Daily Inspiration Quote by Ezra Stiles

A chill of casual certainty runs through Stiles's sentence: a world neatly sorted by latitude, as if people were flora. The line reads like a neutral observation, but it’s doing the quieter work of classification. “Numerous” flattens living societies into a demographic fact; “not so elsewhere” finishes the thought with a shrug, turning absence (or displacement) into something like natural distribution. That rhetorical posture matters because it makes human history feel like climate.

Stiles, a prominent New England clergyman and later president of Yale, wrote in an era when ministers were also amateur scientists, forever collecting data about God’s creation. The impulse wasn’t only curiosity. In the late 18th-century Atlantic world, counting and categorizing Indigenous peoples helped colonial elites manage land claims, mission projects, and political anxieties about frontier conflict. Framing Indigenous presence as “numerous” only in “tropical regions” conveniently implies a thinning out in the temperate zones where British settlement was expanding fastest. It converts violence, disease, forced removal, and legal dispossession into a pseudo-geographic pattern.

The subtext is a theology of order wearing the costume of empiricism. If Indigenous people “belong” to certain climates, then New England’s Indigenous populations can be treated as exceptions, remnants, or vanishing traces rather than sovereign nations with rights. The sentence’s power lies in its blandness: it doesn’t argue; it inventories. That’s often how ideology travels best, as a footnote that pretends to be weather.