Human Nature in Politics - Third Edition by Graham Wallas
page 62 of 260 (23%)
page 62 of 260 (23%)
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nowhere, as far as I know, is it found between varieties so nearly
related to each other and so readily interbreeding as the various human races. Anglo-Indian officials sometimes explain, as a case of specific instinct, the fact that a man who goes out with an enthusiastic interest in the native races often finds himself, after a few years, unwillingly yielding to a hatred of the Hindoo racial type. But the account which they give of their sensations seems to me more like the nervous disgust which I described as arising from a constantly repeated mental and emotional adjustment to inharmonious surroundings. At the age when an English official reaches India most of his emotional habits are already set, and he makes, as a rule, no systematic attempt to modify them. Therefore, just as the unfamiliarity of French cookery or German beds, which at the beginning of a continental visit is a delightful change, may become after a month or two an intolerable _gĂȘne,_ so the servility and untruthfulness, and even the patience and cleverness of those natives with whom he is brought into official contact, get after a few years on the nerves of an Anglo-Indian. Intimate and uninterrupted contact during a long period, after his social habits have been formed, with people of his own race but of a different social tradition would produce the same effect. Perhaps, however, intellectual association is a larger factor than instinct in the causation of racial affection and hatred. An American working man associates, for instance, the Far Eastern physical type with that lowering of the standard wage which overshadows as a dreadful possibility every trade in the industrial world. Fifty years ago the middle class readers to whom _Punch_ appeals associated the same type with stories of tortured missionaries and envoys. After the battle of |
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