The same social manners characterize the Hottentots, who are but a little more developed than the Bushmen.  Lubbock describes them as “the filthiest animals,” and filthy they really are.  A fur suspended to the neck and worn till it falls to pieces is all their dress; their huts are a few sticks assembled together and covered with mats, with no kind of furniture within.  And though they kept oxen and sheep, and seem to have known the use of iron before they made acquaintance with the Europeans, they still occupy one of the lowest degrees of the human scale.  And yet those who knew them highly praised their sociability and readiness to aid each other.  If anything is given to a Hottentot, he at once divides it among all present—­a habit which, as is known, so much struck Darwin among the Fuegians.  He cannot eat alone, and, however hungry, he calls those who pass by to share his food.  And when Kolben expressed his astonishment thereat, he received the answer.  “That is Hottentot manner.”  But this is not Hottentot manner only:  it is an all but universal habit among the “savages.”  Kolben, who knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence, could not praise their tribal morality highly enough.

“Their word is sacred,” he wrote.  They know “nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.”  “They live in great tranquillity and are seldom at war with their neighbours.”  They are “all kindness and goodwill to one another..  One of the greatest pleasures of the Hottentots certainly lies in their gifts and good offices to one another.”  “The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the exercise of justice, and their chastity, are things in which they excel all or most nations in the world."(15)

Tachart, Barrow, and Moodie(16) fully confirm Kolben’s testimony.  Let me only remark that when Kolben wrote that “they are certainly the most friendly, the most liberal and the most benevolent people to one another that ever appeared on the earth” (i. 332), he wrote a sentence which has continually appeared since in the description of savages.  When first meeting with primitive races, the Europeans usually make a caricature of their life; but when an intelligent man has stayed among them for a longer time, he generally describes them as the “kindest” or “the gentlest” race on the earth.  These very same words have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dayaks, the Aleoutes, the Papuas, and so on, by the highest authorities.  I also remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and several others.  The very frequency of that high commendation already speaks volumes in itself.