A TAINTED ATMOSPHERE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6901, 15 September 1900, Page 2

A TAINTED ATMOSPHERE.

MORAL DEGENERACY OF ; THE WHITE RACES. THE RESULT OP LIPS IN TROPICAL AND ORIENTAL COUNTRIES. So injurious is the climate of tropical countries to those white men accustomed to the less torrid zones of the United States and of Europe (writes "Ex- Attache" in an American paper), that Great Britain and the otlher colonial Powers are accustomed to increase by 30 to 50 per cent tlhe rate ot pay of those military and civil officials who are;assigned to duty in hot countries of Asia, Aircca, arrdoi'tiid West Indies, while the. years spent there usually count double in making up tie term of service required i;a order to qualify for -pensions. That it is necessary .to hold out inducements of this, kind in the shape of extra emoluments is shown by the fact that the vast majority of .people who have spent any time in the East or West Indies, in tropical Africa, or in China, return home with sadly impaired constitutions, fortunate indeed if they get back alive. For the tropics are known as "the white man's grave." Harmful as is hot life in the countries to the physical health of white folk, it ia infinitely more deleterious to their moral well being, and it requires men of such strong character and (high principles to Tesist the temptations by which they are surrounded, and to remain unaffected by the contaminating influences of the atmosphere which prevails, that a certain degree of indulgence should foe accorded to those misguided officials — fortunately few in number — who have recently brought the good name of Uncle Sam into disrepute in Cuba, and it is rumoured also in the Philippines. The standards of honour, nay, even of common honesty, are so different tjiere to those which prevail here ; the . ethics in matters of morality so much more broad I and lax, that the only matter for surprise | is that the -cases of Americao public/servants whose notions of right and wrong have I been warped by the conditions of life in t(he i tropics, should be so comparatively rare. I Nor is the United States the only sufferer in this respect. France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and Portugal, in fact all countries that possess colonial dependencies in the hot zones, have undergone similar experiences, and have suffered from the errors and even crimes of men who left home with records that were above reproach, but wiho, degenerated^ by the conditions of their »ew existence, DISGRACED THE OFFICES TO WHICH THEY HAD. BEEN APPOINTED. Few realise until they take up their (residence in tropical countries how much, until then they have been restricted in their conduct by tJhe conventionalities of life in. the United States and in Europe. If ;>may sound cynical, but there is no doubt that our j social discipline is maintained to an infinitely greater degree by conventionality ! than," by principle. It'is far less a questkn, of conscience than the fear of what our ' friends and neighbours will say that keeps us in the right path, and most .people are in greater dread of forfeiting the regard and esteem of those among whom they are living than their own self-respect. Take men of this class,* men who hare been kept from straying frcm the paths of honour and morality chiefly by^conventionality, that is to say, by a terror of losing the good opinion of their fellow-citizens, and place them suddenly in the midst of a community where official corruption and private dishonesty are regarded as a matter of course, where no ethics of morality exist to act as a restraint on the animal passions, and where it ds not dishonesty and profligacy, but rectitude and morality that are regarded as unconventional, and he will socn loss all noHions of right and wrong, and become as depraved as the influences by which he is surrounded. There are few white officials serving in, the Orient, or in the northern portion of Africa, who have not at one time cr another of their careers been subjected to the indignity of having bribes offered to them, the wheels of native administration in countries subject to Oriental forms of government seldom moving without a certain quantity .of "baksheesh." It is not so many years ago that Sir Charles Euan Smith, while engaged in. a special mission to Morocco for the purpose of negotiating a treaty between that country and Great Britain, was offered at the last moment a bribe of 150,000 dollars by the Sultan if he would consent to the modification of certain clauses of the agreement that were displeasing to his Moorish Majesty. Sir Charles, ia a fit of righteous indignation, tore the treaty into pieces, flung- them in the face, of the Sultan, and immediately broke off all diplomatic relations with the Court of Morocco, replying to his threats with the words : " You may kill me if you like ; but it will avail you little, for there will quickly be another British envoy on the spot to take my place, bat in that event there will be no longer any Sultan of Morocco." France was less fortunate at the neighbouring court of Tunis with its former Minister plenipotentiary, M. ' Roustan, whose career there was brought to a rather sensational close by his appearance in a suit for libel against the well-known French journalist, the Marquis Henri de RochefortLucay, during the course of which Maitre Clery, the leader of the French bar, exclaimed in the presence of the Tribunal de Ia Seine at Paris, " Gentlemen of the jury, ii you decide that the defendant, Rochefort, is not guilty of libel, then you thereßy declare that the prosecutor, Roustan, is a thief, and an utterly dishonourable man ; that he has ACCEPTED BRIBES ON A WHOLESALE SCALE, through his mistress ; that he has bartered and sold French and Tunisian officers, and that he has used his position of French envoy to Tunis to cause rises and falls in the price of Tunisian bonds for the benefit of his own speculation." These remarks were supplemented in court by the Attorney - General, or Procureur-General of the Republic, who concluded his address with the following words :— " if, in your opinion, gentlemen of the jury, M. Roustan is guilty of the act imputed to him, that acquits M. Rochefort of the charge of libel. In that case, as the principal law officer of the Government, I shall be the first to demand that M. Roustan should take his place in the prisoner's dock." The jury, at the conclusion of the case, acquitted M. Rochefort, and condemned M. Roustan to pay the costs, virtually, therefore, pronouncing him guilty of the charges of malfeasance brought against him . It is doubtful whether there has ever been any Oriental potentate so liberal, and at the same time so insinuating in his offers of bribes to foreign diplomats and officials as the late Khedive Ismail, who', while still on the throne of Egypt, was reputed to have more than one of the ambassadors cvf the Great Powers at Constantinople in his pay, besides which, at least two of the foreign representatives at Cairo were so heavily in his debt as to be completely subservient to his wishes. In fact, it used to be said that he even went to the length of employing professional gamblers—" Urecs " in every sense of the word— to ruin foreign diplomats at the card table, in order, that he might have the opportunity of becoming their Providence, and at the same time their master. Spain may be said to have lost her once magnificent colonial empire mainly through the greed and dishonesty of her colonial officials, who looted upon .their terms of transpontine service merely as an opportunity of enriching themselves. Had the i-mlippines and the Antilles been honestly governed, it is probable that they would be still to-day in the possession of the Spanish Crown, and a source of prosperity to thekingdom of young Don Alfonso. Port<mal | suffers in the same way, and to such? an extent does the Portuguese colonial official lose his sense of the fitness of things in tropical climos, and succumb ' to the degeneracy of his surroundings that the Gover-nor-General of Mozambique may be seen playing billiards publicly with paroled con-

