4IO swanton: international misunderstandings 



information that an American or European gets regarding the 

 backward peoples is apt to be sensational reports of their most 

 peculiar customs, sweeping condemnations of their physical and 

 moral condition, and usually lurid accounts of barbarities in- 

 flicted upon representatives of civilized races who may have 

 chanced to stray among them. This distorted publicity is due 

 partly to the willingness of newspapers and journals in Europe 

 and America to cater to the love of the marvelous — their ex- 

 pectation, as goes the Spanish proverb, of "distant countries, 

 big tales" — and partly to the desire of commercial interests to 

 force an intervention which will render available to them the 

 natural riches of a virgin but helpless land. 



Inability or unwillingness to understand the other man's point 

 of view has a second, and perhaps more dangerous, development 

 here in our midst. It is the failure to understand the thoughts 

 and actions of men of a different class or social stratum. This 

 has some slight excuse when it concerns the representatives of 

 distinct races living among us, but it is also maintained toward 

 individuals of different classes whether foreign or not. Upper, 

 middle, and lower classes attribute to each other vices of which 

 they profess to be free themselves, and look upon actions which 

 tend to run counter to the views or curtail the comfort of them- 

 selves, as evidences of wilful evil intent. Opinions of this kind 

 are particularly dangerous because most people associate famil- 

 iarly with only a restricted class, and when one hears the same 

 stock accusations repeated over and over he comes to assume 

 their absolute truth without giving himself the trouble to in- 

 quire further. Responsibility for this state of affairs rests upon 

 all classes alike, but by far the greater measure must be shoul- 

 dered by those most abundantly endowed with wealth, power, 

 and intelligence because they also have better opportunities for 

 ascertaining actual conditions. Too much reading and too 

 many exchanges of opinion are for the purpose of re-enforcing 

 prejudices rather than establishing truth and rendering justice, 

 and in this connection I cannot refrain from expressing the 

 opinion that the public press in America is altogether too ready 

 to cater to the partisan demand. What we find in the news 



