DYING OUT.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 250, 21 October 1924, Page 7

DYING OUT.

VANISHING RACES. "MAN SHAXI, CEASE.' 9 There is much food for thought in the conclusions to which research has brought Captain Pitt-Rivers, of Sydney, in his examination of vanishing races. !He has embodied these conclusions in a lecture which he delivered in Adeaide under the auspices of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of science. A noted anthropologist, the lecturer has examined with the utmost care evidences which go to prove that certain races are dying out. He pointed out. that the word "race" is often used without due regard for its Teal meaning. We often congratulate ourselves in Australia on the fact that the "good old British stock" is being maintained in even greater purity than in the Mother Country itself. Alas, the peculiarly "Britsh" characteristics, on which we pride ourselves as being "racial," are in process of dying out, submerged iby the Mediterranean and Alpine types, which, with the Nordic, are the ' three which distinguish every country of Europe. This blond type is disappearing, and the process in Australia is reasonably fast, faster than in England, owing to the inimical action of the tropical or semi-tropical climate against fairness. Native Races. What Captain Pitt-Rivers has to say about the gradual disappearance of the native races is not flattering to the missionary. When we ask why these races are vanishing, the easiest and most obvious answer seems to be that these races are extinguished because we give them drink which they are not used to, and infest them with new diseases which carry them off. or else we supply them with rifles so that they can kill each other off more quickly, as the Maoris did, or occasionally we "shoot them down ourselves as we did the Tasmanians. "The remedy," we say, "is easy. Stop their drink, taJ<e away their rifles, don't shoot them; doctor them, dose them, and drill them up with food. Wait till they get immunised to the new diseases, teach them to attend Sunday school and say their prayers. Thia will give them a new interest in life. Then you will see them increasing at a rapid rate." Plausible though this sounds, Captain Pitt-Rivers says that it is not true. Missionary action cannot save these doomed races. Accomplishments. The civilisation or culture of a people, he points out, is not dependent only on a combination of social organisation and beliefs (culture-form), implements, weapons, and invention (culture-acces-sories), but it is conditioned by a third factor, the innate ability or capacity to develop, under suitable conditions, artistic, scientific, or technical accomplishments and skill (culture-potential). Without the third, the other two, if attempted to be grafted on to an alien race, are futile. Most people mean by words like "civilisation," "culture," and "morality," a narrow propaganda abstraction signifying their own little conception of these great generic terms. Wrong Methods. The lecturer points out clearly that culture-accessories cannot be "wished on" to a people, but are the slow outcome of evolution, growing step by step as they arc fed by the inventive genius of man. Similarly, our cultureforms, religious beliefs, habits, and conventions owe their Changing forms to different small groups of men. It follows that our methods with so-called "savage" peoples arc wrong. We try by persuasion, amounting almost rto force, to impose our culture-forms and I culture-accessories on people whose culture-potential is not adapted for them. You cannot make a so-called "pagan savage" civilised by putting him into trousers, teaching him how to smoke cigarettes and go to church in a word, by changing his cultureforms. If we impose' these forms we must first destroy the ones we find. Thus missionaries, hoping to mould human clay in the likeness of an arbitrary model of their own, are too impatient to watch a natural process of evolution, and find that they cannot mitigate the evil consequences of a too rapid change. Government officials, traders, and missionaries all err in the same wa> : but from different motives, m their dealings with native races. Government imposes a new system of justice, new ideas of crime, punishment, and individual responsibility. Traders care nothing about native workmanship and its great significance, if only they can teach the natives to acquire new tastes for their inappropriate goods; missionaries are only interested in old native cults in order the more easily to trample them under indignant feet. Root of Culture. All tltree classes, therefore, undermine the tribal system, which is at the root of racial culture-forms. Missionaries are so certain that they have the one infallible moral specific which must be better for all people than their own, quite apart from whether they have any knowledge of the one the} supplant or not. .««„« The "savagery" of these native races has been much exaggerated, due. w exaggeration of our own ideas of civili- ! 8a i i t°i n s"this interference with the cultureforms of island peoples winch is at the root of their destruction. It M V»^"£t^tti__-£ natives realise the position "" and feel their doom approaching, in sadness Captain Pitt-R.vers tells of.the melancholy disappearance of thau. islanders before the approach of an un assimilable culture. -,-n's "After a visit from the white* man schooner," he says, "they would for daj appear listless and s P ir titUnt times I would see lonely figures srtHnJ moodily on the, looking out to sea. A" a * .. _ „.; tll sun sank into the sea, fl °?*"8 ™£ golden-red light the days as scene they would sometimes chant « low, monotonous the ..on „__ ishing race and a ««*£_ _„ d to watched their id ° 0m '-~ ■-, tree* shall grow, • £ne sbaTlVead. : But man shall ceaM~