That, Mr. Homebody, will mean another war; and even if you are a year or two too old for military service, your Main Street will rumble with the jar of an economic balance overthrown. Before that breaks right in front of your office building, maybe you will agree with the Rockefeller Foundation’s theory of economics. Keep the native alive, restore his health, give him enough European knowledge to fend him against the evils of Europe, then he will go happily ahead cultivating the soil for the world and himself.

******

Perhaps in these pages I have dwelt too much on the savagery of certain backward tribes. Have I said enough about the self-sufficing social pattern which these so-called barbarians had built around themselves before the pale invader came to fuddle them? Have I said enough of the ideal family life and wise social laws that prevailed over old Polynesia? It needed no British or American schoolmaster to teach them the kindness and neighborly generosity that are the aim of higher civilization. They had these things, which are at the heart of social happiness.

Definitely, I am not a Cassandra. The islander, I feel, will survive to achieve great things in a brave new world. Already he has contributed to science and statecraft, and in some cases has dominated in a business world which yesterday was a closed book to him. He will make his way in the arts, literature, music, painting. He had been misled and fooled for generations, but his intellect is overcoming an inferiority complex which the pale overlord once foisted on him. Island governments have become humane and understanding, more missionaries are letting fanaticism yield to common sense. Utopia is always a long way off, but I’ll risk a prophecy. Guide the native with sympathetic intelligence, and the time will come when he will cease to be our pupil. He will become our teacher. Not in the science of war, God deliver us, but in the more difficult art of living together in harmony and peace.

******

So the Lamberts have bought a house in California. Eloisa tells me that she will soon have the best rose garden in Walnut Creek. We are a bit too far inland to see the Pacific; but I can feel it, over in the west. Fiji doesn’t seem so far away.

THE END

INDEX