Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/504

488 Reference to the Reports on the Discovery of Peru of Xeres and Pizarro (pp. 68-9, 85-6, 114-120), makes it manifest that the general untruthfulness described was due to the intimidation the Indians were subject to. So, too, respecting the Mexicans, the Franciscan testimony was—"They are liars, but to those who treat them well they speak the truth readily." A clear conception of the relation between mendacity and fear was given to Livingstone by his experiences. Speaking of the falsehood of the East Africans he says

"But great as this failing is among the free, it is much more annoying among the slaves. One can scarcely induce a slave to translate anything truly: he is so intent on thinking of what will please."

And he further remarks that "untruthfulness is a sort of refuge for the weak and oppressed."

A glance over civilized communities at once furnishes verification. Of European peoples, those subject to the most absolute rule, running down from their autocrat through all grades, are the Russians; and their extreme untruthfulness is notorious. Among the Egyptians, long subject to a despotism administered by despotic officials, a man prides himself on successful lying, and will even ascribe a defect of his work to failure in deceiving some one. Then we have the case of the Hindus, who, in their early days irresponsibly governed, afterwards subject for a long period to the brutal rule of the Mahometans, and since that time to the scarcely-less brutal rule of the Christians, are so utterly untruthful that oaths in Courts of Justice are of no avail, and lying is confessed to without shame. Histories tell like tales of a mendacity which, beginning with the ruled, infects the rulers. Writing of the later feudal period in France, Michelet says: "It is curious to trace from year to year the lies and tergiversations of the royal false coiner"; but nowadays political deceptions in France, though still practiced, are nothing like so gross. Nor has it been otherwise among ourselves. If with the "universal and loathsome treachery of which every statesman of every party was continually guilty," during Elizabeth's reign, while monarchical power was still but little qualified, we contrast the veracity of statesmen in recent days, we see a kindred instance of the relations between the untruthfulness which accompanies tyranny and the truthfulness which arises along with increase of liberty.

Hence such connections as we trace between mendacity and a life of external enmity, and between veracity and a life of internal amity, are not due to any direct relations between violence and lying and between peacefulness and truth-telling; but are due to the coercive social structure which chronic external enmity develops, and to the non-coercive social structure developed by a