We—­and I speak of the European nations generally—­have talked loudly of our own glory; but have we welcomed and acclaimed the glory and beauty of the other peoples and races around us—­among whom it is our privilege to dwell?  We have boasted to love each our own country, but have we cared at all for the other countries too?  Verily I suspect that it is because we have not truly loved our own countries, but have betrayed them for private profit, that we have thought fit to hate our neighbours and ill-use them for our profit too.

What a wonderful old globe this is, with its jewelled constellations of humanity!  Alfred Russel Wallace, in his Travels on the Amazon (1853, ch. xvii), says:  “I do not remember a single circumstance in my travels so striking and so new, or that so well fulfilled all previous expectation, as my first view of the real uncivilized inhabitants of the river Uaupes....  I felt that I was as much in the midst of something new and startling, as if I had been instantaneously transported to a distant and unknown country.”  He then speaks of the “quiet, good-natured, inoffensive” character of these copper-coloured natives, and of their quickness of hand and skill, and continues:  “Their figures are generally superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human form.”  Elsewhere he says[31]:  “Their whole aspect and manner were different [from the semi-civilized Indians]; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller ... original and self-sustaining as the wild animals of the forest ... living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was discovered.  The true denizen of the Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be forgotten.”

Not long ago I was talking to a shrewd, vigorous old English lady who had spent some forty years of her life among the Kafirs in South Africa and knew them intimately.  She said (not knowing anything about my feelings):  “Ah! you British think a great deal about yourselves.  You think you are the finest race on earth; but I tell you the Kafirs are finer.  They are splendid.  Whether for their physical attributes, or their mental, or for their qualities of soul, I sometimes think they are the finest people in the world.”  Whether the old lady was right (and one has heard others say much the same), or whether she was carried away by her enthusiasm, the fact remains that here is a people capable of exciting such enthusiasm, and certainly capable of exciting much admiration among all who know them well.

Read the accounts of the Polynesian peoples at an early period—­before commerce and the missionaries had come among them—­as given in the pages of Captain Cook, of Herman Melville, or even as adumbrated in their past life in the writings of R.L.  Stevenson—­what a picture of health and gaiety and beauty!  Surely never was there a more charming and happy folk—­even if long-pig did occasionally in their feasts alternate with wild-pig.