that the Native "house-boy" who works in constant and close
physical contact with his European mistress and her daughters is exposed
to sexual excitation which very few European youths are called upon to
withstand. But crimes of this kind are indeed common enough among the
lower orders in Europe and America, and are particularly frequent among
men who have to live for a long time in unnatural abstinence from
natural intercourse with the opposite sex, and who then find themselves
in new surroundings giving opportunities for the gratification of their
natural desires, but without having at the same time the restraining
influences of their home life to help them to overcome the temptations
to which they are exposed. The seaports of Europe and America, and the
Great War furnish too many sad examples of sexual ferocity by white men
to allow us to think that they are in this respect inherently superior
to the men of other races.
The maternal instinct is manifested in the same manner and degree in the
women of both people. I have often asked Native women whether it would
be possible for any mother among them to distinguish her own new-born
baby from a supposed "changeling" of the same sex and of the same
general appearance, and the answer has always been negative. The Native
and the white woman alike would continue to cherish the substituted
child exactly as they would have cherished the issue of their own
bodies. The desire to bear children is the same in all normally
constituted women irrespective of colour or race, and there is no sign
of any special instinct for identification in the Native woman, such as
the sense of smell, which is found in all the higher animals.
There are some students who think that most of the emotions of man are
but the survivals of instinctive habit. Be this as it may, the sexual
attraction which is commonly called love certainly seems to be
essentially instinctive whereas friendship and parental and filial
devotion, when continued throughout life, seem to be emotions that
depend largely upon association and conscious intelligence. Every
natural mother will sacrifice herself for her offspring while it is
young but the tender feeling which continues in her breast towards the
child after it has grown up is sustained by association, or, where the
child is continually absent, by conscious intelligence in the form of
considerations of conventional approbation which in time merge into a
habit or a se
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