What sort of people must Europeans be? What species of creature are they? Europeans have to be forced to do good and have no other prompter for the avoidance of evil except the fear of punishment.
You see that we have no judges. What’s the reason for that? It’s because we never quarrel or sue one another. And what’s the reason that we have no lawsuits? Because we have resolved never to accept or to make use of silver. But why do we refuse admission to silver? The reason is that we are resolved not to have laws because, since the world was a world, our ancestors lived happily without them.
For the past six years, I have bent my thoughts upon the state of the Europeans, and I cannot see anything in their actions that is not beneath a man. I truly think it is impossible for it to be otherwise as long as you stick to your measures of mine and thine. I affirm that what you call silver is the devil of devils, the tyrant of the French, the source of all evil, the bane of souls, and the slaughterhouse of the living. To pretend you can live in the country of money and at the same time save one’s soul is as great a contradiction as for a man to go to the bottom of a lake to preserve his life. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, tricks, lying, treachery, falseness—in a word, all the mischief in the world. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill one another, friends are false, and all this proceeds from money. Consider this and then tell me if we are not correct in refusing to touch or so much as to look upon that cursed metal.
You fob me off very prettily when you bring in your gentlemen, your merchants, and your priests. If you were strangers to mine and thine, those kinds of men would be sunk and a leveling equality would then develop among you as it now does among the Wendat. For the first thirty years after the banishing of interest, you would see a strange desolation. Those who are qualified only to eat, drink, sleep, and divert themselves would languish and die. But their descendants would be fit for our way of living. I have set forth the qualities that make a man inwardly such as he ought to be—wisdom, reason, equity, etc.—all of which are courted by the Wendat. The notion of separate individual interests knocks all these qualities on the head. A man swayed by interest can’t be a man of reason.
From Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled, by Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan. Lahontan and two hundred other French soldiers were sent to New France to subdue the Great Lakes Iroquois in 1683. After his return to Europe, Lahontan published three volumes recounting his North American travels, the third of which was a series of conversations with “Adario,” a Huron chief identified as Kandiaronk by David Graeber and David Wengrow, who report that in the 1690s Kandiaronk and Lahontan were regular guests of the French governor-general in Montreal.
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