Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/37

Rh them as individuals; but the fault lies chiefly with the home boards, who, not realizing the paramount importance of local conditions in treating with primitive peoples, have attempted to enforce almost the same set of regulations from Greenland's icy mountains to Africa's coral strand.

The missionary, whether he would or no, is forbidden to conduct marriages between heathen and Christians, and too often one party to the contract must enter upon it with a lie upon his or her lips. The hypocrisy and espionage which results from sharing with the informer, or the chief, the fines derived from those who smoke, or swear, or work upon a Sunday, may well be imagined, and moreover, altogether too large a share of the earned wealth of the natives is demanded from them, the revenues of the church in certain groups being decidedly larger than the taxes collected by the civil government.

Yet let us not blind ourselves to an appreciation of the fundamental good the missions have accomplished, for whether Christianity be true or false, the natives must live under the rule of a people actuated by its motives and its faith, and are thus through its acquisition inestimably better fitted to resist the evil that preys upon them with the advent of "civilization."

In Fiji, however, the natives had become thoroughly known to the missionaries before the great conversion of 1854, and many old customs were thus permitted to remain which would have been suppressed had the missionary, and the political party which inevitably springs up around him, came more quickly into power.

The power of the missionary, after the great chiefs cast in their lot with him, is indeed terrible for good or evil, and in Tonga and later in Fiji he connived at the arming of the natives in order to conquer "converts." As the struggling priest of a great religion the missionary inspires all respect, but as the crafty politician or bigoted inquisitor his actions become correspondingly reprehensible. Too often in those early days of missionary endeavor he seemed satisfied with a mere semblance of order and religion for this was the period in which faith rather than good works was deemed essential. To the natives he too often remained one of a foreign race—a wizard, terrible, mysterious and implacable. Happily, a change has come over the thought of the world, and the conditions we describe are not those of to-day.

Henceforth Thakombau was to remain nominally king in Fiji, but the real power was vested in the white men who had settled upon his shores. He had escaped the retribution of native revenge only to struggle hopelessly in the net of commercialism and diplomacy. It was a sad and disappointing period between the time of the conversion in 1854 and the annexation to Great Britain in 1874. Soon after