Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/109

Rh eager to cut the heart out of his hated enemy, but he would not lay perjury upon his soul—no, not for Venice! The burglars kept, therefore, in their pay two Christians, who were as ready to forswear themselves as any Tammany Hall politician at the polls, and who made the requisite false oaths at fixed rates.

These examples serve to show the natural tendency of mankind to look upon compatriots and coreligionists from a different moral standpoint from that with which they regard persons who are not connected with them by such ties, and to whom they not only attribute a lower standard of right and wrong, but also act upon it as a rule of conduct in dealing with them.

Great dissimilarity in physical characteristics intensifies the ethical estrangement caused by differences of blood and of belief. The more any tribes of men deviate from ourselves in form and feature, the less we are inclined to think of them as endowed with the same powers and passions, the same kind of sympathy and sensibility as ourselves, or as entitled to the same rights that we possess. A people with black skin, woolly hair, flat noses, and countenances of a strongly prognathous character do not enlist our kindly feelings and awaken our affections in the same manner and degree as representatives of a fair-complexioned and finely featured type would do. The schemes of European governments and of private individuals and corporations for the exploration, partition, and colonization of Africa are based upon the assumption that the Africans themselves have no claim to the continent which they inhabit. The only African colony that has ever been founded on principles of common justice and with a full recognition of the rights of the natives is the Republic of Liberia, established more than sixty years ago under the auspices of the United States, and this was done solely for the sake of getting rid of an undesirable population of free negroes at home. All the other enterprises of this sort are morally and legally no better than buccaneering expeditions.

The ethical maxims which we are wont to accept as axiomatic in our mutual relations as civilized individuals and nations are too easily set aside as inconvenient and inapplicable to our dealings with the so-called lower races. The fatal facility with which under such circumstances enlightened Europeans of the nineteenth century may revert to primitive savagery as soon as the outward restraints of civilization are removed is seen in the early settlers of Australia, who did not scruple to shoot the defenseless and harmless aborigines as they would any game, and feed the carcasses to their hounds. The inoffensive and rather feeble-bodied Negritos were treated as beasts of venery, which could be hunted without danger and furnished plentiful supplies of dog's meat, costing the sportsman nothing, not even a pang of