7 i2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



airdead, 1 or in the wholesale shootings and burnings of houses, after 

 the suppression of the Jamaica insurrection. Listen to what is said 

 at home about such deeds in our own colonies, and you find that 

 habitually they are held to have been justified by the necessities of 

 the case. Listen to what is said about such deeds when other nations 

 are guilty of them, and you find the same persons indignantly declare 

 that no alleged necessities could form a justification. Nay, the bias 

 produces perversions of judgment even more extreme. Feelings and 

 deeds we laud as virtuous when they are not in antagonism with our 

 own interests and power, we think vicious feelings and deeds when 

 our own interests and power are endangered by them. Equally in the 

 mythical story of Tell, and in any account not mythical, we read with 

 glowing admiration of the successful rising of an oppressed race ; but 

 admiration is changed into indignation if the race is one held down 

 by ourselves. "We can see nothing save crime in the endeavor of the 

 Hindoos to throw off our yoke ; and we recognize no excuse for the 

 efforts of the Irish to establish their independent nationality. "We en- 

 tirely ignore the fact that the motives are, in all such cases, the same, 

 and, in the abstract, are to be judged apart from results. 



A bias which thus vitiates even the perceptions of physical appear- 

 ances, which so greatly distorts the beliefs about conspicuous antago- 

 nists and their deeds, which leads us to reprobate in other nations 

 severities and cruelties that we applaud when committed by our own 

 agents, and which makes us regard acts of intrinsically the same kind 

 as wrong or right according as they are or are not directed against 

 ourselves, is a bias which inevitably perverts our sociological ideas. 

 The institutions of a despised people cannot be judged with fairness; 

 and if, as often happens, the contempt is unwarranted, or but partially 

 warranted, such value as their institutions have will certainly be under- 

 estimated. "When antagonism has bred hatred toward another na- 

 tion, and has, consequently, bred a desire to justify the hatred by 

 ascribing a hateful character to members of that nation, it inevitably 

 happens that the political arrangements under which they live, the 

 religion they pi-ofess, and the habits peculiar to them, become asso- 

 ciated in thought with this hateful character become themselves 

 hateful, and cannot therefore have their natures studied with the calm- 

 ness required by science. 



An example will make this clear. The reflex egoism we name 

 patriotism, causing, among other things, a high valuation of the reli- 

 gious creed nationally professed, makes us overrate the effects this 

 creed has produced, and makes us underrate the effects produced by 

 other creeds, and by influences of other orders. The notions respect- 

 ing savage and civilized races, in which we are brought up, show this. 



1 1 make this statement on the authority of a letter read to me at the time by an 

 Indian officer, written by a brother officer in India. 



