past
life in the writings of R.L. Stevenson--what a picture of health and
gaiety and beauty! Surely never was there a more charming and happy
folk--even if long-pig did occasionally in their feasts alternate with
wild-pig.

And yet how strange that the white man, with all his science and all his
so-called Christianity, has only come among these three peoples
mentioned (and how many more?) to destroy and defile them--to flog the
mild and innocent native of the Amazons to death for greed of his
rubber; to rob the Kafir of his free wild lands and blast his life with
drink and slavery in the diamond mines; to degrade and exterminate the
Pacific islanders with all the vices and diseases of "civilization"!

Think of the Chinese--that extraordinary people coming down from the
remotest ages of history, with their habits and institutions apparently
but little changed--so kindly, so "all there," so bent on making the
best of this world. "At the first sight of these ugly, cheery, vigorous
people I loved them. Their gaiety, as of children, their friendliness,
their profound humanity, struck me from the first and remained with me
to the last."[32] And the verdict of all who know the people well--in
the interior of the country of course--is the same. Think of the
Japanese with their slight and simple, but exceedingly artistic and
exceedingly heroic type of civilization.

Or, again, of the East Indian peoples, so unfitted as a rule for making
the best of this world, so passive, dreamy, subtle, unpractical, and yet
with their marvellous spiritual gift, their intuition (also since the
dawn of history) and conviction of another plane of being than that in
which we mostly move, and their occasional power of distinctly sensing
that plane and acting on its indications. Think of their ancient
religious philosophy--their doctrine of world-unity--absolutely
foundational and inexpugnable, the corner-stone of all metaphysics,
science, and politics, and of the latest most modern democracy; and
still realized and believed in in India as nowhere else in the world.

Think of the gentle Buddhistic Burmese, the active, social Malays, the
hard-featured, hard-lived Thibetans and Mongolians. Think of the Arabian
and Moorish and Berber races, who, once the masters of the science and
comforts of civilization, of their own accord (but in accordance also
with their religion) abandoned the worship of all these idols and
returned to the Biblical simplicit