SECT. II.] MOEAL SENSE. 315 



without the least scruple, though they are generally humane 

 towards the White. No doubt some of them have grievously 

 suffered from the massacre of their families by the Indians. 

 They accordingly look upon the Indians as wild beasts, and treat 

 them as such. 1 Thus we perceive that the European acts in 

 such cases entirely on the principle prevalent among savages, 

 namely, that vengeance, if it cannot reach the guilty, may be 

 taken on the tribe to which he belongs ; for instance, the 

 Bedouin Arab makes the Turk responsible for the Turk, the 

 Frank for the Frank, the black for the black. 2 We need 

 scarcely refer to the morality of the slaveholders in the United 

 States. The Catholic missionaries in Congo looked with horror 

 upon the slave trade carried on by Protestants, but had no ob- 

 jection that Congo negroes should be kidnapped by Catholics 

 and carried into Catholic countries. 3 In our own time even 

 we find the moral judgment very elastic, and just adapted to 

 the prevailing practice ; habit makes us so familiar with this, 

 that only striking deviations become perceptible. Thus we 

 read that in Java the seducer of another man's wife is judged 

 very indulgently, the husband only being ridiculed ; whilst the 

 seduction of another man's housekeeper is considered a very 

 reprehensible act, for which the offender is excluded from all 

 society. 4 Some hundred years back there prevailed in Europe 

 quite a different morality. Slave trade, cruelties of every kind 

 against non- Christians, were considered as perfectly justifiable. 

 We may mention, by the way, that Edward III. of England 

 forbade his " right noble lords and right honourable ladies" to 

 carry on piracy and highway robbery, not on the grounds of 

 justice and morality, but simply because these acts injured the 

 revenues of the crown, and deterred foreign merchants from 

 visiting the country. 



The natives of America have often been reproached with an 

 incorrigible vice of drunkenness peculiar to the red race, and 

 which leads them to certain destruction. This may also be as- 



1 Hoffman, " A Winter in the Far West," ii, p. 30, 1835. 



2 D'Escayrac, " Die Afrika Wiiste und d. Land der Scliwarzen," p. 170, 1855. 



3 ZuchelH, " Merkw. Miss. u. Eeisebeschr. nacli Congo," p. 226, 1715. 



4 Selberg, loc. cit., p. 168. 



