And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered that the back door had been wide open all the time and that we could enter the premises at will. But that convenient little gate was not situated in the neighborhood of Akkad or Memphis. It stood in the very heart of the jungle. And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan temple. * * * * * Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in contact with what they were pleased to call “wild men” or “savages.” The meeting had not been a pleasant one. The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the white men, had welcomed them with a salvo of spears and arrows. The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses. After that there had been little chance for a quiet and unprejudiced exchange of ideas. The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees and deserved all that was coming to him. Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau began to contemplate the world through a haze of sentimental tears. His contemporaries, much impressed by his ideas, pulled out their handkerchiefs and joined in the weeping. The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite subjects. In their hands (although they had never seen one) he became the unfortunate victim of circumstances and the true representative of all those manifold virtues of which the human race had been deprived by three thousand years of a corrupt system of civilization. Today, at least in this particular field of investigation, we know better. We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated animals, from which as a rule he is not so very far removed. In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble. The savage, but for the grace of God, is our own self under much less favorable conditions. By examining him carefully we begin to understand the early society of the valley of the Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia and by knowing him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin crust of manners and customs which our own species of mammal has acquired during the last five thousand years. This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On the other hand a realization of the conditions from which we have escaped, together with an appreciation of the many things that have actually been accomplished, can only tend to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among our distant cousins who have failed to keep up the pace. This is not a handbook of anthropology. It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance. But tolerance is a very broad theme. The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten track, Heaven alone knows where we will land.