part not yet ingrained into the
race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of
the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer
beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going
on. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and
belongs almost to the inorganic world. Layer after layer of human
perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley
with cries of "meat, meat!" This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen's
principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which
obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself.
Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in
me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I
shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen
in the conduct of this momentous debate. To me as a teacher the
intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for
infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed,
I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment. Will Mr. Allen
seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and
tweedledee?

To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seem
slight indeed,--same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless
disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books,
etc. "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no
perceptible difference." But what a difference to the literary men
themselves! Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies
together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are
indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah! Our flesh creeps at the
thought.

But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place
himself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things _en gros_ and
out of focus, rather than minutely. It is quite true that there are
things and differences enough to be seen either way. But which are the
humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,--the
large distinctions or the small? In the answer to this question lies
the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists. As
I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only
thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I
prefer.

The zone of the individual differences, and of the