and the thrum-headed primrose. As he grows older, he scans the
roadside for little peeping things that to a lazy eye seem as like
each other as two peas--the dove's foot geranium, the round-leaved
geranium and the lesser wild geranium. "As like each other as two
peas," we have said: but _are_ two peas like each other? Who knows
whether the peas have not the same differences of feature among
themselves that Englishmen have? Half the similarities we notice are
only the results of our ignorance and idleness. The townsman passing a
field of sheep finds it difficult to believe that the shepherd can
distinguish between one and another of them with as much certainty as
if they were his children. And do not most of us think of foreigners
as beings who are all turned out as if on a pattern, like sheep? The
further removed the foreigners are from us in race the more they seem
to us to be like each other. When we speak of negroes, we think of
millions of people most of whom look exactly alike. We feel much the
same about Chinamen and even Turks. Probably to a Chinaman all English
children look exactly alike, and it may be that all Europeans seem to
him to be as indistinguishable as sticks of barley-sugar. How many
people think of Jews in this way! I have heard an Englishman
expressing his wonder that Jewish parents should be able to pick out
their own children in a crowd of Jewish boys and girls.

Thus our first generalisations spring from ignorance rather than from
knowledge. They are true, so long as we know that they are not
entirely true. As soon as we begin to accept them as absolute truths,
they become lies. One of the perils of a great war is that it revives
the passionate faith of the common man in generalisations. He begins
to think that all Germans are much the same, or that all Americans are
much the same, or that all Conscientious Objectors are much the same.
In each case he imagines a lay figure rather than a human being. He