ude that
lies behind it. Our people are trying to pattern themselves on white
men, and succeed in giving a more or less shambling imitation thereof.
The native has standards, ideas, and ideals that perfectly satisfy him,
and that antedated the white man's coming by thousands of years. The
consciousness of this reflects itself in his outward bearing. He does
not shuffle; he is not either obsequious or impudent. Even when he
acknowledges the white man's divinity and pays it appropriate respect,
he does not lose the poise of his own well-worked-out attitude toward
life and toward himself.

We are fond of calling these people primitive. In the world's standard
of measurement they are primitive, very primitive indeed. But ordinarily
by that term, we mean also undeveloped, embryonic. In that sense we are
wrong. Instead of being at the very dawn of human development, these
people are at the end-as far as they themselves are concerned. The
original racial impulse that started them down the years toward
development has fulfilled its duty and spent its force. They have worked
out all their problems, established all their customs, arranged the
world and its phenomena in a philosophy to their complete satisfaction.
They have lived, ethnologists tell us, for thousands, perhaps hundreds
of thousands of years, just as we find them to-day. From our standpoint
that is in a hopeless intellectual darkness, for they know absolutely
nothing of the most elementary subjects of knowledge. From their
standpoint, however, they have reached the highest DESIRABLE pinnacle
of human development. Nothing remains to be changed. Their customs,
religions, and duties have been worked out and immutably established
long ago; and nobody dreams of questioning either their wisdom or their
imperative necessity. They are the conservatives of the world.

Nor must we conclude-looking at them with the eyes of our own
civilization-that the savage is, from his standpoint, lazy and idle.
His life is laid out more rigidly than ours will be for a great many
thousands of years. From childhood to old age he performs his every act
in accord with prohibitions and requirements. He must remember them all;
for ignorance does not divert consequences. He must observe them all; in
pain of terrible punishments. For example, never may he cultivate on
the site of a grave; and the plants that spring up from it must never
be cut.* He must make certain complicated offerings before ve