swanton: international misunderstandings 409 



extended as "etiquette terms" over a great number of persons 

 of the same clans as those to which the true father and mother 

 belonged. Depravity there is among primitive people as among 

 civilized races, and, as with us, too much has from time to time 

 become embodied into custom and law. However, it would 

 certainly not be just to assume that any people are depraved 

 merely because they conform to the customs and laws in which 

 they have been brought up. Particularly, it would not be fair 

 to interpret customs and laws which are the expressions of one 

 interpretation of morality in terms of customs and laws repre- 

 senting different interpretations. 



Unfortunately this lack of appreciation of primitive mentality 

 has resulted in an ignorant impulse on the part of representatives 

 of so-called higher races to take such esteemed backward peoples 

 under surveillance with the idea of making them over into at 

 least outward conformity with civilized views of what is right 

 and proper. They must be given civilized dress, taught to live 

 in civilized houses — however unsuited to their climate — made 

 to marry and rear families in accordance with the paternal cus- 

 toms and ideas of the higher race, and proselytized into the 

 religion or religions dominant among the latter. Particularly 

 they must be kept in "tutelage" until they are "fitted for self- 

 government" — which can only mean a government after the 

 pattern of one of the more developed states, with all its uses and 

 abuses — for, until the white race came in upon them, there was 

 not a single people that did not ordinarily govern itself. 



"Tutelage" of a primitive people has just this meaning and 

 just this justification, that, since the peculiar civilization of 

 western Europe has in the last four centuries spread so rapidly 

 that it is invading all corners of the earth, between their past 

 isolation and their future adaptation to this culture the backward 

 peoples must experience a transition period which may be one of 

 "tutelage" or not, but should at any rate be one of sympathetic 

 appreciation on the part of the culture-bearing powers, not the 

 product of a desire to profit by the ignorance and helplessness 

 of the peoples whose well being is professedly desired. 



Unfortunately for this wished-for consummation the first 



