272 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP 



savage chiefs, are hailed as heroes by thousands 

 besides silly women, and held up, like the cut- 

 throats 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 con- 

 science is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in 

 their disregard for the life and happiness of the 

 non-human animal world. With the develop- 

 ment 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, 



