One is an educated and the other an uneducated quack.
My notes finish here. They are wanting in order and art but not in verity because above all I have dedicated this writing to the truth, prompted by feelings of gratitude and good will towards my kind friends the savages. I have wished to illustrate the customs and character of a people very much calumniated, amongst whom I have found strong and devoted friendship free from every taint of jealousy or self-interest.
Sixteen years of a tranquil, laborious life have I passed among the Sakais and still to-day I feel a pang of home-sickness thinking of that wonderfully fertile land and its good and simple inhabitants.
If my words have been clear to you, dear reader, you must have remarked that in those savages are to be found real treasures of uprightness, honesty and common sense. And the first seeds of these virtues were sown by nobody for they bud and blossom in their souls as spontaneously as from the bosom of great Mother Nature the marvellous multitude of flora rises up towards the sun, seeking light and heat.
It is not so amongst us. Civilization teaches virtue: sermons preach it; moralists condense it into precepts and aphorisms; historians honour it in the ancients in order to inspire it in the moderns; laws, and the menaces of Hell, want to impose it. And yet, notwithstanding all this, it cannot flower well for too often it is fettered by the frenzy of "getting ahead" and by the spasms of passions which in the superb majesty of the forest, and under its sublime influence, are neither known nor understood. Here one works serenely, undisturbed by the fear that others will rob you of your profit.
I mention the fact but leave others to draw the conclusion because if I arrived at that which would seem most logical after the premise, I should be called a worse savage than those I have held up to public admiration and if I arrived at any other I should be accused (and with reason) of contradiction.
I will instead declare that, in spite of certain discouraging proofs, I firmly keep my faith in human progress, believing that Science will one day succeed in lessening the grand anguish accruing from the incessant and cruel "struggle for life".
My chief reason for illustrating the virtues and defects of the little-known Sakais is to present them more closely to the attention of England, that, by delivering them from the contempt and able trickery of other races, might easily lead them to civilization and at the same time form important and lucrative centres of agricultural product in the interior of the Peninsula.