The Ethical KinshipHuman Nature a Product of the JungleEgoism and AltruismThe Ethics of the SavageThe Ethics of the AncientModern EthicsThe Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human BeingsThe Origin of ProvincialismUniversal EthicsThe Psychology of AltruismAnthropocentric EthicsEthical Implications of EvolutionConclusionOne of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the ‘idols (or illusions) of the tribe’ by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.The Ethical KinshipI. Human Nature a Product of the Jungle.The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth. To be civilised or even half-civilised is, to the children of this world, neither instinctive nor easy. To preserve a certain pretence or appearance of virtue, especially when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel in the hands of the community, is a possible and not uncommon accomplishment. But to be at heart and in reality as considerate of others as we are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural. Human beings are not children of the sun, sojourning for a season on this spheroid of clay, and needing only pinions to be angels. Human nature did not come, pure and shining, down from the glittering gods. It came out of the jungle. Civilised peoples are the not very remote posterity of savages, and savages are the posterity of individuals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood in their veins. Civilised men and women are troglodytes with a veneering of virtue. In the heart of every ‘civilised’ man and woman is an unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism. Humanity is only a habit. Against it, and tending ever to weaken and subvert it, are the powerful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen’s ‘Rhymed Epistle,’ civilisation carries a corpse in its cargo—the elemental appetites and passions which have been implanted in all sentient nature by the laws in accordance with which organic forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is simply the sloughing off of this inherited animality.To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts.II. EGOISM AND ALTRUISM.Everything has been evolved—everything—from daffodils to states and from ticks to religion. Every organic thing is the result of long and incessant survival of the advantageous—advantageous from the standpoint of the organism itself or from the standpoint of its kind, not necessarily so from the standpoint of the universe. That which is true of everything is true also of egoism and altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts in the natures of human and other beings for the same reason that the various physical facts exist in the structures of human and other beings, because they have been advantageous in the struggle for life. There is just as definite an explanation for the existence of egoism and altruism in this world, and for their existence in the particular form and ratio in which they do exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the kildeer the mottled markings of the clods among which they lie.Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one’s own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world.‘I saw the fishes playing there;I saw all that was in the whole world round;In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.All these I saw, and say to you,That nothing lives among them without hate.’Life has been developed through selection. This selection has been brought about largely through war—war between individuals and between groups of individuals. War and competition are struggle between living beings, and the soul of competition is selfishness. Egoism is the primal and most powerful of terrestrial impulses, because beings hated and exterminated each other before they tolerated and loved, and because struggle has far overshadowed cooperation as a factor in life evolution.There are those who believe that mutual aid has been a more dynamic factor in the development of terrestrial life than competition. Cooperation has been an important element in the evolution of animal life, and it has operated among nearly all animals, from the humblest to the highest. Far down near the beginning of organic existence we find the one-celled forms huddling together in colonies, giving rise in the course of time to the many-celled animals. But to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in animal development is to shut one’s eyes to one of the most obvious and overwhelming facts of organic evolution. Individualism antedates mutualism, both among the one-celled forms and among the many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is the sequence of a long preliminary of individual contention. And cooperation does not mean cessation of struggle, either among those co-operating or among the groups themselves, as Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the mutual aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little more than transfer the struggle from individuals to groups. When a lot of pelicans or wolves get together and work together in order that they may thereby the better defend themselves or slay others it is hard to see how such facts can be placed to the credit of cooperation any more than to that of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so far as to do more than slightly alleviate the competition even among the members of a co-operating group. Competition is a much more common and influential fact in the phenomena of life than cooperation, for it involves a large part of the activity of individual life, and is also prominent in all social activities.The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this individual, as the world’s executive, continues to determine its phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world, what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while.Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for, others. It shows itself in feelings of justice, goodwill, tenderness, charity, pity, public spirit, sympathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of kindness, humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philanthropy and the like. Altruism is a graft. The stock is selfishness and brutality. Altruism (the form of altruism to which I here refer: there are several distinct species of altruism) has come into the world as a result of cooperation and consanguinity. It has grown out of the cooperation of individuals in families and tribes against their cooperating enemies. Altruism—at least, in its initial stages—is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and other animals have learned to stand by each other and help each other against their common foes because it was the only way in which they were able to stand. Those aggregates that have had strongest this feeling of fraternity have prospered and prevailed, while the less fraternal have gone down.The altruism manifested by men in their relations with each other is not different in kind from the altruism and cooperation displayed by other social animals. Human gregariousness—the gathering together of human beings into tribes and communities for purposes of companionship and defence—is a part of the phenomena of animal gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a human town, however much they may think so, are not impelled to associate with each other and to cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by causes or considerations different from those which actuate a society of ants or apes, of wasps or wolves, who do the same things. The antecedents of human ethics and society are, therefore, to be looked for in the ant-hill and the jungle.The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individualswith each otherandagainst othersis a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth.To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism. The ethical systems of all peoples are, and have always been, to a greater or less extent, provincial and contradictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not extended universally—that is, to all beings—but are maintained only among those associating more or less closely as a group, and having interests that are more or less nearly the same. Among men of primitive mind, morality is a thing to be practised toward only a few thousand or even a few hundred individuals, and then in a very half-awake and half-hearted manner. But as the perceptions sharpen and vivify and the horizon of knowledge widens—as commerce and imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow bounds of the community into larger dimensions of time and space—as the myriad influences operating as race experience and race selection enable men to realise the wider and wider oneness of their origin, natures, interests, and destiny—an increasing consistency characterises the conduct among the members of the group, and an increasingly larger number of individuals are admitted to ethical consideration and kinship.III. The Ethics of the Savage.The ethics of the savage is, almost without exception, purely tribal in its extent. A marked distinction is everywhere made by primitive peoples between injuries to personsinsidethe tribe and injuries to thoseoutsidethe tribe. Crimes which are looked upon as felonious when committed by a savage against the members of his own tribe may be regarded as harmless, or even highly commendable, when perpetrated on those outside the tribe. Acts are not judged according to their intrinsic natures or results, but wholly as to whether they are performed on outsiders or on insiders. The Balantis (Africa) punish with death a theft committed against a fellow-tribesman, but encourage and reward thieving from other tribes. The Afridi (Afghanistan) mother prays that her son may be a successful robber—not a robber of her own people, but of other peoples—and in order that he may become proficient in crime teaches him to creep stealthily through a hole in the wall. By certain Bedouin tribes the ‘strenuous life’ is held in such high honour that ‘it is considered a disgrace to die in bed’; and among the man-eating Fijians ‘men who have not slain an enemy suffer the most degrading of all punishments’.[1a]In the paradise of the Kukis (India) the cut-throats who have in life killed the largest number of aliens not only inherit the highest places, but these adepts of the knife are supposed to be attended in their celestial comings and goings by their victims as slaves.[1b]In his dealings with the other members of his tribe, the savage observes a certain rude code of morals, this code being usually, as in the case of the civilised code, an inglorious mixture of equity and brutality, superstition and sanity, honesty and hypocrisy. But the savage recognises no moral obligations to any being outside of his tribe, clan, or family. Anthropology teaches nothing more positively than this. Consanguinity and self-interest are the only bases of savage friendship. Outsiders are outlaws. They may be attacked, robbed, deceived, murdered, eaten, or enslaved, with perfect propriety. It was this general hostility of foreigners that Cain feared when he was turned out from his countrymen after his crime upon Abel. He knew that he was liable to be set upon by the first stranger that came upon him. So the Lord is said to have set a mark upon him, ‘lest any finding him should kill him.’‘There was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers,’ says Sir Henry Maine, in speaking of the ancestors of the Aryan and Semitic races, ‘except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If a man was not of kin to another, there was nothing between them. He was an enemy to be hated, slain, or despoiled as much as the wild beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging, indeed, to the craftiest and cruelest of wild animals. It would scarcely be too strong to assert that the dogs which followed the camp had more in common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe’.[2a]Among some tribes of savage men the ethical code is reversed in dealing with outsiders, and enmity toward aliens is considered a duty.This same senseless hostility toward every one from abroad, so spitefully exhibited by primitive men, is also manifested by ants, who immediately recognise and pounce upon an individual introduced from a foreign colony, but welcome with every demonstration of joy, even after a lapse of weeks or months, a returning member of their own society. The same spirit of exclusiveness is found also in elephants. If by accident an elephant becomes separated from his herd, he becomes an outcast and a fugitive, never being permitted in any circumstances to attach himself to another herd.[3]That the savage should entertain feelings of friendship for those belonging to the same social unit as himself is, considering the circumstances in which it takes place, a perfectly natural phenomenon. The members of his tribe are, to the savage, the beings among whom he has come into existence, and in the midst of whom he has grown up. He knows and understands them, and is known and understood by them. They speak the same language as himself, and cherish the same customs and traditions. They have the same sacred trees, the same gods, the same experiences day after day, and the same memories, as he himself. They are his associates in the chase, his allies in war, and his comrades in sorrow and success. They are the only beings into whose lives he has ever entered. They constitute his world, and are to him the only real beings in the universe.The members of his tribe are, moreover, to the savage, for the most part, his kinspeople. If they are not actually related to him by blood, they are usually conceived by him to be so related. The co-villagers of an Indian community call each other brothers. It is a characteristic of all the Aryan and Semitic races when in the tribal state to conceive that the tribes themselves, and all subdivisions of them, are descended each from a single male ancestor. The savage sees the living family of which he forms a part descended from a single living man and his wife or wives. This family group with which he is familiar and other similar groups make up the tribe. And the process by which each family has been brought about is in his mind identical with the process by which the community as a whole has been formed.