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In fact, the actors in the scandal have the air of persons who are living, not more majorum, by rules with which they are familiar, but like half-civilized people who have got hold of a code which they do not understand, and the phrases of which they use without being able to adapt their conduct to it.
With a sudden dread that she might recognize him, and likewise demand his services "for luck," he turned and fled. Once more in the open air, there came upon him a vague loathing and horror of the restless madness and feverish distraction of this half-civilized city. It was the more powerful that it was vague, and the outcome of some inward instinct.
Excepting thus the present inhabitants of the so-called Indian Territory, who ought to be excepted from any scheme that embraces the half-civilized and the wholly savage tribes, we have practically a clear field for any policy which Congress shall determine to be best suited to the serious exigency of the situation; for, however easy to dismiss the subject for a time with ridicule, the task of so disposing a nomad population of 200,000 to 240,000, as to reduce to a minimum the obstruction it shall offer to the progress of settlement and of industry, without leaving the germs of lasting evil to a score of future States, and at the same time to secure the highest welfare of that population, this task is a most serious one, to which the best statesmanship of the nation may well address itself.
Why, for instance, taboo has flourished in Hawaii with its fishing industries and has not flourished in certain half-civilized, partly agricultural North American tribes we are unable to explain precisely.
Because, as a rule, we have but one wife and several mistresses each it is not certain that polygamy is everywhere nor, for that matter, anywhere either wrong or inexpedient. Some of these same Orientals whom we are pleased to term half-civilized have no regard for truth. "Takest thou me for a Christian dog," said one of them, "that I should be the slave of my word?"
I should tell him of the ocean steamers, the railroads that spread themselves like cobwebs over the civilized and half-civilized portions of the earth, the telegraph and the telephone, the photograph and the spectroscope.
I believe we are where Billy was treed by the calf the other day or pretty near it, at any rate. We thought there might be people in the neighborhood, but we did not see them." "I suppose it might be as well to go back," said Percival. "It would not be pleasant to run across a lot of half-civilized natives to say nothing of smugglers."
The custom of swearing by the dead is widespread. In their character of powerful spirits they are agents in processes of magic and divination. Parts of dead bodies are used as charms. The skull especially is revered as an oracle. +370+. Among the lower tribes, savage and half-civilized, it is chiefly those who have died recently that are worshiped.
These public examinations are all conducted by males, and women are passing them triumphantly all over Europe and America, and graduate as doctors in every civilized country, and even in half-civilized Russia.
Again, all recent experience shows that it is most difficult to get any wild animal to breed freely under domestication; yet on the hypothesis of the multiple origin of our pigeons, it must be assumed that at least seven or eight species were so thoroughly domesticated in ancient times by half-civilized man, as to be quite prolific under confinement.