A CANNIBAL AND A FREEBOOTER
these wretches!” burst out Le Blanc. “I’d burn ’em alive!”
“Yes, I am quite sure you would—that is the usual civilized, twentieth-century way, a continuation of the eye-for-an-eye dogma, but it isn’t always efficacious, and it is seldom just. The savage has his good side; he can really teach some of us morals and manners, though you may not believe it. Please don’t explode again—not now; wait until I get through. And I go even farther, for my experience teaches me that the savage never does anything which he himself thinks to be wrong. I say this because I have been among them for a good many years, speak their dialects, and have had, perhaps, a better opportunity of studying them than most travellers. And these evidences of a better nature can be found, let me tell you, not only among the tribes in what is known as ‘White Man’s Africa,’ opened up by the explorers, but in the more distant parts—out of the beaten track—often where no white man has ever stepped—none at least before me. Even among the cannibal tribes I have often been staggered at discovering traits which were as mysterious as they were amazing—deep human notes of the heart which put the white
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