NATIVES 



In that sense we are wrong. Instead of being at the 

 very dawn of human development, these people are 

 at the end — as far as they themselves are concerned. 

 The original racial impulse that started them down 

 the years toward development has fulfilled its duty 

 and spent its force. They have worked out all their 

 problems, established all their customs, arranged 

 the world and its phenomena in a philosophy to their 

 complete satisfaction. They have lived, ethnolo- 

 gists tell us, for thousands, perhaps hundreds of 

 thousands of years, just as we find them to-day. 

 From our standpoint that is in a hopeless intellectual 

 darkness: for they know absolutely nothing of the 

 most elementary subjects of knowledge. From their 

 standpoint, however, they have reached the highest 

 desirable pinnacle of human development. Noth- 

 ing remains to be changed. Their customs, re- 

 ligions, and duties have been worked out and im- 

 mutably established long ago; and nobody dreams 

 of questioning either their wisdom or their impera- 

 tive necessity. They are the conservatives of the 

 world. 



Nor must we conclude — looking at them with 

 the eyes of our own civilization — that the savage 

 is, from his standpoint, lazy and idle. His life is 

 laid out more rigidly than ours will be for a great 

 many thousands of years. From childhood to old 



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