victs, while the corruption 6? tlie authorities' at Lorenzo Marques has passed into . A BY- WORD THROUGHOUT THE CIVILISED WORLD. In niany cases the degeneracy of character in the white man resulting from the demoralising influences of tropical life, takes the form of inhuman savagery. Columns of blood-curdling, yet duly authenticated, stories have recently been printed in the European arid American Pr,ess concerning the shocking cruelties practised on the natives by King Leopold's Belgian officials in the Congo Free State. European officers, born and bred among Christian and civilised surroundings, must assuredly have reached the lowest stage of depravity when they can exact from their tax-collectors basket-loads of human hands, cut off from those unfortunate villagers who were unable to supply the quota of rubber extorted by way of tribute by King Leopold's Government. At the present moment there, is under the strictest kind o f arrest at Berlin, a prince of the ancient ducal house of Jafenberg — one of tfce most illustrious of the former sovereign houses of Europe— who is charged with the cold-blooded murder, of a universally respected native' official in German West Africa. According to all authentic accounts, the prince, after tying the unfortunate onan up, torture.d him in a manner that will not bear description. He tOien. let him go, but before tfhe man had crawled more than a few yards distance shot him three times with his revolver, and as ihe lay dying poked at 'his head with his stick to hasten the end. Arrested and brought back to Germany by the Emperor's own orders, the prince, when asked to explain his murder of a defenceless and inoffensive man, exclaimed, " I was provoked and drri■tated, and I did what as a man of honour and an officer I am'bound to do. You in Europe cannot possibly judge of colonial affairs. You call cruel what is only thorough and dashing, and in your eyes what is arbitrariness is merely sticking to our purpose !" Condemned by court-martial at Berlin to military degradation and to five years' (imprisonment, the Emperor quashed the sentence as ridiculously inadequate, and another trial has been ordered. Lieutenant Mercier, son of the French ex-Minister of War, who figured so .prominently in the Dreyfus case, has recently beea court-martialled. for murdering a native -under Bimilar circumstances in the French Soudan, and the mutiny of the Frendh officers, Captains Voulet and Chanoine, who, after assassinating several of their white comrades and superiors, set forth ■on a raid through the country lying south of Algeria, devastating and killing everything and everyone they met until murdered by "their own native followers, must be SIELL FRESH iEN EVEPJYONE'S MIND. There is yet another form of degeneracy of the white man, which plays, a great role throughout tihe Orient, and indeed in all hot countries. The standard of morality of the natives is so low that it could hardly be lower. In some of the Asiatic languages there is no equivalent for the English word "chaste." Purity is as abnormal in the eyes of the vast majority of people in tropical lands as is honesty, and the entire, atmospihere so enervating from a moral point of view, is calculated to promote the increase of those questionable menages which constitute one of the most blighting influences and shadowy features of white life in. the Orient. They are common in China, Japan, Java and, in fact, throughout the Asiatic East, sa-vo India, with no attempt at concealment, and apparently no sense of shame. Entanglements of this kind are, I need scarcely point out, calculated to degrade, since there, can be no intimate association on tie part of the latter with natives without the white irian being dragged down to the -moral level of his dusky partner. If in India the tone of morality among the white people is higher, it is because the European communities are larger, and hold more strictly aloof from intercourse with the natives. Lord Cromer's marvellous success in the reorganisation has been frequently ascribed to the fact that he had been careful to select as his assistants none but clean-lived, highbred young Englishmen, whose family traditions, loftiness of principle and sense of self-respect constituted a safeguard to the j temptations by which they were surrounded. His plan may be said to be followed by ! the chiefs of all other branches of British administration in tropical climes, and it is to this that must be ascribed the re- ] markable immunity of England from scandals in its Indian and colonial dependencies. The white mjm in tropical countries cannot afford to lower himself to the level of his surroundings. He imist remain superior thereto if he wishes to retain, not sympathy, but the respect among those with whom h*is lot is cast, and the only men who are likely to fulfil this condition are those whose home life is controlled, not by conventionality, but by principle.