Seventy Years Among Savages
1921
The title is the provocation. Henry S. Salt spent seven decades arriving at a heretical conclusion: the real savages wear top hats. This 1921 collection of essays detonates the myth of Western civilization by cataloguing its calculated cruelties, from the slaughterhouse to the colony. Salt, the cofounder of the Humanitarian League and friend to Shaw and Wells, doesn't merely criticize; he dismantles the comfortable assumption that progress and brutality are opposites. He writes with the precision of a reformer who has seen enough to stop mincing words. The essays trace his awakening to the violence hidden in Sunday roasts, in imperial ventures, in the name of progress itself. What emerges is a radical reframing: perhaps the 'savages' were never the ones we thought. The book endures because its central question remains poisonous to comfortable minds: what exactly are we so civilised from?
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“Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.””
— Henry S. Salt
