148 SAVAGE SURVIVALS 



feelings and ideas of the savage are, therefore, 

 purely tribal in their extent. The members of 

 his tribe are to the savage for the most part his 

 kinspeople. They are the beings with whom he 

 has lived all his life, and they are to him the only 

 real and important beings in the world. All others 

 are enemies, to be attacked, robbed, deceived, mur- 

 dered, eaten, or enslaved, as he chooses or is able 

 to do. 



There is always a tendency in us to think of the 

 members of our own crowd as more real and im- 

 portant than other beings, and to consider our 

 part of the world as the center and hub of the 

 universe. This is especially true of simple-mind- 

 ed people. The bigger and broader we are the 

 less inclined we are to be that way. 



I lived once for three weeks with a family in a 

 rather remote part of southwestern Alabama, 

 about thirty miles from Mobile. These people 

 thought that Mobile was the most important, if 

 not the largest, city in the world. It was the only 

 city they had ever seen and the only one they 

 knew anything much about. One evening, in the 

 course of conversation, I inquired the population 

 of Mobile. No one knew exactly. But the moth- 

 er thought that she had read somewhere that it 

 was about a million. Later when I told them that 

 Chicago had more people in it than Mobile and 

 Birmingham and Montgomery and all the rest of 

 Alabama taken together, and extended as far as 

 the distance from where we were to Mobile, and 



