BOOK TWO
DISCUSSION OF NATIVE PROBLEMS—PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
CHAPTER XIII
EXIT THE NOBLE SAVAGE
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To the primitive or simple races of the world marriage, divorce, and supply of only the elemental wants are the most intense problems. Nourishment and reproduction make up the rounds of life. While the highly developed nations around the Pacific are concerned with the exploitation of the resources of the islands, and with political problems growing out of their reciprocal interests, the natives are struggling with matters that lie nearer the real foundations of life. For them the question of survival is an immediate and pressing one. Extinction is facing many of them, absorption by inflowing races is creating altogether new difficulties and relationships, such as marriage and divorce, while newer conceptions of exchange and trade, the buying and selling of meats and vegetables, are introducing social and moral factors they could not as yet be expected to understand. Nor can we who have thrust ourselves upon them or accepted responsibility for their well-being understand our obligations unless we think of them as human beings, or without visualizing their problems by human examples. Nor can we escape these responsibilities or shirk them. Out of the stuff their lives are made of grow the larger problems, those of the relationship of the great civilizations that touch each other on the Pacific—Asia, Australasia, America.
Threnodies and elegies a-plenty have mourned the passing of the Polynesians of the South Seas. The noble savage whose average height often measured six feet—plus thick callouses—has stalked among us, as a mythical figure, maidens unabashed in their naked loveliness have lured men to the tropics oblivious of home ties. Leisure and unlimited harems in prospect have afforded many a civilized man salacious joys the like of which the white race has not altogether abandoned, but which few have the courage to pursue in the open. The passing of these Pacific peoples has in some quarters been hailed as an indication of the viciousness of civilization; their yielding to virtue has been deplored by others. The sentimentalist has clothed them in romance; the cynic has stuck horns in their brows. But whether the romancer is wrong or the missionary devoid of appreciation of nature unadorned, the passing of the Polynesian is an admitted danger. Whether it was the vice of the drunken sailor or the clothes of the devout disciple that brought about this downfall shall not here be determined. It will be mine merely to depict in living examples the episodes that indicate their evanescence, and to point to the silent forces of regeneration that are at work,—forces that, having accomplished the virtual decease of some of the finest races in the world, and yet are bringing about their rebirth.
One cannot live in the tropics without romancing. The simplicity, the earnestness of life, devoid of many of the outer signs of avarice so consonant with the individualism of our civilization; the slovenliness unhampered by too many clothes,—these take one by a storm of pleasure. One forgets the natives once were cannibals; or rather, one delights in saying to oneself "they were," and forgets to thank the missionary and the trader for having altered these tastes before one arrived; one exalts every sprawling female into a symbol of naturalness, though Heaven knows the soft white skins and hidden bosoms of the North come as welcome reminders in face of native temptations. And with Professor Brown of New Zealand, one deplores that the selfsame missionaries and traders "in spite of their antipodal purposes and methods, alike force the race to decay." Their contract with the white race is demoralizing even where it aims to be most just and helpful. Their lands, made secure to them by legislation (as in New Zealand), often become the means of gratifying wild tastes for motor-cars and fineries which leave them bankrupt physically and morally.