276 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP 



morality is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, 

 and broad-mindedness is rewarded with a sneer. 

 Compassion is a disease, and to be fashionable 

 is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no 

 nerves and no choice of emotions, and were utterly 

 indifferent to life, they could scarcely be treated 

 more completely as personal nonentities. 



The denial by human animals of ethical rela- 

 tions to the rest of the animal world is a 

 phenomenon not differing either in character or 

 cause from the denial of ethical relations by a 

 tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest 

 of the human world. The provincialism of Jews 

 toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of 

 Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward 

 non- Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Cau- 

 casians, is not one thing and the provincialism of 

 human beings toward non -human beings another. 

 They are all manifestations of the same thing. 

 The fact that these various acts are performed by 

 different individuals and upon different individuals, 

 and are performed at different times and places, 

 does not invalidate the essential sameness of their 

 natures. Crimes are not classified (except by 

 savages or their immediate derivatives) according 

 to the similarity of those who do them or those 

 who suffer from them, but by grouping them 

 according to the similarity of their intrinsic quali- 

 ties. All acts of provincialism consist essentially 

 in the disinclination or inability to be universal, 

 and they belong in reality, all of them, to the 

 same species of conduct. There is, in fact, but 



