“How horrible!” Frida exclaimed.
“Yes, horrible,” Bertram answered; “like your own worst customs. It didn’t show either gentleness or rationality, you’ll admit; but it showed what’s the one thing essential to civilisation—great coherence, high organisation, much division of function. Some of the rites these civilised Mexicans performed would have made the blood of kindly savages run cold with horror. They sacrificed a man at the harvest festival by crushing him like the corn between two big flat stones. Sometimes the priests skinned their victim alive, and wore his raw skin as a mask or covering, and danced hideous dances, so disguised, in honour of the hateful deities whom their fancies had created—deities even more hateful and cruel, perhaps, than the worst of your own Christian Calvinistic fancies. I can’t see, myself, that civilised people are one whit the better in all these respects than the uncivilised barbarian. They pull together better, that’s all; but war, bloodshed, superstition, fetich-worship, religious rites, castes, class distinctions, sex taboos, restrictions on freedom of thought, on freedom of action, on freedom of speech, on freedom of knowledge, are just as common in their midst as among the utterly uncivilised.”
“Then what you yourself aim at,” Frida said, looking hard at him, for he spoke very earnestly—“what you yourself aim at is—?”
Bertram’s eyes came back to solid earth with a bound.
“Oh, what we at home aim at,” he said, smiling that sweet, soft smile of his that so captivated Frida, “is not mere civilisation (though, of course, we value that too, in its meet degree, because without civilisation and co-operation no great thing is possible), but rationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good—to recognise truly your own place in the universe; to hold your head up like a man, before the face of high heaven, afraid of no ghosts or fetiches or phantoms; to understand that wise and right and unselfish actions are the great requisites in life, not the service of non-existent and misshapen creatures of the human imagination. Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in,—these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers—still more because priests or fetich-men had commanded it—he would be regarded, not as virtuous, but as feeble or wicked—a sort of moral idiot, unable to distinguish rationally for himself between good and evil. That’s not the sort of conduct we consider right or befitting the dignity of a grown man or woman, an ethical unit in an enlightened community. Rather is it their prime duty to question all things, to accept no rule of conduct or morals as sure till they have thoroughly tested it.”