‘In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the slaves were forced to work in chains and to sleep in subterranean prisons. The feeling entertained toward this unfortunate class in the later republican period is illustrated by Varro’s classification of slaves as “vocal agricultural implements,” and by Cato the Elder’s recommendation that old and worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of economy. Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to an island in the Tiber, and there left to die of starvation and exposure’.[3b] Slaves were practically without any rights whatever to the world in which they lived. A Roman could take the life of his Gallic slave with as complete impunity as an American can slay his bovine servant to-day. Romans, in short, looked upon and treated non-Romans about as human beings to-day look upon and treat non-humans—as mere prey.

[1.] Spencer: Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893.
[2.] Myers: Ancient History, part i.; Boston, 1899.
[3a.] [3b.] Myers: Ancient History, part ii.; Boston, 1899.
[4.] Preston and Dodge: The Private Life of the Romans; Boston, 1896.

V. Modern Ethics.

But the peoples of the ancient world are not the only human beings who have suffered from the psychological bequests of savages. Modern states and peoples, notwithstanding their far-flung professions of righteousness, manifest, though in a somewhat weakened form, the same ethnic prejudices and the same senseless antipathies as those displayed by the ancients. Remnants of the primitive tribal morality are found in the moral habits and conceptions of every people, however emancipated they may imagine themselves to be. Many a person who would not think of swindling one of his neighbours will not hesitate to swindle a foreigner, especially if the foreigner happens to be of a nationality much removed in language, colour, manners, or interests from his own. Morality is genetic. It is not a consistent something—something reasoned out and framed according to the facts. It has grown up. It is essentially tribal—whether it is confined to a family, as is done by some, to a corporation or trade, to a nation, to an artificial fraternity, or to a species. We are, in fact, all of us, even the broadest and most illuminated, simply savages more or less leafed out. We all suffer, as men have always suffered, from the over-vividness of the presentative powers of the mind (sensation and perception) compared with the representative powers (memory and imagination). We all exaggerate out of their proper perspective in the phenomena of a universe the things that are around us and about us—the events we witness or take part in, the things that are ours, and the affairs of the street, city, state, neighbourhood, world, and time, in which we live. Every human being (the sage less than the savage, but the sage to some extent) is inclined to lump together as foreign to him, and as more or less useless and shadowy in themselves, the things, beings, and events that are distant, and to consider them, of less reality than those with which he is directly concerned, and of which his knowledge is immediate. The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time.

The Chinese call their country ‘the flower of the middle,’ and believe it to be the central and choicest portion of the earth’s surface. All those beyond the bounds of ‘The Heavenly Flower Kingdom’ are, by those on the inside, venomously lumped together as ‘foreign devils.’ The people of Spain look upon themselves in much the same way as the Chinese look upon themselves, although they are in reality the most belated of all peoples to-day pretending to be civilised. There are a few travelled and educated Spaniards who realise the pitiful place held by their country in the family of reputable states. ‘But the great mass of the people are not only perfectly satisfied with their condition, but consider themselves the most fortunate of all God’s creatures. They never go outside of their country and never read a foreign newspaper or book. Like the Chinese, they consider other nations barbarians, and point to Madrid as the centre of civilisation.’ The French, down to the nineteenth century, confiscated the property of all aliens who died within the realm; and the savage practice of punishing one alien for the crimes of another alien was sanctioned by the laws of England down to the middle of the fourteenth century. It has been only a day in the history of the world since Caucasians hunted their dusky brothers in Africa like ‘wild animals,’ and sold and loaned and lashed them as we do horses to-day. Men now living can remember when it made no difference how exalted in character men might be: if a certain pigment of their bodies was dark, they were ‘niggers.’ They had no ‘souls’ as pale men had, and no more chance of paradise than cattle. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, incredible as it may seem, every country of Europe and America held slaves, and was engaged in the soulless avocation of man-hunting in Africa. Tens of thousands of Africa’s children were annually seized by prowling pirate bands and exported to distant lands to wear their lives out in disgrace and drudgery. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that civilised nations, following the initiative of England, finally abolished human slavery, the United States and Brazil being the last to act. The Christian sneers at all who do not bow down to his deities and worship according to his ritual, as ‘heathens’ or ‘freethinkers,’ and to the Moslem all who are not followers of ‘the True Prophet’ are ‘infidel dogs.’ The history of these two religions is a chronicle of almost unparalleled crimes upon disbelievers.

