But the peoples of the ancient world are not the only human beings
who have suffered from the psychological bequests of savages. Modern
states and peoples, notwithstanding their far-flung professions of
righteousness, manifest, though in a somewhat weakened form, the
same ethnic prejudices and the same senseless antipathies as those
displayed by the ancients. Remnants of the primitive tribal morality
are found in the moral habits and conceptions of every people,
however emancipated they may imagine themselves to be. Many a person
who would not think of swindling one of his neighbours will not
hesitate to swindle a foreigner, especially if the foreigner happens
to be of a nationality much removed in language, colour, manners, or
interests from his own. Morality is genetic. It is not a consistent
something—something reasoned out and framed according to the
facts. It has grown up. It is essentially tribal—whether it is
confined to a family, as is done by some, to a corporation or trade,
to a nation, to an artificial fraternity, or to a species. We are,
in fact, all of us, even the broadest and most illuminated, simply
savages more or less leafed out. We all suffer, as men have always
suffered, from the over-vividness of the presentative powers of the
mind (sensation and perception) compared with the representative
powers (memory and imagination). We all exaggerate out of their
proper perspective in the phenomena of a universe the things that
are around us and about us—the events we witness or take part in,
the things that are ours, and the affairs of the street, city,
state, neighbourhood, world, and time, in which we live. Every human
being (the sage less than the savage, but the sage to some extent)
is inclined to lump together as foreign to him, and as more or less
useless and shadowy in themselves, the things, beings, and events
that are distant, and to consider them, of less reality than those
with which he is directly concerned, and of which his knowledge is
immediate. _The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical
aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and
vivid the phenomena that are more and more_ _distant in both space
and time_.
The Chinese call their country ‘the flower of the middle,’ and
believe it to be the central and choicest portion of the earth’s
surface. All those beyond the bounds of ‘The Heavenly Flower
Kingdom’ are, by those on the inside, venomously lumped together
as ‘foreign devils.’ The people of Spain look upon themselves in
much the same way as the Chinese look upon themselves, although they
are in reality the most belated of all peoples to-day pretending to
be civilised. There are a few travelled and educated Spaniards who
realise the pitiful place held by their country in the family of
reputable states. ‘But the great mass of the people are not only
perfectly satisfied with their condition, but consider themselves
the most fortunate of all God’s creatures. They never go outside
of their country and never read a foreign newspaper or book. Like
the Chinese, they consider other nations barbarians, and point to
Madrid as the centre of civilisation.’ The French, down to the
nineteenth century, confiscated the property of all aliens who died
within the realm; and the savage practice of punishing one alien for
the crimes of another alien was sanctioned by the laws of England
down to the middle of the fourteenth century. It has been only a day
in the history of the world since Caucasians hunted their dusky
brothers in Africa like ‘wild animals,’ and sold and loaned and
lashed them as we do horses to-day. Men now living can remember when
it made no difference how exalted in character men might be: if a
certain pigment of their bodies was dark, they were ‘niggers.’
They had no ‘souls’ as pale men had, and no more chance of
paradise than cattle. At the beginning of the nineteenth century,
incredible as it may seem, every country of Europe and America held
slaves, and was engaged in the soulless avocation of man-hunting in
Africa. Tens of thousands of Africa’s children were annually
seized by prowling pirate bands and exported to distant lands to
wear their lives out in disgrace and drudgery. It was not until the
latter part of the nineteenth century that civilised nations,
following the initiative of England, finally abolished human
slavery, the United States and Brazil being the last to act. The
Christian sneers at all who do not bow down to his deities and
worship according to his ritual, as ‘heathens’ or
‘freethinkers,’ and to the Moslem all who are not followers of
‘the True Prophet’ are ‘infidel dogs.’ The history of these
two religions is a chronicle of almost unparalleled crimes upon
disbelievers.
But it is not necessary to go to Arabia or Cathay, nor even
necessary to read history, in order to find examples of bigotry and
provincialism. It is only necessary to open our eyes. Americans are
not a peculiar people—unless it be in the unbridled character of
their conceit. All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us.
History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible
pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would
look into a mirror. The old savage spirit still circulates in our
veins. The ‘foreigner’ is not an enemy, but he is still an
individual whose chief significance is in his ‘fleece.’ If the
‘foreigner’ did not ease our economic theories by benevolently
‘paying the tax,’ it would be hard to tell what would become of
him. Those who suffer from a different government, speak a different
language, or laud other gods are regarded by us as distinctly
inferior to ourselves. Millions of dollars are annually squandered
by self-righteous societies in sending missionaries to the other
side of the planet to peoples who need evangels of mercy and
humanity far less than we do ourselves. In these times of
ecclesiastical enterprise, however, missionaries are being
superseded, as agents of evangelisation, by the more effective
inventions of Messrs. Maxim and Krupp. ‘American’ is regarded by
us as the synonym of perfection, and to be ‘patriotic’ is to
give unthinking enthusiasm to every scheme incubated by wolfish
spoilsmen. Crimes of conquest carried on by others become, when
undertaken by us, shining masterpieces of ‘benevolent
assimilation.’ We are not so far from the naked and unkempt
contemporaries of the cave-bear and sabre-toothed lion as we imagine
we are. To carry a bayonet, and especially to redden it with an
alien’s blood, is here in this degenerate land of Jefferson, more
glorious than to create a book. Captains particularly competent as
butchers, though their characters be as coarse as a savage
chief’s, are hailed as heroes by thousands besides silly women,
and held up, like the cutthroats of the Kukis, as the highest
exemplars of right-doing. Old Rameses, holding by their hair a
half-dozen dwarfs, and ostentatiously cutting off their heads with a
single sweep of his sword, finds his modern counterpart in miserable
Americans pompously gloating over the offhand slaughter of the
children of distant archipelagoes.