sensitive. I have been told by a relative of one of the three or four
greatest living writers of English that the unfavourable comment of a
child would affect him so that he would be depressed for hours.
Statesmen and politicians, I understand, suffer far more deeply in the
inner self than the outer self ever gives a sign of. The fact that our
own weakness or folly or recklessness or wrong-doing lays us open to a
blow is not much consolation when it falls.



XV


For myself all this became more tolerable when I had fully grasped the
fact that we are still to a considerable degree a race of savages. From
savages one cannot expect too much, not even from oneself. We have
advanced beyond the stage at which one naturally attacked a stranger
simply because he was a stranger, but we have not advanced very far. The
instinct to do one another harm is still strong in us. We do one another
harm when it would be just as easy, perhaps easier, to do one another
good. Just as the Ashanti hiding in the bush will hurl his assegai at a
passer-by for no other reason than that he is passing, so our love of
doing harm will spit itself out on people just because we know
their names.

Personally I find myself often doing it. I could on the spur of the
moment write as many as twenty names of people of whom I am accustomed
to speak ill without really knowing much about them. I make it an excuse
that they are in the public eye, that I don't like their politics, or
their social opinions, or their literary output, or the things they do