Romance of Primitive Hostility 165 



Why should the primitive hordes engage in a 

 struggle of extermination at every meeting? No 

 animal acts without having some object, and the 

 more closely man resembles an animal, the more 

 he ought to act in accord with this rule. Ratzen- 

 hofer tells us the reason for this hostility of the 

 primitive hordes. He says that, "belonging to 

 different races and different civilizations, they 

 must resent all contact as injurious." The expres- 

 sion, "different civilizations,'' is worth noting, as 

 belonging to primitive time, when there was no 

 civilization, but a state of nature like that among 

 the anthropomorphic monkeys. It is difficult to 

 see how the differences of civilization at this epoch 

 could have resulted in these terrible struggles, 

 when these differences did not exist. At the period 

 when differences in civilization appeared, primitive 

 times had been past by thousands and thousands 

 of years. Nor is the difference of races any better 

 reason for these terrible struggles. When the 

 chimpanzees and the makis meet in the tropical 

 forest, they do not throw themselves on each other 

 in a struggle of extermination, even though there is 

 a greater difference between the makis and the 

 chimpanzees than between the most widely sepa- 

 rated of the human races. 



Moreover, Ratzenhofer, with the characteristic 

 superficiality of the philosophy of force, fails to 

 see that contact between widely different bands 

 and races would have been impossible in primitive 

 times. He confuses conditions in modern times, 



