Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/642

622 there has been in every colony a strong minority, at times converting itself into a majority, to which the landed rights of the natives were sacred. None the less has Marshall's decision been the nerve of every colonizing advance. In the spirit of it the colonial legislatures pass laws and the courts make rules for the acquisition of native lands; doubtful sales are made by unauthorized members of tribes; not overscrupulous governments and altogether unscrupulous private individuals acquire wide tracts; the natives see their land slipping away from them; if they are not to become landless fugitives, they must make a final stand. Hence there is, almost always, in the relations with savage peoples, a second war; this time pro aris—for their right to keep the land which is, as it were, an extension of their tribal selves; to take which is to wound, dismember, or destroy them. Such was the cause of the native insurrections in North America in the first half of the eighteenth century, of the Maori war of the sixties, of the Matabele rising the other day, of a dozen different savage rebellions. The colonists summon up their power for a decisive struggle, and the natives are again beaten. On the colonial side there has been a profuse sacrifice of life, villages burned and towns destroyed; on the native side, a ruin still more terrible. Two thirds of the population may have been killed, as in Hispaniola; tribes have been broken up; the soul of a people has been slain.

The mother country has all this while not looked on at the spectacle with listless eyes or folded hands. In general it may be said that the degree of compassion felt for the natives is in exact proportion to the distance of the sympathizers from the objects of their sympathy. The colonists of the North Island of New Zealand, everywhere in peril from the Maoris and eager for their lands, have always been strongly anti-Maori; those of the South Island, perfectly disinterested and out of danger, are nobly philo-Maori; while the home Government, thirteen thousand miles away, has been from first to last the strenuous defender of the Maori. It is an "undoubted maxim," said Mr. Gladstone in 1846, "that the crown should stand in all matters between the colonists and the natives." Nine years earlier a committee of the House of Commons declared, possibly by the same eloquent voice, that England "will tolerate no scheme which implies violence or fraud in taking possession of. . . territory, will no longer subject itself to the guilt of conniving at oppression, and will take upon itself the task of defending those who are too weak and too ignorant to defend themselves." To this honorable line of action the British Government, outside of India, has, until lately, steadfastly adhered. It reluctantly annexed the islands of New Zealand, to save the natives from the settlers. It resisted the interested