[2b]It is a conception of this kind, handed down as a tradition from ancient tribal times, which causes the Jews even to-day to regard themselves as the ‘seed’ of that venerable sheik who, so many centuries ago, led them as a band of nomads in their memorable migration westward from the plains of Mesopotamia. It is not strange, therefore, considering all of the circumstances in the midst of which the savage lives and moves, that he should look upon his fellow-tribesmen as beings to be distinguished by him from all other beings in the universe.Nor is it strange, when we consider the mental sterility of the savage, his lack of travel and imagination, the meagerness of his experiences, and his utter ignorance of the world beyond the community in which he lives, that he should look upon and treat all outsiders as nobodies—as beings without any claims whatever upon his humanity or mercy. The imagination is the picturing power of the mind, the power by which beings are able to get out of themselves and into the places of others, the power which enables us to view the world comparatively—that is, from different points of view. This power of mind, which imparts to the higher types of intelligence their mobility and sympathy, is rudimentary in the savage. This has been proved by Tylor in his study of the comparative mythology of savages. It is this lack of imagination in the savage, combined with his ignorance and his simplicity of life, which gives to him his ferocity, and which renders him inaccessible to those higher sentiments of justice and righteousness which are—well, which are, at least, dreamed about and theorised about by the more evolved savages of the ‘civilised world.’ The world, to the simple mind of the savage, is, as it is to the mind of the child, the world in which he lives and moves—the world which he feels, hears, tastes, and sees. The horizon is the boundary of the universe. Beings beyond his tribe are outside of the world. If they exist at all, it is as a very different order of beings from him and his people. They are not of kin to him, speak a strange tongue, and have monstrous customs and superstitions. How could they be in any way related to him? They are his enemies—vague villainous apparitions who appear to him only in the horrible ordeals of battle. His chief occupation is the waging of war against them, and his keenest gratification is felt in laying them low. The accounts of all travellers testify that the intertribal relations of savages are, with few exceptions, those of chronic feud and hostility. The irreconcilable antagonism between the savage and those around him begets in the savage nature its dominating impulse—hate, hatred and hostility toward other men, as well as toward all other beings. In fact, the savage makes no moral distinction between man and the other animals, but regards them all indiscriminately as his foes, whom he must either use or remove from the face of the earth. The savage hunts men about as he hunts other animals, and for a like purpose. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt antelopes to-day.1a.1b.Spencer:Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893..2a.2b.Maine:Early History of Institutions; New York, 1869.3.Tennent:Natural History of Ceylon; London, 1861.IV. The Ethics of the Ancient.But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the centre of the world and the only real and important people in the universe, and that all others are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive peoples. Ethnocentric ethics—the ethics of amity toward their own tribe or state, their own clique or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward outsiders—has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the peoples of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment. Every people that has ever existed has had its own particular point of view, its own bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through which it has looked at life and the world. This is inevitable. It arises as a necessary sequence out of the fact that all peoples above savages are the descendants of savages, and as such have inherited the limitations, mental and environmental, of those from whom they have evolved.Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times—none whatever. International cooperation, such as exists among the political societies of Europe and America to-day, was absolutely unknown. International relations were everywhere those of hostility. States and races looked upon each other as foes, as objects of plunder and victimisation, not as friends.Caesar says of the ancient Germans that depredations committed beyond the boundaries of each state bore no infamy, and that stealing from aliens was even encouraged as a means of teaching their young men adroitness.The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration of a narrow and self-centred people. Notwithstanding their insignificance, politically and intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed themselves to be the only people of the first class inhabiting the earth. They conceived that they had been selected as favourites by the gods themselves, and that around their little district in half-arid Palestine revolved the interests of the entire world. Their chief city was supposed to be the sacred and central city of the world, and heaven itself only a new and idealised edition of their metropolis. Every Jew was bound to every other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obligation. But all non-Jews were ‘Gentiles,’ chaff-like ‘pagans,’ who possessed no rights which a ‘child of Abraham’ was bound to respect. Their tribal god is said to have been so indulgent toward them as his ‘chosen people’ that he allowed them to exact usury from foreigners, to sell them diseased meats, and to borrow jewels from them and afterwards run away with them. He even permitted them to make war upon weak peoples and dispossess them of their lands. ‘Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess’ (Judg. xi. 24).The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so accustomed to cruelties upon non-Assyrians, and were so proud of these cruelties, that they recorded them in stone as a claim to immortality among men. Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, says: ‘I pulled out their tongues and cut off their limbs, and caused them to be eaten by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.’ Assur-natsir-pal, another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly: ‘I flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with their skins, and their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust.’ ‘Their carcasses covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains,’ says Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Muskayans; and Sennacherib informs us proudly that he drove his chariot over the dead bodies of his victims until ‘its wheels were clogged with flesh and blood.’ ‘Evidently’ remarks Spencer, in speaking of these monstrous inscriptions, ‘the expectation was that men of after-times would admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves eternally infamous’.[1]To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of human beings in the world: Greeks and ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks were the inhabitants of Hellas, which was believed to be the central region of the world, and the ‘barbarians’ were the godless denizens of the less-favoured and less centrally located remainder of the earth. The world was believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its exact centre stood Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly. This mountain, which is 9,700 feet high, was supposed to be the highest elevation on the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes. According to their fabled genealogy, they were the descendants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah. While they were often at war with each other, they spoke a common language, and always regarded themselves as members of a single family. All non-Greeks were ‘barbarians,’ including the Romans, who were called ‘barbarians’ down to the time of Augustus. While the Greeks themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright blood of the gods, the ‘barbarians’ were generally supposed to have originated from stones and trees. The ‘barbarians’ were looked upon and treated by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of beings from themselves. Those taken by them in war were regularly reduced to slavery. The slave population created in this way was increased by the slave traffic carried on with the East until the slave population of Greece was several times as great as the free population. The whole Hellenic world, in fact, even in the days of its greatest magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost every freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out of a population of about five hundred thousand, four hundred thousand were slaves. It was considered a real hardship by the Greeks to be compelled to get along with less than a half-dozen slaves. In Corinth and Aegina there were ten slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were the vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, whom the Spartans had conquered and reduced to chains in early times. Their lot was particularly horrible. They were the property of the state, and were distributed to the Spartan lords by lot. ‘They practically had no rights which their masters felt bound to respect. If one of their number displayed unusual powers of either body or mind, he was secretly assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe to allow such qualities to be fostered in the servile class. It is affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots grew too numerous for the supposed safety of the state, their numbers were thinned by deliberate massacre of the surplus population’.[2]The conception of human slavery entertained by the common mass of Greeks may be inferred from the fact that philosophers like Aristotle taught that ‘slaves were simply domestic animals possessed of intelligence.’ It is this fact, this utter lack of justice and humanity manifested by the Greeks in their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which gives to Greek ‘civilisation’ its seamy side. Greek society has been appropriately likened to a pyramid, its apex gleaming with light and splendour, while its base was sunk in darkness.Non-Romans were called ‘barbarians’ also by the Romans, and were considered by the Romans to be an entirely different order of beings from themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was, according to the Romans, superior to the most illustrious ‘barbarian.’ Men were not treated nor estimated according to their intrinsic qualities, but wholly as to whether they were or were not ‘Roman citizens.’ To be a ‘Roman citizen’ was to be entitled to everything; to be a ‘barbarian’ was not to be entitled to anything necessarily, except to serve in some way the all-glorious Romans. The elaborate legal and ethical codes formulated by these masters of the Mediterranean were reserved religiously for themselves. The business of the ‘barbarians’ was to furnish fields for pillage and conquest, to impart magnitude to triumphal pageants, to act as slaves, and to die by ignominiously butchering each other for the amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ‘Barbarian’ lands were looked upon simply as game-preserves where ambitious captains from the Tiber went to refresh their reputations by hunting and victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome is the history of infamy on a colossal, almost world-wide, scale. There has never been displayed by any people pretending to be civilised such shameless savagery as that displayed by the Romans in their gladiatorial arenas, where men (generally the captives of war) were ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday.’ These tragedies, in their magnitude and atrocity, seem almost frightful when we read of them on the pages of history. They were generally celebrated by victorious captains and emperors at the close of some unusual outrage against the ‘barbarians,’ or upon the departure of Roman legions for the field of activity. The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his victories over the Dacians with shows that lasted more than a hundred days. During this horrible festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena, and more than ten thousand wild animals were slain. The gladiators in these ancient combats fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot—in all the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle. They fought with swords, lances, daggers, tridents, and every other manner of weapon. Some had nets and lassoes with which they entangled their adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a wounded gladiator was in the hands of the spectators, who showed their clemency or their lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively down or up. The thirst of the populace for blood was sometimes such that the dying were aroused and forced on to the fight by burning with a hot iron. The dead bodies were dragged from the arena with hooks, like the carcasses of animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with dry sand.[3a]There was an occasional Roman, like Seneca, sane enough to realise the real character of these performances, and brave enough to denounce them as crimes. But by the great mass of all classes of Romans, even by those who pretended to think, they were regarded with perfect moral indifference. The excuse offered by Pliny was generally concurred in by his countrymen, that these bloody shows were necessary for the cultivation of manliness and for keeping awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in the young.Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human slavery. During the later republic and the earlier empire, one-half the population of the Roman state was slaves. The slave population was recruited chiefly, as in Greece, by war and by slave-hunting. Slave-traders and slave-markets flourished both in the capital itself and in all the great ports visited by Roman ships. Some of the outlying provinces of Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by the slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-priced, because the most intelligent. Among the wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich of every age, dawdled their time in ostentation, there were slaves for each different function in the household. There were thecubicularii, who acted as housemaids; thetriclinarii, who waited at table; theculinarii, who acted as kitchen drudges; and thebalnearii, who looked after the baths. Then there weretonsoresor barbers;criniflores, or hair-crimpers;calceatores, who took care of the feet; andlectores, whose business it was to read aloud to their masters at meals, in the bath, or in bed. Theostiarius, who was sometimes chained in the vestibule like a dog, was the porter; theinvitatorsummoned the guests; and theservus ab hospitiislooked after their lodgment. There was the slave called thesandalio, whose sole duty was to care for his master’s sandals; and another, called thenomenclator, whose exclusive business it was to accompany his master when he went upon the street, and give him the names of such persons as he ought to recognise. The common punishment for a refractory slave was beating. If the runaway were caught, as he could hardly fail to be, since there were extremely heavy penalties for harbouring or assisting him, he was either branded or had an iron collar like a dog’s welded around his neck, or his legs were fettered, or, in exaggerated or repeated cases of offence, he was at once turned into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he attempted to take personal vengeance upon his master for any wrong whatsoever, his whole family shared his fate, and the regular form of capital punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the most ignominious and agonising circumstances.[4]‘In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the slaves were forced to work in chains and to sleep in subterranean prisons. The feeling entertained toward this unfortunate class in the later republican period is illustrated by Varro’s classification of slaves as “vocal agricultural implements,” and by Cato the Elder’s recommendation that old and worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of economy. Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to an island in the Tiber, and there left to die of starvation and exposure’.[3b]Slaves were practically without any rights whatever to the world in which they lived. A Roman could take the life of his Gallic slave with as complete impunity as an American can slay his bovine servant to-day. Romans, in short, looked upon and treated non-Romans about as human beings to-day look upon and treat non-humans—as mere prey.1.Spencer:Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893.2.Myers:Ancient History, part i.; Boston, 1899.3a.3b.Myers:Ancient History, part ii.; Boston, 1899.4.Preston and Dodge:The Private Life of the Romans; Boston, 1896.V. Modern Ethics.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 moredistant 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.VI. The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings.But the most mournful instance of provincial ethics afforded by the inhabitants of the earth is not that furnished by the varieties of the human species in their conduct toward each other, but that afforded by the human race as a whole in its treatment of the non-human races. Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world. With the development of the representative powers of the mind, the widening and mutualising of human activities, and the consequent enlargement of the human horizon, the feeling of amity has spread and intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that is true of human sectionalism, the ethical systems of civilised peoples include, theoretically at least, and more or less seriously, all human beings whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended from individual to family, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to race, from race to species, until, in the case of many millions of men, ethical feeling has reached, with greater or less vividness and consistency, the anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that an individual is aman—that is, that he belongs to the human species of animals—entitles him in all civilised lands to the fundamental rights and privileges of existence. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by all exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties of everyhumanbeing who comes into the world.But, except by occasional individuals here and there whose emotions are more civilised than the rest, or whose conceptions are more ample and clear, ethical relations are not extended by human beings beyond the bounds of their own species. Non-human millions areoutsiders. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked upon as merethings—mere moving, multiplying objects, without the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves. They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, ‘Lions, tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.’ Accustomed from our cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact (‘paragons’ though they pretend to be), the most predatory and brutal of all animals—the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of the planet.It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, to commit crimes upon any beings in this world, except men. There are no beings in the universe, according to human beings, except themselves. All others are commodities. They are of consequence only because they have thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places of the human alimentary. Human beings are ‘persons,’ and have souls and gods and places to go to when they die. But the hundreds of thousands of other races of terrestrial inhabitants are mere ‘animals,’ mere ‘brutes,’ and ‘beasts of the field,’ ‘livestock’ and ‘vermin.’ Every crime capable of being perpetrated by one being upon another is day after day rained upon them, and with an equanimity that would do honour to the managers of an inferno. Human beings preach as the cardinal rule of morality—and they seem never to tire of its reiteration—that they should do unto others as they would that others would do unto them; but they hypocritically confine its application to the members of their own crowd, notwithstanding there are the same reasons identically for extending it to all creatures. The happiness of the human species is assumed to be so much more precious than that of others that the most sacred interests of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order that human desires may all be fastidiously catered to. Even for a tooth or a feather or a piece of skin to wear on human vanity, forests are depopulated and the land filled with the dead and dying. Assassination is the commonest and most fashionable of human pastimes. Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little compunction as savages put on war-paint. They come back from their campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old Rome, trailing their victims as trophies, and expecting to be hailed as heroes for the hells they have established. Barbarians preponderate, and morality is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, and broad-mindedness is rewarded with a sneer. Compassion is a disease, and to be fashionable is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no nerves and no choice of emotions, and were utterly indifferent to life, they could scarcely be treated more completely as personal nonentities.The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals andupondifferent individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct. There is, in fact, but one great crime in the universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances of this crime. It is the crime ofexploitation—the considering by some beings of themselves asendsand of others as theirmeans—the refusal to recognise the equal, or the approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others wouldnotact toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter of the inhabited globe.Every beingis anend. In other words, every being is to be taken into account in determining the ends of conduct. This is the only consistent outcome of the ethical process which is in course of evolution on the earth. This world was not made and presented to any particular clique for its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth belongs, if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit it—toallof them. And when one being or set of beings sets itself up as the sole end for which the universe exists, and looks upon and acts toward others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation, nothing else and never can be anything else, it matters not by whom or upon whom the usurpation is practised. A tyrant who puts his own welfare and aggrandisement in the place of the welfare of a people, and compels the whole people to act as a means to his own personal ends, is not more certainly a usurper than is a species or variety which puts its welfare in the place of the welfare of all the inhabitants of a world. The refusal to put one’s self in the place of others and to act toward them as one would that they would act toward him does not depend for its wrongfulness upon who makes the refusal or upon whether the refusal falls upon this or that individual or set. Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done,depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe. The basic mistake that has ever been made in this egoistic world in the judging and classifying of acts has been the mistake of judging and classifying them with reference to their effects upon some particular fraction of the inhabitants of the universe. In pure egoism conduct is judged as good or bad solely with reference to the results, immediate or remote, which that conduct produces, or is calculated to produce, on theself. To the savage, that is right or wrong which affects favourably or unfavourablyhimselfor histribe. And this sectional spirit of the savage has, as has been shown, characterised the moral conceptions of the peoples of all times. The practice human beings have to-day—the practice of those (relatively) broad and emancipated minds who are large enough to rise above the petty prejudices and ‘patriotisms’ of the races and corporations of men, and are able to view ‘the world as their country’ (the world ofhumanbeings, of course)—the practice such minds have of estimating conduct solely with reference to its effects upon the human species of animals is a practice which, while infinitely broader and more nearly ultimate than that of the savage, belongs logically in the same category with it. The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude ofuniversal gentleness and humanity.‘The world is my country,’ said Thomas Paine, and every man, woman, and child capable of appreciating the exalted sentiment applauded. But ‘the world’ of the great freethinker was inhabited bymen only.The following lines were written by Robert Whitaker, and first printed in a San Francisco newspaper:‘My Country is the world! I countNo son of man my foe,Whether the warm life currents mountAnd mantle brows like snow,Or whether yellow, brown, or black,The face that into mine looks back.‘My Native Land is Mother Earth,And all men are my kin,Whether of rude or gentle birth,However steeped in sin;Or rich or poor, or great or small,I count them brothers one and all.‘My Flag is the star-spangled sky,Woven without a seam,Where dawn and sunset colours lie,Fair as an angel’s dream,The Flag that still unstained, untorn,Floats over all of mortal born‘My Party is all humankind,My Platform, brotherhood;I count all men of honest mindWho work for human good,And for the hope that gleams afar.My comrades in the holy war.‘My Country is the world! I scornNo lesser love than mine,But calmly wait that happy mornWhen all shall own this sign,And love of country, as of clan,Shall yield to love of Man.’Robert Whitaker, you are a grand improvement on the ‘jingo.’ But you are still too small. There are conceptions as much more prophetic and exalted than yours as your conception is superior to that of the Figian.Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called ‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of the political unit to which they belong—he is not broad enough. He is still asectionalist, apartialist. He represents but astagein the process of ethical expansion. He is, in fact, small compared with theuniversalist, just as the savage is small compared with the philanthropist. ‘Mankind,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘all men,’ ‘the whole human family’—these are big conceptions, too big for the poor little nubbins of brains with which most millions make the effort to think. But they are pitifully small compared with that grand conception of kinship which takes in all the races that live and move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these conceptions compared with that sublime and supreme synthesis which embraces not only the present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but which extends longitudinally as well as laterally, extends in time as well as in space, and embraces the generations which shall grow out of the existing generation and which are yet unborn—that conception which recognises earth-life as a single process, world-wide and immortal, every part related and akin to every other party and each generation linked to an unending posterity.Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough to judge of acts of conduct according to their intrinsic natures and consequences rather than according to some local or traditional bias, cannot help knowing that the exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim or convenience is an offence against the laws of morality, not different in kind from the offences denounced in human laws as robbery and murder. The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or to kill a sheep for his skin ismurder, and those who do these things or cause them to be done aremurderersjust as actually as highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their guineas. If these thingsseem untrueit is not because theyareuntrue, but because those to whom they seem soare unable to judge conduct from the quadrupedal point of view. If there were in this world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should look upon Caucasians as simply so much ‘beef’ and ‘mutton,’ these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not only preposterous, but fiendish.VII. The Origin of Provincialism.Human provincialism, all of it, is the consequence of a common cause—the provincialism of the savage. Back of the provincialism of the savage is, of course, the antecedent fact of primordial egoism. The savage is the common ancestor of all men, and as such has imparted to all men their general characters of mind and heart. Everything that grows, whether it be a tree, a human being, a grass blade, or a race, grows from something. This something, this germ or embryo from which each thing springs, imparts to the thing its fundamental characters. However far anything may evolve, and however much it may come to differ superficially from its original, it will always remain at heart more or less faithful to the facts of its genesis. This hereditary tendency of everything, this tendency toward invariability, is the conservative, or inertial tendency of the universe. All races, colours, and conditions of men—civilised, slightly civilised, and barbarous—extend back to, and take root in, savages, just as all savages have probably sprung in some still more remote period of the past from a single stirp of anthropoids. The savage is, therefore, the author of human nature and philosophy. Just as the fish, which is the common ancestor of all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, has predetermined the general structural style of all subsequently evolved vertebrates, so the savage, as the original ancestor of mankind, has predetermined the general mental and dispositional make-up of all higher men. That civilised and semi-civilised men are naturally narrow and revengeful, selfish and superstitious, and find it next to impossible to feel and act toward others as they would like to have others feel and act toward them, is, therefore, not more mysterious than that vertebrates have red blood, two eyes, two pairs of limbs, and a backbone with a bulging brain-box at the hither end of it. Just as the habits, beliefs, and conceptions of the child persist, often but slightly modified, in the full-grown man or woman, so the habits, beliefs, and conceptions, formed by the race in its childhood, continue, under the influence of the same laws of inertia, on into the more mature stages of racial development. Human nature changes with great reluctance, and only in its superficial aspects at that. There are cave-men, men with the primitive ideas and practices of the Stone Age, and men in the pastoral and hunting stages of mankind, in all the highest societies of men. There is scarcely a habit, vice, occupation, amusement, crime, or trait of character, found among men of the past but may be seen still among our contemporaries.Altruism (other-love) is just as natural as egoism (self-love) is. There is not so much of it in the world as there is of egoism. But that is simply the misfortune of our place of existence. There is no reason why there might not have been as much, or even more, under different conditions. With the same antecedents, nothing can, of course, happen differently from what does happen. But with different antecedents, different causes, the results are bound to be different. Civilised men are not beings of altruism, because they are not theeffectsof that kind ofcauses. But there is no reason why there might not be a world—several of them, in fact, or even a universeful—where the inhabitants have never known or heard of such an indelicate thing as of beings preferring themselves to others—where it is as natural for them to act toward each other according to what we call the Golden Rule as it is for us terrestrial heathens to violate it. It is possible to conceive of beings with even too much altruism. The ideal condition is one of balanced egoism and altruism—one in which each thinks as much of others as he does of himself, no more and no less. And if beings were endowed with natures rendering them not only willing butdeterminedto act primarily in the interests of others, and this condition of things were universal, there would be about as much discord and strife as if everyone acted in the interest of himself. The Golden Rule among a lot of hypothetical otherists like this would be the opposite of ours, for, instead of emphasising the importance of others as we do, they would need to encourage regard for self. Wouldn’t it seem original to live in a world where men were sent to gaol for over-benevolence, and where sermons had to be preached on such texts as, ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’; ‘It is more blessed to receive than to give’; ‘Avoid doing to yourself that which you do not like when done to others’; ‘The Lord loves a cheerful taker’; and the like?The persistence with which savage ideas and instincts continue to influence men long after those ideas and instincts have really become anachronistic and vestigial is well illustrated by civilised men and women everywhere. The sun continues to ‘rise’ and ‘set’ in all civilised lands just as it used to do to the savage, although men have long since learned that it does not do either. Hell, as originally conceived, was an actual subterranean region, and heaven was an abode located a few hours’ journey above the supposedly flat earth. To-day we continue to say ‘upto heaven,’ and ‘downto hell’ (never ‘down to heaven’ and ‘up to hell’), and always think of these places as being thus relatively located, although it is extremely doubtful whether any really sane mind continues to believe that hell is on the inside of the earth (or any place else, for that matter), and althoughupmeans simply away from the centre of the earth, and away from the centre of a ball means literally every possible direction. The theological theories of the origin, nature, and destiny of man and of the universe in general, all of which originated in savage or semi-savage minds, and all of which bear the unmistakable traces of their origin, continue to cling to the minds of the masses of civilised men, notwithstanding the inherent absurdity of these theories, and notwithstanding the fact that their unsoundness is vouched for by the most positive and unanimous assurances from the scientific world. Why should civilised men and women, any of them, be indifferent to the sufferings of others, or find delight in such loathsome avocations as the fishing and hunting of their fellow-creatures? Because their ancestors were savages, and they are not yet sufficiently evolved to be independent of the instincts of their savage sires. There is no other explanation. No human being could enjoy seeing a pack of hounds hunt down and rend to pieces a poor harmless hare—unless he were a savage. No human being could go out to the abodes of the squirrel and quail, and shoot murderous balls into their beautiful bodies for food or fun—unless he were a savage. No human being would lounge all day about the margins of a brook, blind to the beauties of the stream and the glories of forest and sky, in order to thrust brutal hooks into the lips of those whom he deceives, and drag them from their waters to suffocate in the sun—unless he were a savage. No human being would have palaces and parks and yachts and equipages, townships of lands, packs of hounds, and studs of horses, troops of lackeys and nothing to do, when all around him are the men and women who made this wealth, half clad and half starved, suffocating in shanties and working like wretches from morning till night—unless he were a savage. All of these deeds are savage deeds, deeds of exceeding thoughtlessness and brutality, and, instead of being enjoyable, are to every emancipated mind positively painful.Hunting, fishing, and fighting are the chief occupations of savage life. Back of the activities displayed in these occupations are powerful instincts prompting and sustaining them. Civilised peoples are devoted primarily to the arts of industry and peace. But there are enough savages in every civilised society, and enough of the savage spirit in those who pretend to approximate the civilised state, to give to civilised life a decidedly barbaric aspect. War is a more or less regular exercise, and killing and competing and torturing enter largely into the pastimes of all peoples. Next to eating, fighting, in one form or another, is the favourite pursuit of men nearly everywhere on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever human beings have any energy or time left over from what they are required to spend in maintaining their existence, they use it in fighting somebody or in watching somebody else fight. And generally the more brutal and sanguinary the conflict, the more popular and satisfying it is. Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and the baseball and slugball battles of the Americans, where eager thousands gather and roar for hours like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or set of animals punish or discredit another. If there are no pigeons to shoot, or if the community is ruled by men and women who are too emancipated to allow such things, we make glass birds and heroically bang away at them, supplying by our imaginations the blood and agony of real carnage. And if we can’t do anything else, we take some poor pig, that never did anyone any harm in the world, and grease it and turn it loose, and then take after it with knives, as Chicago butchers do on vacation days, and see who can cut its throat the quickest. This amusement, in pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty near the top in the list of human pastimes so far invented. Maybe it is outclassed by that other contest sometimes advertised as a feature of butchers’ barbecues, in which a band of professional cutthroats compete to see who can kill, skin, and eviscerate the largest number of their fellow-beings in a given time.Games and other performances in which interest is aroused by contending or killing are all of them entertainments gotten up primarily for the amusement of the under-exercised savage within us. The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans, which seem so incomprehensible to the people of to-day, find their diabolical parallels right here in our high-sniffing civilisation. The bull-pen, where poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins for the amusement of Castilian communities, and the cockpit and the prize-ring, where irate fowls and naked thugs peck and pound each other to insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving mobs, are the legitimate successors of the gladiatorial arena of the Romans. The gladiatorial horror is not changed, either in its nature or functions, by changing the combatants to cocks and bulls. The ringside roars that rise to-day beside the Tagus and the Hudson over the fatal thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of the pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising from the satisfaction of the same instincts as those which seventeen centuries ago made amphitheatres thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The ability to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is not different in kind from the ability to be entertained by strife and suffering in any other form. Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified form of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at sight of the death-stagger of a mangled ox, are psychologically equipped to go into raptures over the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.Few pastimes indulged in by civilised peoples are more horrible to an emancipated mind than that of bull-fighting. It is the national amusement of Spain, and is carried on among all peoples who have acquired their natures and institutions from the Spanish. ‘Every Sunday afternoon, whenever the weather permits, 14,000 or 15,000 men and women, representing every class of society, mothers and grandmothers, priests and monks, assemble at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid to witness the most brutal spectacle the human taste approves. Six bulls are tortured and worried until they are exhausted. Then they are killed by the thrusts of the sword of a matador, who is the most popular person in the community and makes more money than any other man. Often as many as twelve horses are ripped open by the horns of the infuriated bulls, and are allowed to die in the presence of the audience, with blood gushing from their wounds and their entrails dragging upon the ground. This sort of thing is carried on not only in Madrid, but is a regular weekly festival in all the cities of Spain. The horses are blindfolded, so they cannot even see what attacks them. The men who torture the bulls have wooden screens behind which they can dodge when pursued, and if one of the baited creatures crowds too closely upon any of its tormentors, the other matadors throw a blanket over its head. It is not sport, for the poor bulls have no chance whatever to escape or to fight back. It is simply slow butchery, an exhibition of unmitigated cowardice and cruelty. And yet, although the Spanish people are the most religious people of Europe, 95 per cent, of the population approve this atrocious barbarism—not only approve it, but demand that the King shall appear in the royal box at every bull-fight, or have his throne upset.’The notorious ‘Juke’ family of criminals, who sprang from a single ruffian who lived in 1720, has cost the State of New York millions of dollars in money and incalculable misery and crime. But the initial savage progenitors of the human species have stocked the earth with the most stupendous array of wrong-doers—knaves, felons, kings, warriors, barbarians, butchers, brutalitarians, kleptomaniacs, and thugs—that has ever (let us hope) brought damnation to a world.
Human Nature a Product of the JungleEgoism and AltruismThe Ethics of the SavageThe Ethics of the AncientModern EthicsThe Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human BeingsThe Origin of ProvincialismUniversal EthicsThe Psychology of AltruismAnthropocentric EthicsEthical Implications of EvolutionConclusion
One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the ‘idols (or illusions) of the tribe’ by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.
One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the ‘idols (or illusions) of the tribe’ by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.
