RELIGIOUS BELIEF AS A BASIS OF MORALITY. 97 



eager to cut the heart out of his hated enemy, but he would 

 not lay perjury upon his soul no, not for Venice ! The burglars 

 kept, therefore, in their pay two Christians, who were as ready 

 to forswear themselves as any Tammany Hall politician at the 

 polls, and who made the requisite false oaths at fixed rates. 



These examples serve to show the natural tendency of man- 

 kind to look upon compatriots and coreligionists from a different 

 moral standpoint from that with which they regard persons who 

 are not connected with them by such ties, and to whom they not 

 only attribute a lower standard of right and wrong, but also act 

 upon it as a rule of conduct in dealing with them. 



Great dissimilarity in physical characteristics intensifies the 

 ethical estrangement caused by differences of blood and of belief. 

 The more any tribes of men deviate from ourselves in form and 

 feature, the less we are inclined to think of them as endowed with 

 the same powers and passions, the same kind of sympathy and 

 sensibility as ourselves, or as entitled to the same rights that we 

 possess. A people with black skin, woolly hair, flat noses, and 

 countenances of a strongly prognathous character do not enlist 

 our kindly feelings and awaken our affections in the same man- 

 ner and degree as representatives of a fair-complexioned and 

 finely featured type would do. The schemes of European govern- 

 ments and of private individuals and corporations for the explo- 

 ration, partition, and colonization of Africa are based upon the 

 assumption that the Africans themselves have no claim to the 

 continent which they inhabit. The only African colony that has 

 ever been founded on principles of common justice and with a 

 full recognition of the rights of the natives is the Republic of 

 Liberia, established more than sixty years ago under the auspices 

 of the United States, and this was done solely for the sake of get- 

 ting rid of an undesirable population of free negroes at home. 

 All the other enterprises of this sort are morally and legally no 

 better than buccaneering expeditions. 



The ethical maxims which we are wont to accept as axiomatic 

 in our mutual relations as civilized individuals and nations are 

 too easily set aside as inconvenient and inapplicable to our deal- 

 ings with the so-called lower races. The fatal facility with 

 which under such circumstances enlightened Europeans of the 

 nineteenth century may revert to primitive savagery as soon as 

 the outward restraints of civilization are removed is seen in the 

 early settlers of Australia, who did not scruple to shoot the de- 

 fenseless and harmless aborigines as they would any game, and 

 feed the carcasses to their hounds* The inoffensive and rather 

 feeble-bodied Negritos were treated as beasts of venery, which 

 could be hunted without danger and furnished plentiful supplies 

 of dog's meat, costing the sportsman nothing, not even a pang of 



VOL. XLV. 8 



