THE STATUS OF MAN, 267 



The question of rights in matters of privilege is intimately 

 bound up with the species question as concerning human kind. 



Nobody seriously considers the rights of the trees that grow 

 on a certain spot, if he wants to cut them down in order to 

 grow wheat for his family or clover for his pigs. And buffaloes 

 and rabbits will be ousted from pasturages where they have 

 been thriving for untold generations, if man needs the pas- 

 ture for his live-stock. The interests of man, of our likes, come 

 before the interests of all the other creatures. 



But this feeling of solidarity with our likes, with people like 

 ourselves is altogether more exclusive, than a feeling of the 

 rights of men as against those of pine-trees or rabbits. In the 

 first-place, settlers in a country already inhabited by men, may 

 quarrel among themselves about rights in land and other prop- 

 erty, but if the older inhabitants are visibly very different 

 from themselves, the settlers will not seriously consider their 

 ownership. Unless the aborigines have the organization and 

 the temperament of the Zulus to resist infringements of their 

 rights, these rights are by the settlers considered in approxi- 

 mately the same way as the rights of the pine-trees and the 

 rabbits. For sentimental reasons reservations may be set aside 

 for them, but this happens in the same spirit in which reser- 

 vations are set aside for Buffaloes and redwoods and Egrets. 

 The rights and privileges of our own "kind of people" come 

 first everywhere. And that this spirit of solidarity with our 

 own sort is not vague and general, is best illustrated by those 

 instances where a few people of one nationality acquire rights 

 in property, in diamond-mines or coal-fields situated in another 

 country. Whenever such foreigners do not merge into the people 

 among which they live, if they do not naturalize themsel- 

 ves, they sometimes feel hampered by having to submit to the 

 laws of the country. The people in whose territory they hve, 

 may want to tax their property, or take away their privileges 

 unless they assimilate themselves, unless they become citizens. 

 In such cases the country-fellows of these emigrants will almost 

 certainly sympathize with them. They will fed that the people 



