And yet how strange that the white man, with all his science and all his so-called Christianity, has only come among these three peoples mentioned (and how many more?) to destroy and defile them—­to flog the mild and innocent native of the Amazons to death for greed of his rubber; to rob the Kafir of his free wild lands and blast his life with drink and slavery in the diamond mines; to degrade and exterminate the Pacific islanders with all the vices and diseases of “civilization”!

Think of the Chinese—­that extraordinary people coming down from the remotest ages of history, with their habits and institutions apparently but little changed—­so kindly, so “all there,” so bent on making the best of this world.  “At the first sight of these ugly, cheery, vigorous people I loved them.  Their gaiety, as of children, their friendliness, their profound humanity, struck me from the first and remained with me to the last."[32] And the verdict of all who know the people well—­in the interior of the country of course—­is the same.  Think of the Japanese with their slight and simple, but exceedingly artistic and exceedingly heroic type of civilization.

Or, again, of the East Indian peoples, so unfitted as a rule for making the best of this world, so passive, dreamy, subtle, unpractical, and yet with their marvellous spiritual gift, their intuition (also since the dawn of history) and conviction of another plane of being than that in which we mostly move, and their occasional power of distinctly sensing that plane and acting on its indications.  Think of their ancient religious philosophy—­their doctrine of world-unity—­absolutely foundational and inexpugnable, the corner-stone of all metaphysics, science, and politics, and of the latest most modern democracy; and still realized and believed in in India as nowhere else in the world.

Think of the gentle Buddhistic Burmese, the active, social Malays, the hard-featured, hard-lived Thibetans and Mongolians.  Think of the Arabian and Moorish and Berber races, who, once the masters of the science and comforts of civilization, of their own accord (but in accordance also with their religion) abandoned the worship of all these idols and returned to the Biblical simplicity of four thousand years ago—­having realized that they already possessed something better, namely, the glory of the sky and the earth, the sun and the desert sands, and the freedom of love and adventure.  How strange, and yet how natural, that sundered only by a narrow strip of sea they even now should look back upon all the laborious, feverish, and overcrowded wealth of Europe and seeing the cost thereof should feel for it only contempt!  For that, indeed, is actually for the most part the case—­though not of course without exceptions among certain sections of the population.