Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/647

Rh ETHNOGBAPH Y 025 Such pictures as that drawn by Mr Wallace are not unfrequent, and we might have transcribed many pleasant descriptions of the peace, concord, and fraternity reigning among the Todas, Aleutians, and some other primitive communities. Now comes the indictment by Lubbock, Tylor, and others. It is a heavy one. &quot;The Veddahs of Ceylon are of opinion that it signifies little whether they do right or wrong&quot; (Davies). &quot;To Australians I lie words good and bad had reference to taste or bodily comfort, and did not convey any idea of right or wrong. . . . The whole tendency of their system is to give every thing to the strong, to the prejudice of the young, and more particularly to the detriment of women&quot; (Lang). . .&quot;To believe,&quot; says Sir George Grey, &quot;that man ina savagestate is endowed with freedom, either of thought or action, is erroneous in the highest degree. . . . Offences, in r ijian estima tion, are light or grave according to the rank of the offender. . . . In Tahiti the missionaries considered that no less than two-thirds of t lie children were murdered by their parents. &quot;. . . &quot;Conscience does not exist in Eastern Africa. Kepentance expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime. Robbery constitutes an honourable man. Murder the more atrocious the midnight crime the better makes the hero&quot; (Burton). And is civilization any thing else ? reply the others. Is it not the same struggle for existence, but here on a gigantic scale ? Is not our incessant battle for life little short of wholesale murder ? Is it not accompanied with the same envy, with the same remorse less hatred, but under a thicker veil of perfidy and hypocrisy? The Anthropological Society in London was told by the late Win wood Keade that among the savages of Africa he had not seen anything as bad as the pauperism, as the mass of misery and degradation to lie found in our large cities. The Anthropological Society of Paris was told by Mr Coudereau that in our modern Europe the moral and intellectual development of the multitude is not superior to that of the Dahomians. It was said by Mr Lavrof: &quot; Between our peasants iiiul the primitive savages there is little difference. The religions and the most advanced philosophies, which hold so large a place in the history of mankind, have never been taken up in reality except by a minority numerically insignificant. Were they profitless to the majority? No, they enriched it with new amulets, new magical signs, new forms of divination. And when practical results of science, such as the electric telegraph, enter into common use, their real signification is as little understood by our country folks as it would be by the Marquesas Islanders.&quot; Although there may have been some exaggeration in the expression, the facts which have been alleged on both sides are true ; none is to be explained or trifled away. Thus it is evident that among civilized men all is not satisfactory, while among uncivilized all is not unsatisfac tory. We are led to infer that civilization amplifies and intensifies its elements. We had already occasion to note that among ourselves the extremes are wider apart than among the barbarians. We can say that we are at once materially much better and much worse off, and morally much better and much worse than savages. And as to man himself it can be said that of all ferocious brutes he is the most cruel, and of all gentle animals the most affec tionate. Can material progress be disputed ? An increased pro duction of food has enabled greater numbers of men to live ; their daily ration of eatables and drinkables has been increased; the quality of their vestments has been im proved; most people do not dwell in damp holes dug in the earth; they do not any longer roost in the branches of trees. Not to speak of other comforts, the invention of lucifer matches and of candles have been splendid achiev- ments in their day. . That the intellectual progress has been prodigious from the time when our forefathers were unable to count their own ringers, even of one hand, as Spix and Martius tell of the Brazilian Wood Indians, to the transformation of mathematics into a powerful scientific engine, to the calculations of Newton and Laplace, to the wonders of spectral analysis, is a position nobody dares to impugn. Material and intellectual development being satisfactorily settled, we touch upon the vexed question of moral pro gress. Mr Wallace says &quot;While civilized communities have increased vastly beyond the savage state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in morals.&quot; It may be said with equal truth that this progress has been immense, and that it has been ridiculously small, immense, if we consider that there is an infinite distance between nothing and something ; very small indeed, if we gauge the precise amount of that something. But that actual something will appear larger if we trace it to its original state, of which we do not find the like among the present savages. Their abject condition, abject as it has been depicted, is yet vastly superior to that of the supposed primeval man. Everything tends to prove that mankind, far from being born with a vivid sense of right and wrong, as the common doctrine will have it, had to evolve a moral sense by a long process. Through ages man must have collected sensations of a peculiar sort, which at first were slightly perceptible, and which, when accumulated, became that positive perception, the most to be cared for of our inherited abilities. &quot; The world is very young,&quot; said Mrs Mill, &quot; and has only just begun to cast off injustice.&quot; And we hold to be survivals of antecedent ages the instances which show among civilized and uncivilized an utter absence of morality, the lack of all fairness and generosity. But in our times these instances are exceptions. On the average, we know better than the Bechwana, who, being asked what it meant &quot;to be good,&quot; was much puzzled, but finally answered, &quot; To be good it is to possess a wife and cows, and to steal one neighbour s wife and cows;&quot; or than the Pawnee, who said, &quot;He is a good man who is a hunter sly, crafty as a fox, daring and strong as a wolf.&quot; A last question arises If moral progress be a positive fact, how could it be denied by intelligent observers ? First, progress is far from being always evident. Its course runs not incessantly onwards in a straight line at a uniform speed; it proceeds by irregular motions and some times by curved, by broken, or even by spiral lines. Then we are apt to underrate a progress which has become a habit. The pleasure which au improvement gives us does not last longer than its novelty. Very soon we become used to it and then we become conscious that some evil, which we had till then borne patiently, has grown iusulfer- able, and must be quickly done away with. We feel to the quick injustices and iniquities which ages ago we would have submitted to without complaint, of which we would have been participants. Till mankind reaches some goal yet unknown to us, its motto seems to be, Never to rest, never to be thankful. Thus ethnology may be considered as the science which builds up the history of material and intellectual progress, which retraces the evolution of that attribute, precious and delicate, of which Dr Maudsley has finely said, &quot; Morality, the last acquired faculty of man, is the first which he is liable to lose.&quot; * XI. The Bibliography of ethnology may be regarded either as very extensive or unimportant, according as we include all books in which ethnological subjects are treated, or as we exclude all books which have not ethnology for their primary object. Although possessed of immense territories in copartnership with the sister sciences, ethnology holds but a limited province of its own. This remark disposes of the largest mass of ethnographical bibliography, in a work which contains bibliographies of other sciences. Works which take up the new science as a whole, and bring its various problems together, cannot as yet be very numerous, especially if the demarcation between ethnology and anthropology is main tained. In the preceding pages the titles of most current books which are acknowledged as authoritative have been mentioned, and for brevity s sake will not be repeated. One of the most important publications, the object of which is to set the science on a solid foundation, is in progress. The Descriptive Sociology commenced in 1867 by Mr Herbert Spencer, devised, classified, and arranged by him, is compiled and abstracted by Messrs James Collier, Richard Schcppig, and David Duncan. &quot;The digests of materials, thus brought together, will supply the student of social science with data, standing towards his conclusions in a relation like that of VTIT. - 79