Nor are the heathen themselves blind to the political dangers which are involved in the presence of missionaries among them. All over the world conversion is from the native point of view the same thing as disaffection, and war is dreaded as the certain consequence of the adoption of Christianity. The French bishop, Lefebvre, when asked by the mandarins of Cochin China, in 1847, the purpose of his visit, said that he read in their faces that they suspected him ‘of having come to excite some outbreak among the neophytes, and perhaps prepare the way for an European army;’ and the king was ‘afraid to see Christians multiply in his kingdom, and in case of war with European Powers, combine with his enemies.’[242] How right events have proved him to have been!
The story is the same in Africa. ‘Not long after I entered the country,’ said the missionary, Mr. Calderwood, of Caffraria, ‘a leading chief once said to me, “When my people become Christians, they cease to be my people.”’[243] The Norwegian missionaries were for twenty years in Zululand without making any converts but a few destitute children, many of whom had been given to them out of pity by the chiefs,[244] and their failure was actually ascribed by the Zulu king to their having taught the incompatibility of Christianity with allegiance to a heathen ruler.[245] In 1877, a Zulu of authority expressed the prevalent native reasoning on this point in language which supplies the key to disappointments that extend much further than Zululand: ‘We will not allow the Zulus to become so-called Christians. It is not the king says so, but every man in Zululand. If a Zulu does anything wrong, he at once goes to a mission-station, and says he wants to become a Christian; if he wants to run away with a girl, he becomes a Christian; if he wishes to be exempt from serving the king, he puts on clothes, and is a Christian; if a man is an umtagati (evil-doer), he becomes a Christian.’[246]
It is on this account that in wars with savage nations the destruction of mission-stations has always been so constant an episode. Nor can we wonder at this when we recollect that in the Caffre war of 1851, for instance, it was a subject of boast with the missionaries that it was Caffres trained on the mission-stations who had preserved the English posts along the frontiers, carried the English despatches, and fought against their own countrymen for the preservation and defence of the colony.[247] It is rather a poor result of all the money and labour that has been spent in the attempt to Christianise South Africa, that the Wesleyan mission-station at Edendale should have contributed an efficient force of cavalry to fight against their countrymen in the Zulu campaign; and we may hesitate whether most to despise the missionaries who count such a result as a triumph of their efforts, or the converts whom they reward with tea and cake for military service with the enemies of their countrymen.[248]
It needs no great strain of intelligence to perceive that this use of mission-stations as military training-schools scarcely tends to enhance the advantages of conversion in the minds of the heathen among whom they are planted.
For these reasons, and because it is becoming daily more apparent that wars are less a necessary evil than an optional misery of human life, the principal measure for a country which would fain improve, and live at peace with, the less civilised races which touch the numerous borders of its empire, would be the legal restraint or prevention of missionary enterprise: a proposal that will appear less startling if we reflect that in no quarter of the globe can that method of civilising barbarism point to more than local or ephemeral success. The Protestant missions of this century are in process of failure, as fatal and decided as that which befel the Catholic missions of the French, Portuguese, or Spanish, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and very much from the same causes. The English wars in South Africa, with which the Protestant missionaries have been so closely connected, have frustrated all attempts to Christianise that region, just as ‘the fearful wars occasioned directly or indirectly by the missionaries’ sent by the Portuguese to the kingdoms of Congo and Angola in the sixteenth century rendered futile similar attempts on the West Coast.[249]
The same process of depopulation under Protestant influences may now be observed in the Sandwich Islands or New Zealand that reduced the population of Hispaniola, under Spanish Christianity, from a million to 14,000 in a quarter of a century.[250] No Protestant missionary ever laboured with more zeal than Eliot did in America in the seventeenth century, but the tribes he taught have long since been extinct: ‘like one of their own forest trees, they have withered from core to bark;’[251] and, in short, the history of both Catholic and Protestant missions alike may be summed up in this one general statement: either they have failed altogether of results on a sufficient scale to be worthy of notice, or the impartial page of history unfolds to us one uniform tale of civil war, persecution, conquest, and extirpation in whatever regions they can boast of more at least of the semblance of success.
Another measure in the interests of peace would be the organisation of a class of well-paid officials whose duty it should be to examine on the spot into the truth of all rumours of outrages or atrocities which are circulated from time to time, in order to set the tide of public opinion in favour of hostile measures. Such rumours may, of course, have some foundation, but in nine cases out of ten they are false. So lately as the year 1882, the Times and other English papers were so far deceived as to give their readers a horrible account of the sacrifice of 200 young girls to the spirits of the dead in Ashantee; and people were beginning to ask themselves whether such things could be suffered within reach of an English army, when it was happily discovered that the whole story was fictitious. Stories of this sort are what the Germans call Tendenzlügen, or lies invented to produce a certain effect. Their effect in rousing the war-spirit is undeniable; and, although the healthy scepticism which has of recent years been born of experience affords us some protection, no expenditure could be more economical than one which should aim at rendering them powerless by neutralising them at the fountain-head.
In the preceding historical survey of the relations in war between communities standing on different levels of civilisation, the allusion, among some of the rudest tribes, to laws of war very similar to those supposed to be binding between more polished nations tends to discredit the distinction between civilised and barbarian warfare. The progress of knowledge threatens the overthrow of the distinction, just as it has already reduced that between organic and inorganic matter, or between animal and vegetable life, to a distinction founded rather on human thought than on the nature of things. And it is probable that the more the military side of savage life is studied, the fewer will be found to be the lines of demarcation which are thought to establish a difference in kind in the conduct of war by belligerents in different stages of progress. The difference in this respect is chiefly one of weapons, of strategy, and of tactics; and it would seem that whatever superiority the more civilised community may claim in its rules of war is more than compensated in savage life both by the less frequent occurrence of wars and by their far less fatal character.
But, however much the frequency and ferocity of the wars waged by barbarian races as compared with those waged by civilised nations has been exaggerated, there is no doubt but that in warfare, more than in anything else, there is most in common between civilisation and savagery, and that the distinction between them most nearly disappears. In art and knowledge and religion the distinction between the two is so wide that the evolution of one from the other seems still to many minds incredible; but in war, and the thoughts which relate to it, the points of analogy cannot fail to strike the most indifferent. We see still in either condition, the same notions of the glory of fighting, the same belief in war as the only source of strength and honour, the same hope from it of personal advancement, the same readiness to seize any pretext for resorting to it, the same foolish sentiment that it is mean to live without it.
Then only will the distinction between the two be final, complete, and real, when all fighting is relegated to barbarism, and regarded as unworthy of civilised humanity; when the enlightenment of opinion, which has freed us already from such curses as slavery, the torture-chamber, or duelling, shall demand instinctively the settlement of all causes of quarrel by peaceful arbitration, and leave to the lower races and the lower creation the old-fashioned resort to a trial of violence and might, to competition in fraud and ferocity.