The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth. To be civilised or even half-civilised is, to the children of this world, neither instinctive nor easy. To preserve a certain pretence or appearance of virtue, especially when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel in the hands of the community, is a possible and not uncommon accomplishment. But to be at heart and in reality as considerate of others as we are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural. Human beings are not children of the sun, sojourning for a season on this spheroid of clay, and needing only pinions to be angels. Human nature did not come, pure and shining, down from the glittering gods. It came out of the jungle. Civilised peoples are the not very remote posterity of savages, and savages are the posterity of individuals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood in their veins. Civilised men and women are troglodytes with a veneering of virtue. In the heart of every ‘civilised’ man and woman is an unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism. Humanity is only a habit. Against it, and tending ever to weaken and subvert it, are the powerful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen’s ‘Rhymed Epistle,’ civilisation carries a corpse in its cargo—the elemental appetites and passions which have been implanted in all sentient nature by the laws in accordance with which organic forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is simply the sloughing off of this inherited animality.
To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts.
Everything has been evolved—everything—from daffodils to states and from ticks to religion. Every organic thing is the result of long and incessant survival of the advantageous—advantageous from the standpoint of the organism itself or from the standpoint of its kind, not necessarily so from the standpoint of the universe. That which is true of everything is true also of egoism and altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts in the natures of human and other beings for the same reason that the various physical facts exist in the structures of human and other beings, because they have been advantageous in the struggle for life. There is just as definite an explanation for the existence of egoism and altruism in this world, and for their existence in the particular form and ratio in which they do exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the kildeer the mottled markings of the clods among which they lie.
Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one’s own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world.
‘I saw the fishes playing there;I saw all that was in the whole world round;In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.All these I saw, and say to you,That nothing lives among them without hate.’
‘I saw the fishes playing there;I saw all that was in the whole world round;In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.All these I saw, and say to you,That nothing lives among them without hate.’
Life has been developed through selection. This selection has been brought about largely through war—war between individuals and between groups of individuals. War and competition are struggle between living beings, and the soul of competition is selfishness. Egoism is the primal and most powerful of terrestrial impulses, because beings hated and exterminated each other before they tolerated and loved, and because struggle has far overshadowed cooperation as a factor in life evolution.
There are those who believe that mutual aid has been a more dynamic factor in the development of terrestrial life than competition. Cooperation has been an important element in the evolution of animal life, and it has operated among nearly all animals, from the humblest to the highest. Far down near the beginning of organic existence we find the one-celled forms huddling together in colonies, giving rise in the course of time to the many-celled animals. But to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in animal development is to shut one’s eyes to one of the most obvious and overwhelming facts of organic evolution. Individualism antedates mutualism, both among the one-celled forms and among the many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is the sequence of a long preliminary of individual contention. And cooperation does not mean cessation of struggle, either among those co-operating or among the groups themselves, as Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the mutual aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little more than transfer the struggle from individuals to groups. When a lot of pelicans or wolves get together and work together in order that they may thereby the better defend themselves or slay others it is hard to see how such facts can be placed to the credit of cooperation any more than to that of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so far as to do more than slightly alleviate the competition even among the members of a co-operating group. Competition is a much more common and influential fact in the phenomena of life than cooperation, for it involves a large part of the activity of individual life, and is also prominent in all social activities.
The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this individual, as the world’s executive, continues to determine its phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world, what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while.
Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for, others. It shows itself in feelings of justice, goodwill, tenderness, charity, pity, public spirit, sympathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of kindness, humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philanthropy and the like. Altruism is a graft. The stock is selfishness and brutality. Altruism (the form of altruism to which I here refer: there are several distinct species of altruism) has come into the world as a result of cooperation and consanguinity. It has grown out of the cooperation of individuals in families and tribes against their cooperating enemies. Altruism—at least, in its initial stages—is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and other animals have learned to stand by each other and help each other against their common foes because it was the only way in which they were able to stand. Those aggregates that have had strongest this feeling of fraternity have prospered and prevailed, while the less fraternal have gone down.
The altruism manifested by men in their relations with each other is not different in kind from the altruism and cooperation displayed by other social animals. Human gregariousness—the gathering together of human beings into tribes and communities for purposes of companionship and defence—is a part of the phenomena of animal gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a human town, however much they may think so, are not impelled to associate with each other and to cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by causes or considerations different from those which actuate a society of ants or apes, of wasps or wolves, who do the same things. The antecedents of human ethics and society are, therefore, to be looked for in the ant-hill and the jungle.
The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individualswith each otherandagainst othersis a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth.To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism. The ethical systems of all peoples are, and have always been, to a greater or less extent, provincial and contradictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not extended universally—that is, to all beings—but are maintained only among those associating more or less closely as a group, and having interests that are more or less nearly the same. Among men of primitive mind, morality is a thing to be practised toward only a few thousand or even a few hundred individuals, and then in a very half-awake and half-hearted manner. But as the perceptions sharpen and vivify and the horizon of knowledge widens—as commerce and imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow bounds of the community into larger dimensions of time and space—as the myriad influences operating as race experience and race selection enable men to realise the wider and wider oneness of their origin, natures, interests, and destiny—an increasing consistency characterises the conduct among the members of the group, and an increasingly larger number of individuals are admitted to ethical consideration and kinship.
The ethics of the savage is, almost without exception, purely tribal in its extent. A marked distinction is everywhere made by primitive peoples between injuries to personsinsidethe tribe and injuries to thoseoutsidethe tribe. Crimes which are looked upon as felonious when committed by a savage against the members of his own tribe may be regarded as harmless, or even highly commendable, when perpetrated on those outside the tribe. Acts are not judged according to their intrinsic natures or results, but wholly as to whether they are performed on outsiders or on insiders. The Balantis (Africa) punish with death a theft committed against a fellow-tribesman, but encourage and reward thieving from other tribes. The Afridi (Afghanistan) mother prays that her son may be a successful robber—not a robber of her own people, but of other peoples—and in order that he may become proficient in crime teaches him to creep stealthily through a hole in the wall. By certain Bedouin tribes the ‘strenuous life’ is held in such high honour that ‘it is considered a disgrace to die in bed’; and among the man-eating Fijians ‘men who have not slain an enemy suffer the most degrading of all punishments’.[1a]In the paradise of the Kukis (India) the cut-throats who have in life killed the largest number of aliens not only inherit the highest places, but these adepts of the knife are supposed to be attended in their celestial comings and goings by their victims as slaves.[1b]In his dealings with the other members of his tribe, the savage observes a certain rude code of morals, this code being usually, as in the case of the civilised code, an inglorious mixture of equity and brutality, superstition and sanity, honesty and hypocrisy. But the savage recognises no moral obligations to any being outside of his tribe, clan, or family. Anthropology teaches nothing more positively than this. Consanguinity and self-interest are the only bases of savage friendship. Outsiders are outlaws. They may be attacked, robbed, deceived, murdered, eaten, or enslaved, with perfect propriety. It was this general hostility of foreigners that Cain feared when he was turned out from his countrymen after his crime upon Abel. He knew that he was liable to be set upon by the first stranger that came upon him. So the Lord is said to have set a mark upon him, ‘lest any finding him should kill him.’
‘There was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers,’ says Sir Henry Maine, in speaking of the ancestors of the Aryan and Semitic races, ‘except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If a man was not of kin to another, there was nothing between them. He was an enemy to be hated, slain, or despoiled as much as the wild beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging, indeed, to the craftiest and cruelest of wild animals. It would scarcely be too strong to assert that the dogs which followed the camp had more in common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe’.[2a]Among some tribes of savage men the ethical code is reversed in dealing with outsiders, and enmity toward aliens is considered a duty.
This same senseless hostility toward every one from abroad, so spitefully exhibited by primitive men, is also manifested by ants, who immediately recognise and pounce upon an individual introduced from a foreign colony, but welcome with every demonstration of joy, even after a lapse of weeks or months, a returning member of their own society. The same spirit of exclusiveness is found also in elephants. If by accident an elephant becomes separated from his herd, he becomes an outcast and a fugitive, never being permitted in any circumstances to attach himself to another herd.[3]
That the savage should entertain feelings of friendship for those belonging to the same social unit as himself is, considering the circumstances in which it takes place, a perfectly natural phenomenon. The members of his tribe are, to the savage, the beings among whom he has come into existence, and in the midst of whom he has grown up. He knows and understands them, and is known and understood by them. They speak the same language as himself, and cherish the same customs and traditions. They have the same sacred trees, the same gods, the same experiences day after day, and the same memories, as he himself. They are his associates in the chase, his allies in war, and his comrades in sorrow and success. They are the only beings into whose lives he has ever entered. They constitute his world, and are to him the only real beings in the universe.
The members of his tribe are, moreover, to the savage, for the most part, his kinspeople. If they are not actually related to him by blood, they are usually conceived by him to be so related. The co-villagers of an Indian community call each other brothers. It is a characteristic of all the Aryan and Semitic races when in the tribal state to conceive that the tribes themselves, and all subdivisions of them, are descended each from a single male ancestor. The savage sees the living family of which he forms a part descended from a single living man and his wife or wives. This family group with which he is familiar and other similar groups make up the tribe. And the process by which each family has been brought about is in his mind identical with the process by which the community as a whole has been formed.[2b]It is a conception of this kind, handed down as a tradition from ancient tribal times, which causes the Jews even to-day to regard themselves as the ‘seed’ of that venerable sheik who, so many centuries ago, led them as a band of nomads in their memorable migration westward from the plains of Mesopotamia. It is not strange, therefore, considering all of the circumstances in the midst of which the savage lives and moves, that he should look upon his fellow-tribesmen as beings to be distinguished by him from all other beings in the universe.
