the popular phrases about 'city savages' and 'street Arabs' seem like comparing a ruined house to a builder's yard. It is more to the purpose to notice how war and misrule, famine and pestilence, have again and again devastated countries, reduced their population to miserable remnants, and lowered their level of civilization, and how the isolated life of wild country districts seems sometimes tending towards savagery. So far as we know, however, none of these causes have ever really reproduced a savage community. For an ancient account of degeneration under adverse circumstances, Ovid's mention of the unhappy colony of Tomi on the Black Sea is a case in point, though perhaps not to be taken too literally. Among its mixed Greek and barbaric population, harassed and carried off into slavery by the Sarmatian horsemen, much as the Persians till lately were by the Turkomans, the poet describes the neglect of the gardener's craft, the decay of textile arts, the barbaric clothing of hides.
'Nec tamen hæc loca sunt ullo pretiosa metallo:
Hostis ab agricola vix sinit illa fodi.
Purpura sæpe tuos fulgens prætexit amictus:
Sed non Sarmatico tingitur illa mari.
Vellera dura ferunt pecudes, et Palladis uti
Arte Tomitanæ non didicere nurus.
Femina pro lana Cerialia munera frangit,
Suppositoque gravem vertice portat aquam.
