lose and nothing to gain.


THE PRIMITIVE SAVAGE MOTIVE

I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives
are easy enough to find. Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet
learns that if he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe--
and without doing that he can rule them--he must terrify or
revolt them from time to time by acts of hideous cruelty or
disgusting unnaturalness. We are far from being as superior to
such tribes as we imagine. It is very doubtful indeed whether
Peter the Great could have effected the changes he made in Russia
if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by his
monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades. Had he been a
nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for
some huge accidental calamity: a cholera epidemic, a war, or an
insurrection, before waking us up sufficiently to get anything
done. Vivisection helps the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the
Russians. The notion that the man who does dreadful things is
superhuman, and that therefore he can also do wonderful things
either as ruler, avenger, healer, or what not, is by no means
confined to barbarians. Just as the manifold wickednesses and
stupidities of our criminal code are supported, not by any
general comprehension of law or study of jurisprudence, not even
by simple vindictiveness, but by the superstition that a calamity
of any sort must be expiated by a human sacrifice; so the
wickednesses and stupidities of our medicine men are rooted in
superstitions that have no more to do with science than the
traditional ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with