Nor is it strange, when we consider the mental sterility of the savage, his lack of travel and imagination, the meagerness of his experiences, and his utter ignorance of the world beyond the community in which he lives, that he should look upon and treat all outsiders as nobodies—as beings without any claims whatever upon his humanity or mercy. The imagination is the picturing power of the mind, the power by which beings are able to get out of themselves and into the places of others, the power which enables us to view the world comparatively—that is, from different points of view. This power of mind, which imparts to the higher types of intelligence their mobility and sympathy, is rudimentary in the savage. This has been proved by Tylor in his study of the comparative mythology of savages. It is this lack of imagination in the savage, combined with his ignorance and his simplicity of life, which gives to him his ferocity, and which renders him inaccessible to those higher sentiments of justice and righteousness which are—well, which are, at least, dreamed about and theorised about by the more evolved savages of the ‘civilised world.’ The world, to the simple mind of the savage, is, as it is to the mind of the child, the world in which he lives and moves—the world which he feels, hears, tastes, and sees. The horizon is the boundary of the universe. Beings beyond his tribe are outside of the world. If they exist at all, it is as a very different order of beings from him and his people. They are not of kin to him, speak a strange tongue, and have monstrous customs and superstitions. How could they be in any way related to him? They are his enemies—vague villainous apparitions who appear to him only in the horrible ordeals of battle. His chief occupation is the waging of war against them, and his keenest gratification is felt in laying them low. The accounts of all travellers testify that the intertribal relations of savages are, with few exceptions, those of chronic feud and hostility. The irreconcilable antagonism between the savage and those around him begets in the savage nature its dominating impulse—hate, hatred and hostility toward other men, as well as toward all other beings. In fact, the savage makes no moral distinction between man and the other animals, but regards them all indiscriminately as his foes, whom he must either use or remove from the face of the earth. The savage hunts men about as he hunts other animals, and for a like purpose. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt antelopes to-day.
1a.1b.Spencer:Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893..2a.2b.Maine:Early History of Institutions; New York, 1869.3.Tennent:Natural History of Ceylon; London, 1861.
But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the centre of the world and the only real and important people in the universe, and that all others are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive peoples. Ethnocentric ethics—the ethics of amity toward their own tribe or state, their own clique or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward outsiders—has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the peoples of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment. Every people that has ever existed has had its own particular point of view, its own bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through which it has looked at life and the world. This is inevitable. It arises as a necessary sequence out of the fact that all peoples above savages are the descendants of savages, and as such have inherited the limitations, mental and environmental, of those from whom they have evolved.
Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times—none whatever. International cooperation, such as exists among the political societies of Europe and America to-day, was absolutely unknown. International relations were everywhere those of hostility. States and races looked upon each other as foes, as objects of plunder and victimisation, not as friends.
Caesar says of the ancient Germans that depredations committed beyond the boundaries of each state bore no infamy, and that stealing from aliens was even encouraged as a means of teaching their young men adroitness.
The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration of a narrow and self-centred people. Notwithstanding their insignificance, politically and intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed themselves to be the only people of the first class inhabiting the earth. They conceived that they had been selected as favourites by the gods themselves, and that around their little district in half-arid Palestine revolved the interests of the entire world. Their chief city was supposed to be the sacred and central city of the world, and heaven itself only a new and idealised edition of their metropolis. Every Jew was bound to every other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obligation. But all non-Jews were ‘Gentiles,’ chaff-like ‘pagans,’ who possessed no rights which a ‘child of Abraham’ was bound to respect. Their tribal god is said to have been so indulgent toward them as his ‘chosen people’ that he allowed them to exact usury from foreigners, to sell them diseased meats, and to borrow jewels from them and afterwards run away with them. He even permitted them to make war upon weak peoples and dispossess them of their lands. ‘Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess’ (Judg. xi. 24).
The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so accustomed to cruelties upon non-Assyrians, and were so proud of these cruelties, that they recorded them in stone as a claim to immortality among men. Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, says: ‘I pulled out their tongues and cut off their limbs, and caused them to be eaten by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.’ Assur-natsir-pal, another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly: ‘I flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with their skins, and their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust.’ ‘Their carcasses covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains,’ says Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Muskayans; and Sennacherib informs us proudly that he drove his chariot over the dead bodies of his victims until ‘its wheels were clogged with flesh and blood.’ ‘Evidently’ remarks Spencer, in speaking of these monstrous inscriptions, ‘the expectation was that men of after-times would admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves eternally infamous’.[1]
To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of human beings in the world: Greeks and ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks were the inhabitants of Hellas, which was believed to be the central region of the world, and the ‘barbarians’ were the godless denizens of the less-favoured and less centrally located remainder of the earth. The world was believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its exact centre stood Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly. This mountain, which is 9,700 feet high, was supposed to be the highest elevation on the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes. According to their fabled genealogy, they were the descendants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah. While they were often at war with each other, they spoke a common language, and always regarded themselves as members of a single family. All non-Greeks were ‘barbarians,’ including the Romans, who were called ‘barbarians’ down to the time of Augustus. While the Greeks themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright blood of the gods, the ‘barbarians’ were generally supposed to have originated from stones and trees. The ‘barbarians’ were looked upon and treated by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of beings from themselves. Those taken by them in war were regularly reduced to slavery. The slave population created in this way was increased by the slave traffic carried on with the East until the slave population of Greece was several times as great as the free population. The whole Hellenic world, in fact, even in the days of its greatest magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost every freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out of a population of about five hundred thousand, four hundred thousand were slaves. It was considered a real hardship by the Greeks to be compelled to get along with less than a half-dozen slaves. In Corinth and Aegina there were ten slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were the vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, whom the Spartans had conquered and reduced to chains in early times. Their lot was particularly horrible. They were the property of the state, and were distributed to the Spartan lords by lot. ‘They practically had no rights which their masters felt bound to respect. If one of their number displayed unusual powers of either body or mind, he was secretly assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe to allow such qualities to be fostered in the servile class. It is affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots grew too numerous for the supposed safety of the state, their numbers were thinned by deliberate massacre of the surplus population’.[2]The conception of human slavery entertained by the common mass of Greeks may be inferred from the fact that philosophers like Aristotle taught that ‘slaves were simply domestic animals possessed of intelligence.’ It is this fact, this utter lack of justice and humanity manifested by the Greeks in their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which gives to Greek ‘civilisation’ its seamy side. Greek society has been appropriately likened to a pyramid, its apex gleaming with light and splendour, while its base was sunk in darkness.
Non-Romans were called ‘barbarians’ also by the Romans, and were considered by the Romans to be an entirely different order of beings from themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was, according to the Romans, superior to the most illustrious ‘barbarian.’ Men were not treated nor estimated according to their intrinsic qualities, but wholly as to whether they were or were not ‘Roman citizens.’ To be a ‘Roman citizen’ was to be entitled to everything; to be a ‘barbarian’ was not to be entitled to anything necessarily, except to serve in some way the all-glorious Romans. The elaborate legal and ethical codes formulated by these masters of the Mediterranean were reserved religiously for themselves. The business of the ‘barbarians’ was to furnish fields for pillage and conquest, to impart magnitude to triumphal pageants, to act as slaves, and to die by ignominiously butchering each other for the amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ‘Barbarian’ lands were looked upon simply as game-preserves where ambitious captains from the Tiber went to refresh their reputations by hunting and victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome is the history of infamy on a colossal, almost world-wide, scale. There has never been displayed by any people pretending to be civilised such shameless savagery as that displayed by the Romans in their gladiatorial arenas, where men (generally the captives of war) were ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday.’ These tragedies, in their magnitude and atrocity, seem almost frightful when we read of them on the pages of history. They were generally celebrated by victorious captains and emperors at the close of some unusual outrage against the ‘barbarians,’ or upon the departure of Roman legions for the field of activity. The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his victories over the Dacians with shows that lasted more than a hundred days. During this horrible festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena, and more than ten thousand wild animals were slain. The gladiators in these ancient combats fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot—in all the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle. They fought with swords, lances, daggers, tridents, and every other manner of weapon. Some had nets and lassoes with which they entangled their adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a wounded gladiator was in the hands of the spectators, who showed their clemency or their lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively down or up. The thirst of the populace for blood was sometimes such that the dying were aroused and forced on to the fight by burning with a hot iron. The dead bodies were dragged from the arena with hooks, like the carcasses of animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with dry sand.[3a]There was an occasional Roman, like Seneca, sane enough to realise the real character of these performances, and brave enough to denounce them as crimes. But by the great mass of all classes of Romans, even by those who pretended to think, they were regarded with perfect moral indifference. The excuse offered by Pliny was generally concurred in by his countrymen, that these bloody shows were necessary for the cultivation of manliness and for keeping awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in the young.
Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human slavery. During the later republic and the earlier empire, one-half the population of the Roman state was slaves. The slave population was recruited chiefly, as in Greece, by war and by slave-hunting. Slave-traders and slave-markets flourished both in the capital itself and in all the great ports visited by Roman ships. Some of the outlying provinces of Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by the slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-priced, because the most intelligent. Among the wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich of every age, dawdled their time in ostentation, there were slaves for each different function in the household. There were thecubicularii, who acted as housemaids; thetriclinarii, who waited at table; theculinarii, who acted as kitchen drudges; and thebalnearii, who looked after the baths. Then there weretonsoresor barbers;criniflores, or hair-crimpers;calceatores, who took care of the feet; andlectores, whose business it was to read aloud to their masters at meals, in the bath, or in bed. Theostiarius, who was sometimes chained in the vestibule like a dog, was the porter; theinvitatorsummoned the guests; and theservus ab hospitiislooked after their lodgment. There was the slave called thesandalio, whose sole duty was to care for his master’s sandals; and another, called thenomenclator, whose exclusive business it was to accompany his master when he went upon the street, and give him the names of such persons as he ought to recognise. The common punishment for a refractory slave was beating. If the runaway were caught, as he could hardly fail to be, since there were extremely heavy penalties for harbouring or assisting him, he was either branded or had an iron collar like a dog’s welded around his neck, or his legs were fettered, or, in exaggerated or repeated cases of offence, he was at once turned into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he attempted to take personal vengeance upon his master for any wrong whatsoever, his whole family shared his fate, and the regular form of capital punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the most ignominious and agonising circumstances.[4]
‘In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the slaves were forced to work in chains and to sleep in subterranean prisons. The feeling entertained toward this unfortunate class in the later republican period is illustrated by Varro’s classification of slaves as “vocal agricultural implements,” and by Cato the Elder’s recommendation that old and worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of economy. Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to an island in the Tiber, and there left to die of starvation and exposure’.[3b]Slaves were practically without any rights whatever to the world in which they lived. A Roman could take the life of his Gallic slave with as complete impunity as an American can slay his bovine servant to-day. Romans, in short, looked upon and treated non-Romans about as human beings to-day look upon and treat non-humans—as mere prey.
