Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/645

Rh and Olive Schreiner's thrilling story, Peter Halket. He notes with respect the attitude of the honest official who resigns his office because of unfulfilled promises to the natives of a whole island, or that of the private citizen who refuses to subscribe to the Imperial Institute because of unrepaired injustice to a single tribe. He is, nevertheless, obliged to admit, with the sage of Concord, that these things "look very differently to the centuries and to the years." The whole religious future of the world was bound up with the Hebrew conquest of Canaan, of which the ruthless barbarity may have been a necessary incident. The British occupation of India is a shining fact in history. The colonization of the savage-ridden spaces of the globe has swamped the inevitable accompanying crimes with a flood of benefits. A territory belongs by right divine to the race that can most profitably occupy it. But even in Nature's Jesuitism the end does not justify the means. Every step toward it must be just. All treaties must be honestly contracted and loyally observed, all promises kept, all rights respected. There shall be no personal injustice or oppression. Where the balance seems equally poised, the native scale shall be weighted. Pre-eminently, the surrender or confiscation of land shall correspond rather to the decline of the indigenes than to the increase of the colonists.

It would be easier to prove the converse and show that the decline of the natives has followed the loss of their lands. Yet history reveals a surprising amount of equity in transactions where the colonists were under no compulsion. In New England every acre was long scrupulously paid for; and this was the case in other States, as Parkman has shown. In New Zealand millions of acres have been purchased by the Government at a reasonable price. Laws were passed and courts set up in both countries to protect the natives. Where purchase was impracticable, as with the nomadic Australian blacks, the colonial Government has assumed a benevolent trusteeship. It has provided food and clothing, houses, implements and land, hospitals, doctors and medicine, schools and churches. The southern Maoris have been treated with less tardy and more compulsory benevolence. All such are parasites at the table of their invaders—interlopers on the lands they once freely roamed over or rudely cultivated. The more savage indigenes who live on the frontier of settlements, like many red Indian tribes so long, like the last integral fragment of the Maoris in the wild Uriwera country, like the blacks of the Australian north and northwest, have but rare relations with the colonists. They may swoop down from their fastnesses or crowd in from the forest, and threaten or imperil or destroy a colony, thus resembling epidemics of typhus and cholera, which are literally invasions of bacteria; but these descents become ever fewer as the natives grow