622 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



there has been in every colony a strong minority, at times converting 

 itself into a majority, to which the landed rights of the natives were 

 sacred. None the less has Marshall's decision been the nerve of 

 every colonizing advance. In the spirit of it the colonial legislatures 

 pass laws and the courts make rules for the acquisition of native 

 lands; doubtful sales are made by unauthorized members of tribes; 

 not overscrupulous governments and altogether unscrupulous private 

 individuals acquire wide tracts; the natives see their land slipping 

 away from them; if they are not to become landless fugitives, they 

 must make a final stand. Hence there is, almost always, in the 

 relations with savage peoples, a second war; this time pro aris — 

 for their right to keep the land which is, as it were, an extension 

 of their tribal selves; to take which is to wound, dismember, or 

 destroy them. Such was the cause of the native insurrections in 

 North America in the first half of the eighteenth century, of the 

 Maori war of the sixties, of the Matabele rising the other day, of a 

 dozen different savage rebellions. The colonists summon up their 

 power for a decisive struggle, and the natives are again beaten. On 

 the colonial side there has been a profuse sacrifice of life, villages 

 burned and towns destroyed; on the native side, a ruin still more 

 terrible. Two thirds of the population may have been killed, as 

 in Hispaniola; tribes have been broken up; the soul of a people has 

 been slain. 



The mother country has all this while not looked on at the 

 spectacle with listless eyes or folded hands. In general it may be said 

 that the degree of compassion felt for the natives is in exact proportion 

 to the distance of the sympathizers from the objects of their sym- 

 pathy. The colonists of the North Island of New Zealand, every- 

 where in peril from the Maoris and eager for their lands, have always 

 been strongly anti-Maori; those of the South Island, perfectly dis- 

 interested and out of danger, are nobly philo-Maori; while the home 

 Government, thirteen thousand miles away, has been from first to last 

 the strenuous defender of the Maori. It is an " undoubted maxim," 

 said Mr. Gladstone in 1846, " that the crown should stand in all 

 matters between the colonists and the natives." Nine years earlier 

 a committee of the House of Commons declared, possibly by the 

 same eloquent voice, that England " will tolerate no scheme which 

 implies violence or fraud in taking possession of . . . territory, will no 

 longer subject itself to the guilt of conniving at oppression, and will 

 take upon itself the task of defending those who are too weak and too 

 ignorant to defend themselves." To this honorable line of action 

 the British Government, outside of India, has, until lately, stead- 

 fastly adhered. It reluctantly annexed the islands of New Zealand, 

 to save the natives from the settlers. It resisted the interested 