1.Spencer:Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893.2.Myers:Ancient History, part i.; Boston, 1899.3a.3b.Myers:Ancient History, part ii.; Boston, 1899.4.Preston and Dodge:The Private Life of the Romans; Boston, 1896.
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 moredistant 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.
But the most mournful instance of provincial ethics afforded by the inhabitants of the earth is not that furnished by the varieties of the human species in their conduct toward each other, but that afforded by the human race as a whole in its treatment of the non-human races. Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world. With the development of the representative powers of the mind, the widening and mutualising of human activities, and the consequent enlargement of the human horizon, the feeling of amity has spread and intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that is true of human sectionalism, the ethical systems of civilised peoples include, theoretically at least, and more or less seriously, all human beings whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended from individual to family, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to race, from race to species, until, in the case of many millions of men, ethical feeling has reached, with greater or less vividness and consistency, the anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that an individual is aman—that is, that he belongs to the human species of animals—entitles him in all civilised lands to the fundamental rights and privileges of existence. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by all exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties of everyhumanbeing who comes into the world.
But, except by occasional individuals here and there whose emotions are more civilised than the rest, or whose conceptions are more ample and clear, ethical relations are not extended by human beings beyond the bounds of their own species. Non-human millions areoutsiders. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked upon as merethings—mere moving, multiplying objects, without the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves. They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, ‘Lions, tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.’ Accustomed from our cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact (‘paragons’ though they pretend to be), the most predatory and brutal of all animals—the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of the planet.
It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, to commit crimes upon any beings in this world, except men. There are no beings in the universe, according to human beings, except themselves. All others are commodities. They are of consequence only because they have thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places of the human alimentary. Human beings are ‘persons,’ and have souls and gods and places to go to when they die. But the hundreds of thousands of other races of terrestrial inhabitants are mere ‘animals,’ mere ‘brutes,’ and ‘beasts of the field,’ ‘livestock’ and ‘vermin.’ Every crime capable of being perpetrated by one being upon another is day after day rained upon them, and with an equanimity that would do honour to the managers of an inferno. Human beings preach as the cardinal rule of morality—and they seem never to tire of its reiteration—that they should do unto others as they would that others would do unto them; but they hypocritically confine its application to the members of their own crowd, notwithstanding there are the same reasons identically for extending it to all creatures. The happiness of the human species is assumed to be so much more precious than that of others that the most sacred interests of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order that human desires may all be fastidiously catered to. Even for a tooth or a feather or a piece of skin to wear on human vanity, forests are depopulated and the land filled with the dead and dying. Assassination is the commonest and most fashionable of human pastimes. Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little compunction as savages put on war-paint. They come back from their campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old Rome, trailing their victims as trophies, and expecting to be hailed as heroes for the hells they have established. Barbarians preponderate, and morality is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, and broad-mindedness is rewarded with a sneer. Compassion is a disease, and to be fashionable is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no nerves and no choice of emotions, and were utterly indifferent to life, they could scarcely be treated more completely as personal nonentities.
The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals andupondifferent individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct. There is, in fact, but one great crime in the universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances of this crime. It is the crime ofexploitation—the considering by some beings of themselves asendsand of others as theirmeans—the refusal to recognise the equal, or the approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others wouldnotact toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter of the inhabited globe.
Every beingis anend. In other words, every being is to be taken into account in determining the ends of conduct. This is the only consistent outcome of the ethical process which is in course of evolution on the earth. This world was not made and presented to any particular clique for its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth belongs, if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit it—toallof them. And when one being or set of beings sets itself up as the sole end for which the universe exists, and looks upon and acts toward others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation, nothing else and never can be anything else, it matters not by whom or upon whom the usurpation is practised. A tyrant who puts his own welfare and aggrandisement in the place of the welfare of a people, and compels the whole people to act as a means to his own personal ends, is not more certainly a usurper than is a species or variety which puts its welfare in the place of the welfare of all the inhabitants of a world. The refusal to put one’s self in the place of others and to act toward them as one would that they would act toward him does not depend for its wrongfulness upon who makes the refusal or upon whether the refusal falls upon this or that individual or set. Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done,depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe. The basic mistake that has ever been made in this egoistic world in the judging and classifying of acts has been the mistake of judging and classifying them with reference to their effects upon some particular fraction of the inhabitants of the universe. In pure egoism conduct is judged as good or bad solely with reference to the results, immediate or remote, which that conduct produces, or is calculated to produce, on theself. To the savage, that is right or wrong which affects favourably or unfavourablyhimselfor histribe. And this sectional spirit of the savage has, as has been shown, characterised the moral conceptions of the peoples of all times. The practice human beings have to-day—the practice of those (relatively) broad and emancipated minds who are large enough to rise above the petty prejudices and ‘patriotisms’ of the races and corporations of men, and are able to view ‘the world as their country’ (the world ofhumanbeings, of course)—the practice such minds have of estimating conduct solely with reference to its effects upon the human species of animals is a practice which, while infinitely broader and more nearly ultimate than that of the savage, belongs logically in the same category with it. The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude ofuniversal gentleness and humanity.
‘The world is my country,’ said Thomas Paine, and every man, woman, and child capable of appreciating the exalted sentiment applauded. But ‘the world’ of the great freethinker was inhabited bymen only.
The following lines were written by Robert Whitaker, and first printed in a San Francisco newspaper:
‘My Country is the world! I countNo son of man my foe,Whether the warm life currents mountAnd mantle brows like snow,Or whether yellow, brown, or black,The face that into mine looks back.‘My Native Land is Mother Earth,And all men are my kin,Whether of rude or gentle birth,However steeped in sin;Or rich or poor, or great or small,I count them brothers one and all.‘My Flag is the star-spangled sky,Woven without a seam,Where dawn and sunset colours lie,Fair as an angel’s dream,The Flag that still unstained, untorn,Floats over all of mortal born‘My Party is all humankind,My Platform, brotherhood;I count all men of honest mindWho work for human good,And for the hope that gleams afar.My comrades in the holy war.‘My Country is the world! I scornNo lesser love than mine,But calmly wait that happy mornWhen all shall own this sign,And love of country, as of clan,Shall yield to love of Man.’
‘My Country is the world! I countNo son of man my foe,Whether the warm life currents mountAnd mantle brows like snow,Or whether yellow, brown, or black,The face that into mine looks back.‘My Native Land is Mother Earth,And all men are my kin,Whether of rude or gentle birth,However steeped in sin;Or rich or poor, or great or small,I count them brothers one and all.‘My Flag is the star-spangled sky,Woven without a seam,Where dawn and sunset colours lie,Fair as an angel’s dream,The Flag that still unstained, untorn,Floats over all of mortal born‘My Party is all humankind,My Platform, brotherhood;I count all men of honest mindWho work for human good,And for the hope that gleams afar.My comrades in the holy war.‘My Country is the world! I scornNo lesser love than mine,But calmly wait that happy mornWhen all shall own this sign,And love of country, as of clan,Shall yield to love of Man.’
Robert Whitaker, you are a grand improvement on the ‘jingo.’ But you are still too small. There are conceptions as much more prophetic and exalted than yours as your conception is superior to that of the Figian.
Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called ‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of the political unit to which they belong—he is not broad enough. He is still asectionalist, apartialist. He represents but astagein the process of ethical expansion. He is, in fact, small compared with theuniversalist, just as the savage is small compared with the philanthropist. ‘Mankind,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘all men,’ ‘the whole human family’—these are big conceptions, too big for the poor little nubbins of brains with which most millions make the effort to think. But they are pitifully small compared with that grand conception of kinship which takes in all the races that live and move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these conceptions compared with that sublime and supreme synthesis which embraces not only the present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but which extends longitudinally as well as laterally, extends in time as well as in space, and embraces the generations which shall grow out of the existing generation and which are yet unborn—that conception which recognises earth-life as a single process, world-wide and immortal, every part related and akin to every other party and each generation linked to an unending posterity.
Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough to judge of acts of conduct according to their intrinsic natures and consequences rather than according to some local or traditional bias, cannot help knowing that the exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim or convenience is an offence against the laws of morality, not different in kind from the offences denounced in human laws as robbery and murder. The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or to kill a sheep for his skin ismurder, and those who do these things or cause them to be done aremurderersjust as actually as highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their guineas. If these thingsseem untrueit is not because theyareuntrue, but because those to whom they seem soare unable to judge conduct from the quadrupedal point of view. If there were in this world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should look upon Caucasians as simply so much ‘beef’ and ‘mutton,’ these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not only preposterous, but fiendish.
