IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
| [CHAP. | ||
| 400 | THE HEART OF A CONTINENT. |
fencing, the chances are very much in favour of his being worsted. It is not so in every case, for there are, of course, Europeans just as nimble-minded and subtle as Asiatics ; but, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the sharp-witted Asiatic wins. On the other hand, where real influence has been gained by the European over Asiatics, it has been due to his straightness and strength of moral character, and not to any original intellectual superiority. The European shows his greater moral strength by his tenacity of purpose, his persistence in the object he has before him, his disregard of selfish interests in the advancement of that object, and his sympathy with those about him. These characteristics of a higher moral development enable him to win the day in his competition with men of natural capacity equal to his own, who fail in the struggle because they have not the same "grit" or resolution, and, above all, because they do not practise that abnegation of self in the interest of others, and that sympathy with those about them which have been inculcated into the European races by the teaching of the Christian religion. Europeans are anything but perfect in the practice of these principles, but when we hear of a wounded British officer * dismounting from his pony and insisting upon his wounded comrade, a native soldier, mounting it in his stead and riding back to safety, while he walked, although the enemy were firing from all sides, then we know that such principles are 'sometimes applied, and it
is because they are more frequently and more thoroughly
applied by the Christian than by the non-Christian races of the world that the former have been able to establish their
superiority over the latter.
If this conclusion, based upon experiences with men of
many different races, is right, it furnishes a strong argument in support of the opinion that the development of the human race is now, not towards bigger heads, with cold, subtle brains, * Lieutenant Fowler, R.E., at Reshun, in Chitral.
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