Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/362

346 one of the most striking testimonies that modern history affords to the benefits which the dark places of the world have derived from well-directed missionary labor. Tahiti, the capital of which is described as a miniature Polynesian Paris, is another instance of successful missionary and colonizing enterprise, and equally remarkable has been the transformation which the establishment of British rule has effected in Feejee. Unhappily, the contact of even the best civilization with aboriginal races is not always a boon to the latter. The Maoris, one of the finest of the dark-skinned occupants of Polynesia, have dwindled away in the hopeless struggle with an aggression which they were not strong enough to resist and were too proud to conciliate. Neither in their native New Zealand, nor in the lost heritage of the far inferior Australians, has a half-breed population sufficiently large to affect the destiny of the colonies as yet sprung up. To what extent the presence of convicts in New Caledonia has affected the half-breed problem, a writer in "L'Expansion Coloniale" gives us some means of judging. M. P. Joppicourt, in a clever contribution to that journal, presents a striking though melancholy picture of the popinées, or native companions of the French settlers or pardoned criminals. While the rare Frenchwomen, who have ventured to share the discomforts and perils of such an exile, are petted and courted in Noumea (the capital of New Caledonia), away off in the bush the poor, faithful popinée hugs with rapture the white man's child of which she is the proud and loving mother. She looks upon her husband as her master, and does homage to her offspring as of a superior race. For their sake she has severed herself from her tribe, and refrains from the use of her own language, lest her little ones should be thereby degraded. Her kindred have turned against her as a renegade, but she minds not their reproaches. Alas! a day comes when they have their revenge, when the white man closes his door against her and bids her begone. She has served his purpose, and he needs her no longer. He is paying suit to a countrywoman of his own, and the popinée must get out of the way. And so, with misery in her heart, she betakes herself with her children back to the tribe, where for a long time she must put up with taunts and every humiliation. But she, too, has her revenge. By-and-by love changes to bitterness, and his children learn to hate the name and race of the father who has disowned them. When the cry of war is raised, they are the most eager to sink their battle-axes in the white man's skull, to burn his farm, to massacre his wife and children. And thus the innocent and good pay with their lives for the craven treachery of a heartless wretch. Let us hope that the picture is not representative, but exceptional. The same writer seems to see in the half-breed some ground of hope for the future of a colony avoided by the luxurious ladies of France. "Has not South America," he asks, "been entirely peopled by the crossing of Spaniards and Indians? Yes: those mestizos have formed powerful and respectable