ETHNOLOGY: ITS SCOPE AND PROBLEMS 559 



population. The arbitrary politician seeks to force all such into 

 his Procrustean bed of wont and faith, as, for example, Russia is 

 attempting to do in her Baltic provinces and in Finland; but surely 

 there is a more excellent way. 



Perhaps still more are sympathy and knowledge required by 

 those who have to deal with native races. There can be no ques- 

 tion but that a full knowledge of local conditions and a sympathetic 

 treatment of native prejudices would materially lighten the burden 

 of government by preventing many misunderstandings, and thus, by 

 securing greater efficiency, would make for economy. 



To look at the matter from the lowest point of view, even a slight 

 frontier trouble means a direct expenditure for the local executive 

 and a stagnation of trade. Commerce is, as it were, a sensitive 

 barometer that fluctuates with every small variation of pressure in 

 the political firmament and the pecuniary loss to a country is not 

 to be measured by the actual expenditure consequent upon a trouble 

 with natives, so much as by the indirect loss to the community at 

 large; this can rarely be estimated, but it is none the less real. 



"To the man of affairs," writes Professor W. Cunningham, 1 

 "economic history may prove of interest from quite another 

 reason by furnishing a clue to unfamiliar habits and practice 

 in the present day. The expansion of Western civilization has 

 brought Europeans and Americans into the closest contact with 

 many barbarous and half-civilized peoples, whose usages and habits 

 are strange to us. For purposes of trade it is convenient to under- 

 stand their methods of dealing; while the administrator who rules 

 over them cannot easily see how the incidence of taxation will be 

 distributed in their communities or what are the possibilities of 

 social oppression against which it is necessary to guard. Some of 

 the most regrettable blunders of the English Government in India 

 have been due to an inability to understand the working of native 

 institutions. A careful study of the past of our own race, or of the 

 earlier habits of other peoples when natural economy still reigned, 

 would at least have suggested a point of view from which the prac- 

 tical problems in India might be more wisely looked at. By means 

 of analogies drawn from the past we may come to understand the 

 advantage, under certain circumstances, of fiscal methods that 

 seem to be cumbrous, and the danger of introducing modern im- 

 provements in a polity that is not prepared to assimilate them." 



There are higher grounds than those of mere expediency for 

 the carrying-out of this policy, and there ought to be no need to 

 insist upon this point of view. Fortunately there are not lacking 



1 W. Cunningham, "The Teaching of Economic History," in Essays in the 

 Teaching of History, 1901, p. 46; cf. also W. F. Flinders Petrie, Report of British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, 1875, pp. 820-824. 



