United States or Saint Barthélemy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
After making all allowance for these misdeeds, it remains true that few indeed have been the instances in which war has been waged by a civilized power against semicivilized or barbarous forces where there has been so little wrongdoing by the victors as in the Philippine Islands.
Endowed with powers which in a semicivilized state of society must operate powerfully on the mind; at ease and freedom alike on the land, in the water, or among the trees; at once wily, daring, and irresistible in their attack, graceful in their movements, and splendid in their coloring that such creatures, to be both dreaded and admired, should become the subject of superstitious reverence, is scarcely to be wondered at.
The scene of desolation that met us in the Lone City was at once extraordinary and awesome. It seemed impossible that our rays, acting for so brief a period, could have done so much damage. The city was nothing more than a semicivilized settlement of little, flat-topped stone houses. Our rays, striking these, had discharged harmlessly into the ground.
There is something in the possession of superior strength most dangerous, in a moral view, to its possessor. Brought in contact with semicivilized man, the European, with his endowments and effective force so immeasurably superior, holds him as little higher than the brute, and as born equally for his service.
But all this, too, was in a measure dedicatory a foretaste of more vivid episodes to follow, when the glorious siren, displaying to the full her powers of fascination over the souls and the bodies of men, would rise to heights yet greater and the primitive passion she so well simulated would shine forth like a malignant jewel in a setting that was semibarbaric and semicivilized, too, and altogether prodigal and lavish.
The compass finger of the trail, leading out from the timber groves, pointed into a sea of green along the valley of the Kaw. The grass, not yet tall enough fully to ripple as it would a half month later, stood waving over the black-burned ground which the semicivilized Indians had left the fall before.
In modern times polygyny still exists among all the Mohammedan peoples and to a greater or less degree among all semicivilized peoples. It exists in China in the form of concubinage.
Any attempt to trace the stages of this religious development is far beyond our purpose, even if we were capable of doing it. It must suffice to say that man everywhere, when he emerges into history as a semicivilized being, is abundantly supplied with mythological and other religious conceptions which indicate a long preceding evolution in this field of thought.
The lonesome, far-northern Hudson's Bay Trading Post seldom saw such life. Tepees dotted the banks of the Slave River and lines of blanketed Indians paraded its shores. Near the boat landing a group of chiefs, grotesque in semi-barbaric, semicivilized splendor, but black-browed, austere-eyed, stood in savage dignity with folded arms and high-held heads.
After making all allowance for these misdeeds, it remains true that few indeed have been the instances in which war has been waged by a civilized power against semicivilized or barbarous forces where there has been so little wrongdoing by the victors as in the Philippine Islands.
Word Of The Day