THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES, 625 



and Olive Schreiner's thrilling story, Peter Halket. He notes with 

 respect the attitude of the honest official who resigns his office because 

 of unfulfilled promises to the natives of a whole island, or that of the 

 private citizen who refuses to subscribe to the Imperial Institute be- 

 cause of unrepaired injustice to a single tribe. He is, nevertheless, 

 obliged to admit, with the sage of Concord, that these things " look 

 very differently to the centuries and to the years." The whole re- 

 ligious future of the world was bound up with the Hebrew conquest 

 of Canaan, of which the ruthless barbarity may have been a neces- 

 sary incident. The British occupation of India is a shining fact 

 in history. The colonization of the savage-ridden spaces of the globe 

 has swamped the inevitable accompanying crimes with a flood of 

 benefits. A territory belongs by right divine to the race that can 

 most profitably occupy it. But even in Nature's Jesuitism the 

 end does not justify the means. Every step toward it must be 

 just. All treaties must be honestly contracted and loyally observed, 

 all promises kept, all rights respected. There shall be no personal in- 

 justice or oppression. Where the balance seems equally poised, the 

 native scale shall be weighted. Pre-eminently, the surrender or con- 

 fiscation of land shall correspond rather to the decline of the in- 

 digenes than to the increase of the colonists. 



It would be easier to prove the converse and show that the decline 

 of the natives has followed the loss of their lands. Yet history reveals 

 a surprising amount of equity in transactions where the colonists were 

 under no compulsion. In New England every acre was long scrupu- 

 lously paid for; and this was the case in other States, as Parkman 

 has shown. In New Zealand millions of acres have been purchased 

 by the Government at a reasonable price. Laws were passed and 

 courts set up in both countries to protect the natives. Where pur- 

 chase was impracticable, as with the nomadic Australian blacks, the 

 colonial Government has assumed a benevolent trusteeship. It has 

 provided food and clothing, houses, implements and land, hospitals, 

 doctors and medicine, schools and churches. The southern Maoris 

 have been treated with less tardy and more compulsory benevolence. 

 All such are parasites at the table of their invaders — interlopers on 

 the lands they once freely roamed over or rudely cultivated. The 

 more savage indigenes who live on the frontier of settlements, like 

 many red Indian tribes so long, like the last integral fragment of the 

 Maoris in the wild Uriwera country, like the blacks of the Australian 

 north and northwest, have but rare relations with the colonists. They 

 may swoop down from their fastnesses or crowd in from the forest, 

 and threaten or imperil or destroy a colony, thus resembling epi- 

 demics of typhus and cholera, which are literally invasions of bac- 

 teria; but these descents become ever fcv/er as the natives grow 



TOL. LIII. — 43 



