The Zealand THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 1907. VANISHING RACES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 2, 10 January 1907, Page 21

The Zealand THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 1907. VANISHING RACES

T is to the credit of the" Catholic Church in Western Australia .that ' it" has" consistently, through good times and evil, done the best and most sejf-sacrificing work in that State for .the moral and material uplifting of the aboriginal race. Full many a time the Catholic episcopate, in the- West has* raised its voice for the easing- of .the black irianls /burden. " And now the chorus -is swelled by our friend and former travelling - companion, the Anglican Bishop ~ oi Perth." ■ : " • " • " 'Taught by the • Power - that : pities him, He learns "to pity- them'. In Sydney-, on- Christmas Day-, ; he pleaded that, - even from the'^-standpoint of trade and commerce, 'it -is' suicide on the" part- of the Australian whites to let the aborigines die- out '. ' Christianity ' added he- • has hardly taken joy to many of the dark races:.- -Driven from -their home's, taught, all the- vices of -the white . man, making it, impossible--' for them to carry out < their own ■ laws— some of them far more strict in» regard- to matrimony than those of modern ..civilisation — and ■ their lot made harder, what has been done for. them in return ? ' Little, we ween, beyond what religion, philanthropy, and a more or less perfunctory State protectorship have been able to" effect. The convict, -the soldier, and the money-grubber had the- first innings with the strange and mysterious Australian native~race. Disease', drink, bullet, and poison have done s their fell work among them ; for over thirty years the bodies of the last Tasmariian black have^been in the grave, and over the great lone continent the dark-skinned aboriginal is vanishing -away. v " ""

Our own stalwart native race seems to be at last recovering from the swift decline that began with the introduction of gunpowder and continued in varying degrees till ' the census of 1896. But elsewhere the • aboriginal races, as a rule, keep silently disappearing. In the Hawaiian, Fiji, and many other '.Pacific Islands, they are vanishing, at a raging '_pace. The North. American Indiaa is melting, too— following in the wake of the other lost nations that have shrivelled" up on contact with Dutch and ' English-speaking civilisation.' Spain and Portugal, alone of colonising peoples, seem to have been capable of elevating ' and preserving the aboriginal tribes with whom they came,- into -touch. In. 'his 'Spanish Pionfeers ', Mr. F. Lunimis (a" first-crass American non^Catholic authority on the subject)" says, for instance, that ' the legislation of Spain in behalf of the Indians everywhere was Incomparably more extensive,, more comprehensive, more systematic, more

T is to the credit of the" Catholic Church in

humane, than that of Great Britain, the colonies, and the present. United States all combined.,,^ Those; first teachers" gave" the Spanish language and ' Christian faith to a thousand aborigines -where we gave a new language and religion ■to one. There have been Spanish schools for Indians in America since 1524. By 1575— .nearly a century before there was any printing-press in English America— many booiis in twelve different Indian languages had been printed ,in the city of Mexico, where in our history John Eliot's Indian Bible stands alone ; and three Spanish universities in America were nearly, rounding out their century when Harvard was founded. A surprisingly large, proportion of the pioneers of America -were college men, ; and intelligence went hand in hand with heroism i»»the early settlement, of the New World '.

* _ There was, and still is, a -radical difference in the objects and methods of colonisation pursued by Dutch and'~Englishrspeaking civilisation on the one hand and Hispano-Portuguese on the other. The former waswholly or chiefly commercial -in its aims ; the latter placed religion more in the foreground both of purpose and of effort. In his work entitled '• The Establishment of Spanish Rule in America ', Professor Bernard Moses says that if we are to judge from ' the lan-

guage of the -laws of the Indies, we might calculate that the King, in dealing with the inhabitants, regar-

ded no abject as of more importance than their conversion to the Christian faith '. This non-Catholic

wri'ler also grants that ' one -of the strongest motives of Spain's, action ' in extending her empire beyond the seas ' was a genuine and honest desire for the spiritual regeneration of the native population '. And it has been truly observed by another non-Catholic writer

that ' nothing equal to the foreign missionary activity

of Spain in the days of her glory has ever been, . known in the history of Christendom '. The vices and

cancerous excrescences of civilisation kill. But oivilisa - tion itself never yet choked off a native race. The

results of the Hispano-Portuguese methods of colonisation may be briefly told. A large percentage -of the

population of Spanish and Portuguese AmeAca are of pure aboriginal blood or of mixed race. And -in the East, the Philippines, with' 'tluA'r seven" million native Catholics, are a monument more lasting than bronze to Spanish enterprise and piety and valor.