there may have been something more savage
inside, and certainly a Dahomey warrior from South Africa would have to
be ferocious indeed if his fierceness was to equal his rarity. But the
particular race did not matter. The really interesting thing was that
the English crowd was assumed to be as far superior to the African
savage as to a wild beast in a menagerie. The proportion was the same.
The English crowd was expected to extend to the barbarians the same
inquisitive patronage as to jackals and hyenas in a cage, when in front
of the cages it is written, "Do not irritate these animals. They bite."

The facile assumption of superiority recalled a paradoxical remark that
Huxley made about thirty years ago, when that apostle of evolution
suddenly scandalised progressive Liberalism by asserting that a Zulu, if
not a more advanced type than a British working man, was at all events
happier. "I should rather be a Zulu than a British workman," said Huxley
in his trenchant way, and the believers in industrialism were not
pleased. By the continual practice of war, and by generations of
infanticide, under which only the strongest babies survived, the Zulus
had certainly at that time raised themselves to high physical
excellence, traces of which still remain in spite of the degeneracy that
follows foreign subjection. I have known many African tribes between
Dahomey and Zululand too well to idealise them into "the noble savage."
I know how rapidly they are losing both their bodily health and their
native virtues under the deadly contact of European drink, clothing,
disease, and exploitation. Yet, on looking round upon the London crowds
that were particularly requested not to tease the cannibals, my first
thought was that Huxley's paradox remained true.

The crowds that swarmed the Heath were not lovely things to look at.
Newspapers estimated that nearly half a million human beings were
collected on the patch of sand that Macaulay's imagination transfigured
into "Hampstead's swarthy moor." But even if we followed the safe rule
and divided the estimated number by half, a quarter of a million was
quite enough. "Like bugs--the more, the worse," Emerson said of city
crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could
hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before.
Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in
purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enoug