But it is not necessary to go to Arabia or Cathay, nor even necessary to read history, in order to find examples of bigotry and provincialism. It is only necessary to open our eyes. Americans are not a peculiar people—unless it be in the unbridled character of their conceit. All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror. The old savage spirit still circulates in our veins. The ‘foreigner’ is not an enemy, but he is still an individual whose chief significance is in his ‘fleece.’ If the ‘foreigner’ did not ease our economic theories by benevolently ‘paying the tax,’ it would be hard to tell what would become of him. Those who suffer from a different government, speak a different language, or laud other gods are regarded by us as distinctly inferior to ourselves. Millions of dollars are annually squandered by self-righteous societies in sending missionaries to the other side of the planet to peoples who need evangels of mercy and humanity far less than we do ourselves. In these times of ecclesiastical enterprise, however, missionaries are being superseded, as agents of evangelisation, by the more effective inventions of Messrs. Maxim and Krupp. ‘American’ is regarded by us as the synonym of perfection, and to be ‘patriotic’ is to give unthinking enthusiasm to every scheme incubated by wolfish spoilsmen. Crimes of conquest carried on by others become, when undertaken by us, shining masterpieces of ‘benevolent assimilation.’ We are not so far from the naked and unkempt contemporaries of the cave-bear and sabre-toothed lion as we imagine we are. To carry a bayonet, and especially to redden it with an alien’s blood, is here in this degenerate land of Jefferson, more glorious than to create a book. Captains particularly competent as butchers, though their characters be as coarse as a savage chief’s, are hailed as heroes by thousands besides silly women, and held up, like the cutthroats of the Kukis, as the highest exemplars of right-doing. Old Rameses, holding by their hair a half-dozen dwarfs, and ostentatiously cutting off their heads with a single sweep of his sword, finds his modern counterpart in miserable Americans pompously gloating over the offhand slaughter of the children of distant archipelagoes.

VI. The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings.

But the most mournful instance of provincial ethics afforded by the inhabitants of the earth is not that furnished by the varieties of the human species in their conduct toward each other, but that afforded by the human race as a whole in its treatment of the non-human races. Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world. With the development of the representative powers of the mind, the widening and mutualising of human activities, and the consequent enlargement of the human horizon, the feeling of amity has spread and intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that is true of human sectionalism, the ethical systems of civilised peoples include, theoretically at least, and more or less seriously, all human beings whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended from individual to family, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to race, from race to species, until, in the case of many millions of men, ethical feeling has reached, with greater or less vividness and consistency, the anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that an individual is a man—that is, that he belongs to the human species of animals—entitles him in all civilised lands to the fundamental rights and privileges of existence. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by all exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties of every human being who comes into the world.

But, except by occasional individuals here and there whose emotions are more civilised than the rest, or whose conceptions are more ample and clear, ethical relations are not extended by human beings beyond the bounds of their own species. Non-human millions are outsiders. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked upon as mere things—mere moving, multiplying objects, without the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves. They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, ‘Lions, tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.’ Accustomed from our cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact (‘paragons’ though they pretend to be), the most predatory and brutal of all animals—the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of the planet.

It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, to commit crimes upon any beings in this world, except men. There are no beings in the universe, according to human beings, except themselves. All others are commodities. They are of consequence only because they have thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places of the human alimentary. Human beings are ‘persons,’ and have souls and gods and places to go to when they die. But the hundreds of thousands of other races of terrestrial inhabitants are mere ‘animals,’ mere ‘brutes,’ and ‘beasts of the field,’ ‘livestock’ and ‘vermin.’ Every crime capable of being perpetrated by one being upon another is day after day rained upon them, and with an equanimity that would do honour to the managers of an inferno. Human beings preach as the cardinal rule of morality—and they seem never to tire of its reiteration—that they should do unto others as they would that others would do unto them; but they hypocritically confine its application to the members of their own crowd, notwithstanding there are the same reasons identically for extending it to all creatures. The happiness of the human species is assumed to be so much more precious than that of others that the most sacred interests of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order that human desires may all be fastidiously catered to. Even for a tooth or a feather or a piece of skin to wear on human vanity, forests are depopulated and the land filled with the dead and dying. Assassination is the commonest and most fashionable of human pastimes. Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little compunction as savages put on war-paint. They come back from their campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old Rome, trailing their victims as trophies, and expecting to be hailed as heroes for the hells they have established. Barbarians preponderate, and morality is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, and broad-mindedness is rewarded with a sneer. Compassion is a disease, and to be fashionable is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no nerves and no choice of emotions, and were utterly indifferent to life, they could scarcely be treated more completely as personal nonentities.