TEE PERILS OF RAPID CIVILIZATION. 235 



civilized and barbarous peoples is trade. Even when the initial move 

 has been made by the missionary, the trader, scenting the chance for 

 gain, is not slow to follow. In this way one of the earliest forces 

 brought to bear upon the barbarian is that of the sailor and the trader. 

 Unfortunately, there is hardly a class of Anglo-European society whose 

 moral influence is so bad as that of the seamen. The trader sends those 

 commodities which will prove most attractive to the barbarian ; and 

 the latter, with his moral nature as yet uneducated, and his power of 

 self-denial undeveloped, is impelled toward the grossest pleasures of 

 intemperance and licentiousness. Even if he only exchange his native 

 indulgences for those brought by the white traders, the effect is most 

 disastrous. The raw American whisky does its deadly work faster 

 than his own " palmy wine." 



The policy of the trader finds a response in the attraction of the un- 

 tutored mind toward the new indulgence ; and, too often, the preaching 

 of the missionary is more than offset by the practices of the money- 

 seeking trader who has come in the same ship with him. Yet this, it 

 should be remembered, is only incidental. Civilization is to the sav- 

 age what education is to the child, and one of its objects, attainable 

 perhaps not in one or two generations, is to teach him self-restraint. 

 It certainly is not responsible for his failures in that quality.* 



The positive influences which are for a time deleterious to a people 

 in process of civilization are probably much more physical than men- 

 tal. The mind is not sufficiently taxed to create any disturbance in 

 the economy ; and the history of the Indian children who have been 

 brought to the schools at Hampton and Carlisle for education does not 

 show any evil consequences to their health from the intellectual impe- 

 tus given them, they being selected from tribes where the physical 

 condition, food, clothing, etc., were already approximated to the usages 

 of the whites. 



Probably no single influence has had so deleterious an effect upon 

 the physique of the rapidly civilized peoples as clothing. Of course, 

 no one will deny Carlyle's doctrine that man is essentially a clothes- 

 wearing animal, and that dress is absolutely necessary in a cultivated 

 community. The climatic conditions of many denizens of the tropics 

 do not require clothing as a matter of protection or comfort, and 

 consequently they do not wear it to any extent. When civilization 

 reaches those people it says, " You must be dressed." Indeed, too often 

 a European or a New England culture says, " You must be dressed in 



* We may quote in this connection the words of Morel (" Traite des degenerescences, 

 physiques, intellectuelles, et morales, de I'esp^ce humaine," p. 494) : " For limited socie- 

 ties, like the indigenous tribes which still exist in America, for other societies even more 

 numerous, that have yet only passed through the period of infancy, which is that of de- 

 sire, the contact of civilization is a fatal thing — when, instead of the moral law of which 

 it ought to be the harbinger, civilization only brings to them the means of satisfying their 

 grosser appetites as well as the bad tendencies, fruit of the complete lack of instruction, 

 either acquired or inherited." 



