628 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



still more striking. There has been a continuous decrease of the 

 full-bloods and a steady increase of the half-breeds, so that in the 

 present year the latter have at length overtaken the former. The 

 miscegenation has its picturesque incidents. The regal dignity of 

 Montezuma clothes with barbaric grandeur two noble Spanish houses; 

 the blood of Pocahontas flows proudly in Virginian veins; beauty 

 visibly descends from the valor of Eauparaha, and prestige has not 

 deserted the offspring of Te Heu Heu. It may be looked upon as 

 the undesigned atojiement which the immigrant makes to the aborigi- 

 nal for robbing him of his country; and the amount of mixed blood 

 is at length the aboriginal's sole share in the population of the land 

 he once monopolized. 



The agencies accelerating or retarding the inevitable progression 

 toward the two termini have an interest melancholy or cheering, but 

 superficial. The white man's drink, diseases, vices, and crimes are 

 partly offset by the benefits of imperial trusteeship, missionary labor, 

 and the contagion of white settlement. The first is real but distant; 

 the value of the second is chiefly initial, and the action of the last is 

 powerful but unconscious. The home government is beneficent 

 when it protects the natives from the avarice of the settlers, and 

 often maleficent in the guise of beneficence, as in the " insensate 

 negrophilism " of the English at Sierra Leone, or in the sad comedy 

 of conferring French citizenship on the blacks of Senegal and the 

 Antilles. The utility of missionary work is much contested in the 

 colonies, where it can not be denied that the missionaries have done 

 well for themselves and their families. Even clergymen, from Syd- 

 ney Smith to Canon Isaac Taylor, have exulted over " the great mis- 

 sionary failure." Whatever may be the case in India or Africa, 

 throughout one wide colonizing region — that of the South Seas — this 

 great failure has been an unquestionable success. A whole race, in a 

 variety of families — Ilawaiians, Tahitans, Tongans, Samoans, and 

 Maoris — has been raised several degrees in the scale of civilization. 

 Missionaries, and they alone, have done this great thing. Yet, as with 

 the mocking finale to Heine's finest songs, one has to qualify this high 

 eulogy by asking whether they have not smoothed the path of these 

 people to the grave. They have paved the Avay for colonization by 

 breaking down the resistance of the natives, and they have insured 

 that a warlike race shall die ingloriously in its bed. The influence 

 of the surrounding settlers begins where that of the missionaries 

 leaves off. Governed by imitation, the natives procure seeds, imple- 

 ments, and cattle, and farm like whites. This stage lasts as long as 

 they keep their land ; when from misfortune it goes, the tribe is gone. 

 At this stage there may be much mimicry of civilization: the 

 younger members may distinguish themselves at colonial schools and 



