PHYSICAL CONFORMITY OP HUMAN RACES. 999 



every race in the same moral nature, and in the community of moral rights 

 which hence becomes the privilege of all. " This is a bond which every 

 man feels more and more, the farther he advances in his intellectual and 

 moral culture, and which in this development is continually placed upon 

 higher and higher ground : so much so, that the physical relation arising 

 from a common descent is finally lost sight of, in the consciousness of the 

 higher moral obligations." It is in these obligations, that the moral rights 

 of men have their foundation ; and thus " while Africans have the hearts and 

 consciences of human beings, it could never be right to treat them as domes- 

 tic cattle or as wild fowl, if it were ever so abundantly demonstrated that 

 their race was but an improved species of ape, and ours a degenerate kind 

 of god." The Psychical comparison of the various Races of Mankind is 

 really, therefore, in a practical point of view, the most important part of the 

 whole investigation ; but it has been, nevertheless, the one most imperfectly 

 pursued, until the inquiry was taken up by Dr. Prichard. The mass of 

 evidence which he has accumulated on this subject, however, leaves no rea- 

 sonable doubt that no more " impassable barrier " really exists between the 

 different races with respect to this, than in regard to any of those points of 

 ostensible diversity which have been already considered ; the variations in 

 the positive and relative development of their respective psychical powers 

 and tendencies, not being greater, either in kind or degree, than those which 

 present themselves between individuals of our own or of any other race, by 

 some members of which a high intellectual and moral standard has been 

 attained. The tests by which we recognize the claims of the outcast and; 

 degraded of our own or of any other "highly civilized" community, to a 

 common humanity, are the same as those by which we should estimate the 

 true relation of the Negro, the Bushman, or the Australian, to the cultivated 

 European. If, on the one hand, we admit the influence of want, ignorance,, 

 and neglect, in accounting for the debasement of the savages of our own 

 great cities, and, if we witness the same effects occurring under the same 

 conditions among the Bushmen of Southern Africa ( 854), we can scarcely, 

 hesitate in admitting, that the long-continued operation of the same agencies 

 has had much to do with the psychical as well as the physical deterioration 

 of the Negro, Australian, and other degraded races. So, on the other hand,, 

 if we cherish the hope that the former, so far from being irreclaimable, may 

 at least be brought up to the standard from which they have degenerated,. 

 by means adapted to develop their intellectual faculties and to call forth the 

 higher parts of their moral nature, no adequate reason can be assigned why 

 the same method should not succeed with the latter, if employed with suffi- 

 cient perseverance. It will be only when the effect of education, intellectual, 

 moral, and religious, shall have been fairly tested by the experience of many 

 generations, in conjunction with the influence of a perfect equality in civil- 

 ization and social position, that we shall be entitled to speak of any essential 

 and constant psychical difference between ourselves and the most degraded, 

 beings clothed in human form. All the evidence which we at present pos- 

 sess leads to the belief, that under a vast diversity in degree and in modes 

 of manifestation, the same intellectual, moral, and religious capabilities exist 

 in all the Races of Mankind ; so that, whilst we may derive from this con- 

 formity a powerful argument for their zoological Unity as a species, we are 

 also directly led to recognize their community of moral nature with ourselves, 

 and to admit them to a participation in our own rights. 



845. Most important assistance is afforded in the determination of the real 

 affinities of different Races, by the study of their Languages. This, however, 

 is a department of the inquiry so far beyond the limits of Physiological 

 science, that it must be here dismissed with a bare mention of those results, 



