Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/248

236 European or in New England fashion." This is only one phase of a wide-spread and mischievous tendency to impose the particular habits of the new teachers, as being an essential element in race-development, without regard to the natural leanings of the people in question. Many of our customs are purely arbitrary, and it is worse than folly to attempt to impose them upon a new-found race. The civilization of New England is undoubtedly an admirable one, but why insist on making New-Englanders out of Hottentots? Educate them. Christianize them, but do not oblige them to conform to customs which are the accident of another climate and another race. In nothing is this disposition to enforce conformity with an arbitrary standard more injurious and yet more absurd than in the matter of clothes. It would be hard to maintain that the frock-coat or the linen shirt-front of the present representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race are either graceful in the abstract or especially adapted to the use and comfort even of their wearers. Why, then, impose them upon the Sandwich-Islander, or why make them a test of the civilization of the American Indian, by classifying the tribes into the savages and those that wear "citizens' clothes"? We affirm with all seriousness that there is no reason why the inhabitant of the tropics should be expected to wear clothing in form or material like what happens to be in vogue among the dwellers in the temperate zone on the other side of the globe. The grotesque combinations in the habiliments of the Hawaiians, as described by Mark Twain, are as painful to the reason as they are ludicrous to the imagination. Why, for example, need the good missionary women have exerted themselves to make a broadcloth coat for the king of the islands? It and what it represented have been a fruitful source of disease and death to the simple people of that balmy summer clime.

But we may go a step further, and declare that even if a wise liberality allows the savage to dress somewhat in accordance with the requirements of his climate and his pursuits, there yet remains a certain conflict between the minimum demands of civilization in this respect and his bodily welfare, at least until he and his descendants become educated into a tolerance of the new requirement, dress. Consider that we are supposing the case of a dweller in the tropics, where, as a matter of protection, clothing is not required. The temperature is for the most part balmy, and, when it does grow colder, that wonderful mechanism whereby the body is protected from the changes in the surrounding medium does its perfect work. The skin, shiny, tough, and hardy, performs its function well, and "catching cold" is a rare thing. The man, as an animal, has no more need of clothing than the beasts around him. But, when he becomes civilized, this must all change. His smooth, dark skin must be covered. Decency and the laws of society require it. It is inevitable, so soon as he begins to be anything more than an animal. What happens? That skin, shut in from the sun and air, loses its quick power of accommodation. Its