A HISTORY OF FIJI 4 7 



tain a license which he is obliged to exhibit whenever he purchases a 

 drink at any public bar, and if arrested for drunkenness his license is 

 confiscated, not to be renewed, and moreover the bartender is heavily 

 fined if he be detected in selling drinks to natives who possess no license. 



The Fijians of to-day are more orderly and sober than, and quite 

 as contented as are any peoples of European ancestry, and illiteracy is 

 rarer in Fiji than in Massachusetts. You were safer even fifteen years 

 ago in any part of Fiji, although your host knew how you tasted, than 

 you could be in the streets of any civilized city. It is clear that in dis- 

 position the Fijians are not unlike ourselves, and only in their time- 

 honored customs were they barbarous. Indeed the lowest human beings 

 are not in the far-off wilds of Africa, Australia or New Guinea, but 

 among the degenerates of our own great cities. Nor are there any char- 

 acteristics of the savage, be he ever so low, which are not retained in an 

 appreciable degree by the most cultured among us. 



Yet in one important respect the savage of to-day appears to differ 

 from civilized man. Civilized races are progressive and their systems 

 of thought and life are changing, but the savage prefers to remain fixed 

 in the culture of a long past age, which, conserved by the inertia of cus- 

 tom and sanctified by religion, holds him helpless in its inexorable grasp. 

 Imagination rules the world, and the world to the savage is dominated 

 by a nightmare of tradition. 



It is not that there are no individuals of progressive tendencies 

 among primitive tribes, but the careers of their Luthers and Galileos 

 are apt to be short and to end in tragedy. Indeed, only three hundred 

 years ago our own leaders of progress struggled at the risk of their 

 lives against the prejudices of their contemporaries. Even with us 

 every effort of progress engenders a counteracting force in the com- 

 munity which tends to check its growth and to preserve the present 

 status, accepting the acknowledged evil of to-day to preserve the even 

 tenor of our way, for fear of the new is akin to the superstitious 

 dread of the unknown. Whether the race be savage or civilized de- 

 pends chiefly upon the nature of the customs that are handed down as 

 patterns upon which to mold life. and thought. The more ancient the 

 triumph of the conservatives the more primitive the culture which is 

 conserved, and the more likely is it to be crude and barbarous. A 

 wonderful instance of fixity of custom is afforded by the race which in 

 the ice-age lived in the caverns in the valleys of the Dordogne and the 

 Vezere in central France. Their skull measurements indicate that cer- 

 tain of these cave-dwellers were Esquimo and their implements and 

 works of art are the same as those of the Esquimo of the Arctic regions 

 of to-day, who have thus remained unchanged throughout unknown 

 thousands of years, unaffected by their great journey northward fol- 

 lowing the edge of the retreating ice. 