Human provincialism, all of it, is the consequence of a common cause—the provincialism of the savage. Back of the provincialism of the savage is, of course, the antecedent fact of primordial egoism. The savage is the common ancestor of all men, and as such has imparted to all men their general characters of mind and heart. Everything that grows, whether it be a tree, a human being, a grass blade, or a race, grows from something. This something, this germ or embryo from which each thing springs, imparts to the thing its fundamental characters. However far anything may evolve, and however much it may come to differ superficially from its original, it will always remain at heart more or less faithful to the facts of its genesis. This hereditary tendency of everything, this tendency toward invariability, is the conservative, or inertial tendency of the universe. All races, colours, and conditions of men—civilised, slightly civilised, and barbarous—extend back to, and take root in, savages, just as all savages have probably sprung in some still more remote period of the past from a single stirp of anthropoids. The savage is, therefore, the author of human nature and philosophy. Just as the fish, which is the common ancestor of all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, has predetermined the general structural style of all subsequently evolved vertebrates, so the savage, as the original ancestor of mankind, has predetermined the general mental and dispositional make-up of all higher men. That civilised and semi-civilised men are naturally narrow and revengeful, selfish and superstitious, and find it next to impossible to feel and act toward others as they would like to have others feel and act toward them, is, therefore, not more mysterious than that vertebrates have red blood, two eyes, two pairs of limbs, and a backbone with a bulging brain-box at the hither end of it. Just as the habits, beliefs, and conceptions of the child persist, often but slightly modified, in the full-grown man or woman, so the habits, beliefs, and conceptions, formed by the race in its childhood, continue, under the influence of the same laws of inertia, on into the more mature stages of racial development. Human nature changes with great reluctance, and only in its superficial aspects at that. There are cave-men, men with the primitive ideas and practices of the Stone Age, and men in the pastoral and hunting stages of mankind, in all the highest societies of men. There is scarcely a habit, vice, occupation, amusement, crime, or trait of character, found among men of the past but may be seen still among our contemporaries.
Altruism (other-love) is just as natural as egoism (self-love) is. There is not so much of it in the world as there is of egoism. But that is simply the misfortune of our place of existence. There is no reason why there might not have been as much, or even more, under different conditions. With the same antecedents, nothing can, of course, happen differently from what does happen. But with different antecedents, different causes, the results are bound to be different. Civilised men are not beings of altruism, because they are not theeffectsof that kind ofcauses. But there is no reason why there might not be a world—several of them, in fact, or even a universeful—where the inhabitants have never known or heard of such an indelicate thing as of beings preferring themselves to others—where it is as natural for them to act toward each other according to what we call the Golden Rule as it is for us terrestrial heathens to violate it. It is possible to conceive of beings with even too much altruism. The ideal condition is one of balanced egoism and altruism—one in which each thinks as much of others as he does of himself, no more and no less. And if beings were endowed with natures rendering them not only willing butdeterminedto act primarily in the interests of others, and this condition of things were universal, there would be about as much discord and strife as if everyone acted in the interest of himself. The Golden Rule among a lot of hypothetical otherists like this would be the opposite of ours, for, instead of emphasising the importance of others as we do, they would need to encourage regard for self. Wouldn’t it seem original to live in a world where men were sent to gaol for over-benevolence, and where sermons had to be preached on such texts as, ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’; ‘It is more blessed to receive than to give’; ‘Avoid doing to yourself that which you do not like when done to others’; ‘The Lord loves a cheerful taker’; and the like?
The persistence with which savage ideas and instincts continue to influence men long after those ideas and instincts have really become anachronistic and vestigial is well illustrated by civilised men and women everywhere. The sun continues to ‘rise’ and ‘set’ in all civilised lands just as it used to do to the savage, although men have long since learned that it does not do either. Hell, as originally conceived, was an actual subterranean region, and heaven was an abode located a few hours’ journey above the supposedly flat earth. To-day we continue to say ‘upto heaven,’ and ‘downto hell’ (never ‘down to heaven’ and ‘up to hell’), and always think of these places as being thus relatively located, although it is extremely doubtful whether any really sane mind continues to believe that hell is on the inside of the earth (or any place else, for that matter), and althoughupmeans simply away from the centre of the earth, and away from the centre of a ball means literally every possible direction. The theological theories of the origin, nature, and destiny of man and of the universe in general, all of which originated in savage or semi-savage minds, and all of which bear the unmistakable traces of their origin, continue to cling to the minds of the masses of civilised men, notwithstanding the inherent absurdity of these theories, and notwithstanding the fact that their unsoundness is vouched for by the most positive and unanimous assurances from the scientific world. Why should civilised men and women, any of them, be indifferent to the sufferings of others, or find delight in such loathsome avocations as the fishing and hunting of their fellow-creatures? Because their ancestors were savages, and they are not yet sufficiently evolved to be independent of the instincts of their savage sires. There is no other explanation. No human being could enjoy seeing a pack of hounds hunt down and rend to pieces a poor harmless hare—unless he were a savage. No human being could go out to the abodes of the squirrel and quail, and shoot murderous balls into their beautiful bodies for food or fun—unless he were a savage. No human being would lounge all day about the margins of a brook, blind to the beauties of the stream and the glories of forest and sky, in order to thrust brutal hooks into the lips of those whom he deceives, and drag them from their waters to suffocate in the sun—unless he were a savage. No human being would have palaces and parks and yachts and equipages, townships of lands, packs of hounds, and studs of horses, troops of lackeys and nothing to do, when all around him are the men and women who made this wealth, half clad and half starved, suffocating in shanties and working like wretches from morning till night—unless he were a savage. All of these deeds are savage deeds, deeds of exceeding thoughtlessness and brutality, and, instead of being enjoyable, are to every emancipated mind positively painful.
Hunting, fishing, and fighting are the chief occupations of savage life. Back of the activities displayed in these occupations are powerful instincts prompting and sustaining them. Civilised peoples are devoted primarily to the arts of industry and peace. But there are enough savages in every civilised society, and enough of the savage spirit in those who pretend to approximate the civilised state, to give to civilised life a decidedly barbaric aspect. War is a more or less regular exercise, and killing and competing and torturing enter largely into the pastimes of all peoples. Next to eating, fighting, in one form or another, is the favourite pursuit of men nearly everywhere on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever human beings have any energy or time left over from what they are required to spend in maintaining their existence, they use it in fighting somebody or in watching somebody else fight. And generally the more brutal and sanguinary the conflict, the more popular and satisfying it is. Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and the baseball and slugball battles of the Americans, where eager thousands gather and roar for hours like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or set of animals punish or discredit another. If there are no pigeons to shoot, or if the community is ruled by men and women who are too emancipated to allow such things, we make glass birds and heroically bang away at them, supplying by our imaginations the blood and agony of real carnage. And if we can’t do anything else, we take some poor pig, that never did anyone any harm in the world, and grease it and turn it loose, and then take after it with knives, as Chicago butchers do on vacation days, and see who can cut its throat the quickest. This amusement, in pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty near the top in the list of human pastimes so far invented. Maybe it is outclassed by that other contest sometimes advertised as a feature of butchers’ barbecues, in which a band of professional cutthroats compete to see who can kill, skin, and eviscerate the largest number of their fellow-beings in a given time.
Games and other performances in which interest is aroused by contending or killing are all of them entertainments gotten up primarily for the amusement of the under-exercised savage within us. The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans, which seem so incomprehensible to the people of to-day, find their diabolical parallels right here in our high-sniffing civilisation. The bull-pen, where poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins for the amusement of Castilian communities, and the cockpit and the prize-ring, where irate fowls and naked thugs peck and pound each other to insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving mobs, are the legitimate successors of the gladiatorial arena of the Romans. The gladiatorial horror is not changed, either in its nature or functions, by changing the combatants to cocks and bulls. The ringside roars that rise to-day beside the Tagus and the Hudson over the fatal thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of the pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising from the satisfaction of the same instincts as those which seventeen centuries ago made amphitheatres thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The ability to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is not different in kind from the ability to be entertained by strife and suffering in any other form. Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified form of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at sight of the death-stagger of a mangled ox, are psychologically equipped to go into raptures over the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.
Few pastimes indulged in by civilised peoples are more horrible to an emancipated mind than that of bull-fighting. It is the national amusement of Spain, and is carried on among all peoples who have acquired their natures and institutions from the Spanish. ‘Every Sunday afternoon, whenever the weather permits, 14,000 or 15,000 men and women, representing every class of society, mothers and grandmothers, priests and monks, assemble at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid to witness the most brutal spectacle the human taste approves. Six bulls are tortured and worried until they are exhausted. Then they are killed by the thrusts of the sword of a matador, who is the most popular person in the community and makes more money than any other man. Often as many as twelve horses are ripped open by the horns of the infuriated bulls, and are allowed to die in the presence of the audience, with blood gushing from their wounds and their entrails dragging upon the ground. This sort of thing is carried on not only in Madrid, but is a regular weekly festival in all the cities of Spain. The horses are blindfolded, so they cannot even see what attacks them. The men who torture the bulls have wooden screens behind which they can dodge when pursued, and if one of the baited creatures crowds too closely upon any of its tormentors, the other matadors throw a blanket over its head. It is not sport, for the poor bulls have no chance whatever to escape or to fight back. It is simply slow butchery, an exhibition of unmitigated cowardice and cruelty. And yet, although the Spanish people are the most religious people of Europe, 95 per cent, of the population approve this atrocious barbarism—not only approve it, but demand that the King shall appear in the royal box at every bull-fight, or have his throne upset.’
The notorious ‘Juke’ family of criminals, who sprang from a single ruffian who lived in 1720, has cost the State of New York millions of dollars in money and incalculable misery and crime. But the initial savage progenitors of the human species have stocked the earth with the most stupendous array of wrong-doers—knaves, felons, kings, warriors, barbarians, butchers, brutalitarians, kleptomaniacs, and thugs—that has ever (let us hope) brought damnation to a world.