ut have betrayed
them for private profit, that we have thought fit to hate our neighbours
and ill-use them for our profit too.

What a wonderful old globe this is, with its jewelled constellations of
humanity! Alfred Russel Wallace, in his _Travels on the Amazon_ (1853,
ch. xvii), says: "I do not remember a single circumstance in my travels
so striking and so new, or that so well fulfilled all previous
expectation, as my first view of the real uncivilized inhabitants of the
river Uaupes.... I felt that I was as much in the midst of something new
and startling, as if I had been instantaneously transported to a distant
and unknown country." He then speaks of the "quiet, good-natured,
inoffensive" character of these copper-coloured natives, and of their
quickness of hand and skill, and continues: "Their figures are generally
superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human
form." Elsewhere he says[31]: "Their whole aspect and manner were
different [from the semi-civilized Indians]; they walked with the free
step of the independent forest-dweller ... original and self-sustaining
as the wild animals of the forest ... living their own lives in their
own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was
discovered. The true denizen of the Amazonian forests, like the forest
itself, is unique and not to be forgotten."

Not long ago I was talking to a shrewd, vigorous old English lady who
had spent some forty years of her life among the Kafirs in South Africa
and knew them intimately. She said (not knowing anything about _my_
feelings): "Ah! you British think a great deal about yourselves. You
think you are the finest race on earth; but I tell you the Kafirs are
finer. They are splendid. Whether for their physical attributes, or
their mental, or for their qualities of soul, I sometimes think _they_
are the finest people in the world." Whether the old lady was right (and
one has heard others say much the same), or whether she was carried away
by her enthusiasm, the fact remains that here is a people _capable_ of
exciting such enthusiasm, and certainly capable of exciting much
admiration among all who know them well.

Read the accounts of the Polynesian peoples at an early period--before
commerce and the missionaries had come among them--as given in the pages
of Captain Cook, of Herman Melville, or even as adumbrated in their