A gracious, sweet, well-fed idleness was Nature's dower to the Pacific Islander, until the White Man came with his work, as an angel with a flaming sword, and Paradise ended. Now the fruit of that idleness is that the Kanaka can take no part in the bustling life of modern civilisation.
In one British settlement, Papua, a part of New Guinea, the Australian Government is endeavouring to lead a Kanaka race along the path of modern progress. "Papua for the Papuans," is the keynote of the administration, and all kinds of devices are adopted to tempt the coloured man to industry. His Excellency, Colonel Murray, the Administrator of Papua, told me in London (where he was on leave) last year (1911) that he had some hopes that the cupidity of the Papuans would in time tempt them to some settled industry. They had a great liking for the White Man's adornments and tools, and, to gratify that liking, were showing some inclination for work. The effort is well meant, but probably vain. "Civilisation is impossible where the banana grows," declared an American philosopher: and the generalisation was sound. The banana tree provides food without tillage: and an organic law of this civilisation of ours is that man must be driven, by hunger and thirst and the desire for shelter, to plan, to organise, to make machines, to store.
Every nation in the Pacific has the same experience. In the Hawaiian Group, the American Power finds the native race helpless material for nation-making. The Hawaiian takes on a veneer of civilisation, but nothing can shake him from his habits of indolence. He adopts American clothes, lives in American houses, learns to eat pie and to enjoy ice-cream soda. He plays at the game of politics with voluble zeal. But he is still a Kanaka, and takes no real part in the progress of the flourishing territory of Hawaii. Americans do the work of administration. Imported Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and others, are the coolies and the traders. The Hawaiian talks, basks in the sun, adorns himself with wreaths of odorous flowers, and occasionally declaims with the pathetic bleat of an enraged sheep at "American tyranny."
When White civilisation came to the South Pacific, the various islands held several millions of coloured peoples, very many of them enjoying an idyllically happy system of existence. To-day, 50,000 Maoris, beginning to hold their own in the islands of New Zealand, represent the sole hope of all those peoples to have any voice at all in the Pacific. Humanitarian effort may secure the survival for a time of other groups of islanders, but the ultimate prospects are not bright. Probably what is happening at Fiji, where the Fijian fades away in the face of a more strenuous coolie type imported from India, and at Hawaii, will happen everywhere in the South Pacific.
[CHAPTER X]
LATIN AMERICA
Latin America is the world's great example of race-mixture. Europeans and Indians have intermixed from Terra del Fuego to the northern boundary of Mexico, and the resultant race, with some differences due to climate, has general points of resemblance over all that vast territory. There is prompting to speculation as to the reasons why in Spanish and Portuguese America race mixture was the rule, in Anglo-Saxon America the exception. It was not the superior kindness of the Latin people which paved the way to confidence and inter-marriage. No one can doubt that, badly stained as are the records of the Anglo-Saxons in America, the records of the Latins are far, far worse. Yet the Latin, between intervals of massacre, prepared the nuptial couch, and a Latin-Indian race survives to-day whilst there is no Teutonic-Indian race.
Probably it is a superior sense of racial responsibility and racial superiority which has kept the Anglo-Saxon colonist from mingling his blood with that of the races he made subject to him. He shows a reproduction in a modern people of the old Hebraic spirit of elect nationality. In truth; there may be advanced some excuse for those fantastic theorists who write large volumes to prove that ten tribes were once lost from Israel and might have been found soon after in Britain. If there were no other circumstances on which to found the theory (which, I believe, has not the slightest historical basis), the translation of the Old Testament into the English language would amply serve. It is the one great successful translation of the world's literary history: it makes any other version of the Bible in a European language—including that pseudo-English one done at Douai—seem pallid and feeble; it rescues the Hebrew sentiment and the Hebrew poetry from out the morass of the dull Greek translation. And it does all this seemingly because the Elizabethan Englishman resembled in temperament, in outlook, in thought, the Chosen People of the time of David.