MEASURING BODIES '5 5
tics to incorporate it within his system. This posture is clearly
expressed in his statements on the depravity of inferior peoples,
for again and again he encountered stories of courage and accom-
plishment among those he wished to denigrate. Yet he twisted all
these stories into his system. If, for example, he had to admit a
favorable trait, he joined it with others he could despise. Citing the
somewhat dated authority of Tacitus for his conclusion, he wrote:
"Even when honor, chastity, and pity are found among savages,
impulsiveness and laziness are never wanting. Savages have a hor-
ror of continuous work, so that for them the passage to active and
methodical labor lies by the road of selection or of slavery only"
(1911, p. 367). Or consider his one begrudging word of praise for
the inferior and criminal race of gypsies:
They are vain, like all delinquents, but they have no fear or shame.
Everything they earn they spend for drink and ornaments. They may be
seen barefooted, but with bright-colored or lace-bedecked clothing; with-
out stockings, but with yellow shoes. They have the improvidence of the
savage and that of the criminal as well.... They devour half-putrified
carrion. They are given to orgies, love a noise, and make a great outcry in
the markets. They murder in cold blood in order to rob, and were for-
merly suspected of cannibalism. ... It is to be noted that this race, so low
morally and so incapable of cultural and intellectual development, a race
that can never carry on any industry, and which in poetry has not got
beyond the poorest lyrics, has created in Hungary a marvelous musical
art—a new proof of the genius that, mixed with atavism, is to be found in
the criminal (1911, p. 40).If he had no damning traits to mix with his praise, he simply
discounted the motivation for apparently worthy behavior among
primitives." A white saint dying bravely under torture is a hero
among heroes; a "savage" expiring with equal dignity simply
doesn't feel the pain:Their [criminals'] physical insensibility well recalls that of savage peo-
ples who can bear in rites of puberty, tortures that a white man could
never endure. All travellers know the indifference of Negroes and Amer-
•can savages to pain: the former cut their hands and laugh in order to
a^0ld w°rk; the latter, tied to the torture post, gaily sing the praises of
'heir tribe while they are slowly burnt (1887, p. 319).We recognize in this comparison of atavistic criminals with ani-
" savages, and people of lower races the basic argument of