Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/301

Rh the missionaries had attempted to foster and preserve it, for it perished chiefly because of its inadaptability, and the absence of a market for its wares. The cheapest calico is softer and more enduring than the best of tapa, the coarsest canvas sail is superior to that woven of pandanus leaves, the beautiful adze of polished stone fails wholly when placed in competition with even the "trade hatchet."

Yet in each group there was at least some native art which, had it been cared for by the whites, might have been preserved so that in a more or less modified form it might have furnished a permanent and progressively important means of livelihood to the natives, and thus have become a means of maintaining their racial entity and self-respect.

Art was the highest expression of their intellectual life, an absorbing field for their ambition, a means of gratifying their instinct for the beautiful, and a record of their history and their conception of the universe. It meant far more to them than it does to us with our widely varied interests, and to this the European was blind when he permitted its destruction.

All over the south seas in proportion as white men have become dominant native arts have withered. Once the canoe was built of separate pieces skilfully calked and lashed together, and its outrigger was a marvel of flexibility and strength. Yet everywhere it degenerates into a crudely hollowed log, crossed by two rough sticks to which the outrigger is rigidly tied. The house, once shapely in form and carefully thatched, degenerates into a mere shack, and every carved bowl, paddle and implement becomes rude, ugly and misshapen. All care in manufacture degenerates, and in proportion does the light of their intellectual life fade out. A hopeless apathy, a listless lack of interest in all around them overcomes their dulled minds and their lives, like those of prisoners, are no longer worth the while of living, for hope can not flower within the stifle of the cold gray walls of bigotry's bastileBastille [sic].

Pleasures and sports suffer as do the arts. The surf-board riders of Hawaii are now rarely seen, dances and songs are being constantly suppressed, and many happy things that once filled their minds with joy, and were beautiful in their eyes, have vanished never to be theirs again. But one resource is left to their idle minds, and clandestine immorality saps their strength. As the Government Commission in Fiji reports

This carefully selected commission was appointed by the British government in Fiji to inquire into the causes of the decrease in the native population, and after long investigation the conclusions of the commissioners were published by the Colony in 1896. It is probable