IN HIGHER PEOPLES 149 



was something like forty times the size of Mobile, 

 they fairly gasped with astonishment. 



The Spanish people are said to read only Span- 

 ish newspapers and books, and to have very shad- 

 owy and imperfect notions of other peoples. They 

 look to Madrid as the center of the world, and re- 

 gard other peoples as inferior to themselves. 



We Americans are somewhat the same way. We 

 look with a kind of pity on the other nations of 

 the earth, many of whom are recognized by every- 

 body but ourselves to be in reality superior to us. 

 I remember at the time of our World's Fair in 

 Chicago of reading an article in a Belgian paper 

 written by the Belgian representative at the fair, 

 in which it was mentioned as a curious fact that 

 Americans generally have the idea that they are 

 superior to other peoples. 



The narrowness and bigotry which have in all 

 ages characterized the feelings and understand- 

 ings of men, including the hostility existing in the 

 international relations of even the highest socie- 

 ties of men today and showing itself in war and 

 preparations for war, are merely the survivals in 

 a more or less enlarged state of the tribal feel- 

 ings of original men. 



The ancient Greeks divided mankind into two 

 classes: Greeks and ''barbarians." The Greeks 

 were the inhabitants of Greece, and the ''barba- 

 rians" occupied the less centrally-located remain- 

 der of the world. The earth was supposed to be 

 shield-shaped, with Mt. Olympus in Thessaly in its 



