Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/465

Rh children. Justice demands freedom for the Polynesian—room in which to struggle and to rise. It is an inadequate defense of the present system to say that it is immeasurably more humane than the savage rule of the old chiefs, for it has proven itself incompetent to raise a single native race into, a position of self-supporting independence. We have given them the Bible, but we still withhold from them the means to win their moral self-respect. In other words, the task of the European is

but half completed, and the effect of leaving it at this stage is all too apparent in long settled regions such as the Hawaiian Islands, where, after the most easily attained conversion in the history of the Pacific, the natives have steadily sunken, and are to-day a degraded, downcast remnant—mere peons of commercialism, their past forgotten and their future hopeless.

How different this history might have been if along with instruction respecting the lives of Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Sampson, the missionaries had maintained the native arts, modifying them to meet the demands of markets which might have provided the native race with a means of livelihood and replaced the lost ambition due to the abolition of war. Beautiful wall papers and screens might have been made from the delicate tapas of old Hawaii, and their women were once skilled to an unusual degree in feather work and weaving.

We speak of the island races as being "lazy," forgetting that there is as yet no adequate reward for their labor. When opportunity offers, they strive well, as in the crude process of the copra industry, which, after