Bertram drew back with a really pained expression on his handsome features.  “O Mrs. Monteith!” he cried, “Frida, I’m so sorry if I’ve seemed rude to you!  It’s all the same thing—­pure human inadvertence; inability to throw myself into so unfamiliar an attitude.  I forget every minute that you do not recognise the essential identity of your own taboos and poojahs and fetiches with the similar and often indistinguishable taboos and poojahs and fetiches of savages generally.  They all come from the same source, and often retain to the end, as in your temple superstitions and your marriage superstitions, the original features of their savage beginnings.  And as to your being comparatively civilised, I grant you that at once; only it doesn’t necessarily make you one bit more rational—­certainly not one bit more humane, or moral, or brotherly in your actions.”

“I don’t understand you,” Frida cried, astonished.  “But there!  I often don’t understand you; only I know, when you’ve explained things, I shall see how right you are.”

Bertram smiled a quiet smile.

“You’re certainly an apt pupil,” he said, with brotherly gentleness, pulling a flower as he went and slipping it softly into her bosom.  “Why, what I mean’s just this.  Civilisation, after all, in the stage in which you possess it, is only the ability to live together in great organised communities.  It doesn’t necessarily imply any higher moral status or any greater rationality than those of the savage.  All it implies is greater cohesion, more unity, higher division of functions.  But the functions themselves, like those of your priests and judges and soldiers, may be as barbaric and cruel, or as irrational and unintelligent, as any that exist among the most primitive peoples.  Advance in civilisation doesn’t necessarily involve either advance in real knowledge of one’s relations to the universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture.  Some highly civilised nations of historic times have been more cruel and barbarous than many quite uncultivated ones.  For example, the Romans, at the height of their civilisation, went mad drunk with blood at their gladiatorial shows; the Athenians of the age of Pericles and Socrates offered up human sacrifices at the Thargelia, like the veriest savages; and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilised commercial people of the world in their time, as the English are now, gave their own children to be burnt alive as victims to Baal.  The Mexicans were far more civilised than the ordinary North American Indians of their own day, and even in some respects than the Spanish Christians who conquered, converted, enslaved, and tortured them; but the Mexican religion was full of such horrors as I could hardly even name to you.  It was based entirely on cannibalism, as yours is on Mammon.  Human sacrifices were common—­commoner even than in modern England, I fancy.  New-born babies were killed by the priests when the corn was sown; children when it had sprouted; men when it was full grown; and very old people when it was fully ripe.”