DOOMED RACES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19283, 22 September 1924, Page 10

DOOMED RACES.

IN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS. A REMARKABLE ADDRESS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, September 11. One of the most remarkable addresses at the Australasian Science Congress was that delivered on the concluding day by Captain Pitt Rivers (A.D.C. to the GovernorGeneral), based upon considerable travel and investigations amongst the islard races of the Pacific. Ho takes the melancholy view that many of these are doomed, and are conscious of their impending fate. Captain Pitt-Rivers pointed out that the civilisation or culture of a people was not liependent only on a combination of social organisation and beliefs (culture form), implements, weapons, and invention (culture accessories), but it was 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, would be .futile. Most people meant by words like "civilisation " "culture," and "morality" a narrow piopaganda abstraction signifying their own little" conception of those great generic terms. Culture accessories could not bo "wished on" to a people, but were the slow outcome of evolution, growing step by step as they were fed by the inventive genius of man. Similarly, culture forms, religious beliefs habits, and conventions owed tlieir changing forms to different small groups pi men It followed that their methods with so-called "savage" people were wrong, rhey tried by persuasion, amounting almost to force to impose their culture, forms and culture accessories on people whoso culture potential was not adapted for them. One '■ould not make a so-called pagan savage civilised by putting him. into trousers, and teaching him to smoke cigarettes and goto churoh-in a word, by changing his cultaue forms. If they imposed those forms they must first destroy the ones they found. Thus missionaries, hoping to mould human day in the likeness of <m arbitrary model of their own, were too important to watch a natural process of evolution and dound that they could not mitigate the evil consenuences of a too rapid change. _ Government officials, traders, and missionaries all orred in the same way but from different motives, in thoir dealings wtin native races. Government imposed a new system of justice, and now ideas of crime, punishment, and individual responsibility. Trader* cared nothing about native workmanship and its great significance, if only they could teach the natives to acquire new tastes for their inappropriate goods Missionaries were onl y interested in old native cults in order the more, easily to trample them under indignant feet AD throe classes, therefore, undermined the tribal system, which was at the root of racial culture-form. . • Missionaries were so certain that they had tho one infallible moral specific which must be better for all people than their own, quite apart from whether or not they had' any knowledge of the one they supplanted. The "savagery" of those native races had been much exaggerated, due to exaggeration of personal ideas of "civilisation." It was that interference with tho culture-forms of islamd people which was at the root*of their destruction. It was as pitiable as it was inevitable. The natives realised the position thenjselves, and felt their doom approaching. In a reference to the Ana islanders in New Guinea he said: "After a visit from the white man's schooner they would for days appear listless and dispirited. At such times one would pee lonely figures sitting moodily on the benches near tho beach looking out at sea. And as the evening sun sank into the sea, flooding with golden"red light the day's last scene, they would sometimes chant in low, monotonous tones the songs of a vanishing race and a vanishing culture—songs such as the Tahitians used to sing as they mournfully watched their doom: — Tho pal'm tree shall grow, The "coral shall spread, But man shall cease.