ght have thought about manure and the farmer
about metaphysics. And this holds good also of nations and races.
Consider, for instance, the German people who before the rise of
Bismarck were looked upon as a nation of peaceful peasants and
_Gelerhten_, "_ces bons Allemands_," in contemporary French parlance,
and how they became within a few years through being made to think
constantly about their own national supremacy, a race of ruthless
warriors that terrorised and nearly conquered Europe in the Great World
War. The mind of the German race had not been changed, but the main
business of that mind had been changed through the imposition on the
growing masses of a new ideal, the ideal of dominion in the hands of the
German people.

The difference between the mental status of the white man and the Native
is the same as that which we notice between the man who has had a
liberal education and the man who has not, and it lies mainly in the
fact that the one is given to introspection, analysis and criticism
whereas the other, whether he be a European peasant or a Bantu herdsman,
looks outward, takes things for granted and asks no questions, so that
with the Bantu as with the illiterate European, the primitive thoughts
and ways of their forefathers are held good enough by their sons, but
this does not preclude the latent potentiality in both for the
understanding and acquisition of new thoughts and ways once the shackles
of conservatism have been loosened and cast aside.

In his thinking about the things he knows the black man comes to the
same conclusion as the white man when he thinks about the same things.
The black man does not think about electricity or the differential
calculus because he knows nothing about these matters, neither, and for
the same reason, does the European peasant wherever he may still be
found in his primitive state. It has been alleged in America and in
South Africa that Negro and Bantu children, when compared with European
children in both countries, show not only comparative slowness in the
study of arithmetic, but that they are on the whole less accurate in
their work, and this I readily believe, for the reason that the home
surroundings of the black children are seldom as favourable to the
development of speed and exactness as they are among Europeans. It is
not considered "good form" among Natives to do things in a hurry,
slowness is regarded as essential to good manners; moreover the craving
fo