IN HIGHER PEOPLES 127 



merely savages made over and only partially 

 changed. 



'* Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar 

 underneath," some one has said. The Tartars 

 were the wild men from whom the Russians have 

 come. And the saying, "Scratch a Russian and 

 you will find a Tartar underneath," means that 

 Russians are Tartars, except a thin layer on the 

 outside. 



It is the same way with all the higher peoples 

 of the earth. Civilization is only a skin. The 

 great core of human nature is barbaric. Human- 

 ity is only a habit — hardly a habit even, for we 

 find it to be one of the easiest things to lapse into 

 the old savage ways of thinking and feeling and 

 acting. You cannot go very deep into even the 

 highest men until you come to something so un- 

 complimentary that it has to be kept carefully in 

 the background. If we were transparent and could 

 look into each other and see all the thoughts and 

 feelings that come and go in our innermost beings, 

 we would then know much better than we do now 

 what plated beings we really are and how much 

 more shining and attractive we are on the out- 

 side than we are on the inside. 



Human beings are not children of the sun. They 

 are children of the jungle. We have in our na- 

 tures many things that we would be a great deal 

 better off without — instincts and ways of acting 

 which we would never have included in ourselves 

 in the world if we had had the privilege of choos- 



