s of this kind. I call to mind an example in Paraguay, where
abstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearly
wrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at once
began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the
committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to
the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was
averted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to
indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go on
living, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So with
devotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration of
wide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundings which make up
the Home of Man. Were Nature uniform, in a geographical sense, from pole
to pole, civilization might be practically as well as ideally one,
though it may fairly be doubted whether in such a world civilization,
such as we know, would arise; but with the present distribution of land
and water, temperature and rainfall, and the complex of plants and
animals which results from their interaction, unity among the phenomena
of culture ceases to be practicable, and it has become hard for some (as
we have seen) even to keep their faith in the unity of human reason.

It was not, in fact, till a rather later stage in the growth of science,
either in the old world, or in our own, that anyone troubled himself
about the existence of such unity at all. That men of alien blood should
behave in alien and incomprehensible ways seemed to the Greek and to the
navigators of the Renaissance equally natural. And Herodotus and Bodin,
to name only pioneers and masters, are agreed as to the cause. Variety
in Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is the
response of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experience
added intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits of
life, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequent
and obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery is
implicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotle and Locke.
Had Europe broken into the Great East in Locke's day, as the Greeks
broke into Persia in Aristotle's, we might have had completer analogy
between the ethnology of Montesquieu and that of Eratosthenes than we
can actually trace. The defect in the writer of the _Lettres Persanes_
is in his k