In considering crimes of violence against white women it must also be remembered that the Native “house-boy” who works in constant and close physical contact with his European mistress and her daughters is exposed to sexual excitation which very few European youths are called upon to withstand.  But crimes of this kind are indeed common enough among the lower orders in Europe and America, and are particularly frequent among men who have to live for a long time in unnatural abstinence from natural intercourse with the opposite sex, and who then find themselves in new surroundings giving opportunities for the gratification of their natural desires, but without having at the same time the restraining influences of their home life to help them to overcome the temptations to which they are exposed.  The seaports of Europe and America, and the Great War furnish too many sad examples of sexual ferocity by white men to allow us to think that they are in this respect inherently superior to the men of other races.

The maternal instinct is manifested in the same manner and degree in the women of both people.  I have often asked Native women whether it would be possible for any mother among them to distinguish her own new-born baby from a supposed “changeling” of the same sex and of the same general appearance, and the answer has always been negative.  The Native and the white woman alike would continue to cherish the substituted child exactly as they would have cherished the issue of their own bodies.  The desire to bear children is the same in all normally constituted women irrespective of colour or race, and there is no sign of any special instinct for identification in the Native woman, such as the sense of smell, which is found in all the higher animals.

There are some students who think that most of the emotions of man are but the survivals of instinctive habit.  Be this as it may, the sexual attraction which is commonly called love certainly seems to be essentially instinctive whereas friendship and parental and filial devotion, when continued throughout life, seem to be emotions that depend largely upon association and conscious intelligence.  Every natural mother will sacrifice herself for her offspring while it is young but the tender feeling which continues in her breast towards the child after it has grown up is sustained by association, or, where the child is continually absent, by conscious intelligence in the form of considerations of conventional approbation which in time merge into a habit or a sense of duty which is hardly recognised as such.  Many white people think that although the average Native mother is capable of the greatest devotion for her young children she is incapable of the love which a white mother feels for her children even after they have ceased to depend upon her care.  This, I think, is wrong.  I have seen many instances of elderly Native women who have cherished their grown up children to the last with every sign of motherly affection.