9© Hoii' to Pay for the War 



an act of presumption from which the general run of man- 

 kind does not shrink but which is, nevertheless, fraught 

 with peril. . . . Every man has in front of his judgment 

 something which is like a bit of coloured glass, and which 

 represents an aggregate of inherited or acquired ideas, 

 prejudices, interests, desires and sensations that are derived 

 from tradition, physiological or pathological peculiarities 

 and surrounding influences." Thus it is that when the 

 untrained white man tries to understand and fix the ideas 

 of the black on his own mind that he fails, because, as 

 with a kaleidoscope, every time he looks into it, the ideas 

 take on new shapes and colours even as one watches 

 tiiem, and he is unprepared for the unexpected which often 

 happens.' 



Meanwhile the primitive races are being exterminated 

 and so one wonders how it will all end, and when that end 

 will come. Are the Tropics to go back and back to the 

 prehistoric days, that is, to such a pitch that the jungle 

 and the swamp, the beasts of prey and the snakes, the heat 

 and miasma, the mosquito and tsetse-fly, make it untenable 

 for the white man, since there will then be only a Noah's 

 Ark proportion of the primitive people left, not enough to 

 keep Nature at bay even under the guidance and direction 

 of the white superman. 



Peoples and races, we are told, rise and fall ; the Inca 

 and Maya kingdoms, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and so 

 on, and their cycles last about a thousand to twelve 

 hundred years. Has it been that, thanks to the discovery 

 of the New World, the white race has enjoyed a double 

 spell, first in Europe and then abroad. Look back 1,500 

 years and then think of five hundred or seven hundred 

 years ahead, and ask yourself if, as we are fast allowing 

 matters to tend in the Tropics, whether it is beyond the 

 range of possibility for Nature, pure and primitive, to come 

 into her own again, owing to the white man being physically 

 incapable, under the heat of the tropical sun, of driving her 

 back, and to there being only a handful of natives left, a 

 number altogether insufficient to help him do so. We 

 would not only maintain that such a thing is fully possible, 

 but that it is certain to happen unless'^ we can devise a 



' All of which is as a closed book to all but the well-trained anthro- 

 pologist. — Ed., T.I.. 



■1 "There is a tide in the affairs of Man, 



Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. 

 Omitted, &c., &c." 



