It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international
morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it
would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the
standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men
who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are
not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people
who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and
indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance
of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant
lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable
to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new
land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself
misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the
Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying
American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the western miners and
cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux hunting-grounds.
Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for
ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end
shape their own destinies.
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