Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still
lifted to the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.
"Your mental processes," he said, "always go a little too fast.
And they are stated without method. There is no kind of
inconsistency"--and no words can convey the time he took to get to
the end of the word--"between valuing the right of the aborigines
to adhere to their stage in the evolutionary process, so long as
they find it congenial and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no
inconsistency between this concession which I have just described
to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in question is,
nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in the
variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an
inferior evolutionary stage."
Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still
shone like two pallid moons.
Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.
"True," he said, "there is no inconsistency, my son of the red
spear. But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I
am very far from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior
evolutionary stage, whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not
think there is anything stupid or ignorant about howling at the
moon or being afraid of devils in the dark.
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