Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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It may be allowed any man who has English blood in his veins to feel that he can never fall in the gulf of insincerity and egoism but he shall have millions of his fellow countrymen about him, but also that there are no heights of sincerity and humanity towards which he may aspire which thousands of his race have not attained; that he belongs to a branch of the human race which, if it has given birth to some of the most sordid and crumpled of human blooms, has also borne on it the fairest of fruit.

Even if one turn to the despised African races, one finds, with much that is immature and childlike, much that is gracious and charming. That very strength of social instinct which characterises so many of them, to whom the social organism is all, the individual composing it so little, far removed as it is from our individualized Northern standpoint, may it not yet have its aspects of value and its lessons for humanity? The very Bushman, so little socialized, and standing almost on the border-line between the creature that speaks whom we call man and the creature that thinks and feels without speaking whom we call beast, that he has something of the attraction of both, would we be without him? And may one not well be glad one was not born so late in the order of life that one never saw him? And one who has not personally known the Jap, the Chinaman, the Indian, the Afghan, the Spaniard, the Esquimo and the Turk, may well regret that the shortness of human life has made it impossible for him to love and study them all in their own habitats?