112 THE PAPUANS: COMPARATIVE NOTES, ETC., 
of savages in South America and in the Kast, who have no laws 
or law courts but the public opinion of the village freely 
expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his 
fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes 
place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are 
none of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, 
wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product 
of our civilisation; there is none of that wide-spread division 
of labour, which, while it increases weaith, produces also con- 
flicting interests; there is not that severe competition and 
struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population 
of civilised countries inevitably creates. All incitements to 
great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed 
partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that 
natural sense of justice and of his neighbour’s rights, which 
seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man.” 
That the advent of the white man and his boasted civilisation 
will tend to degrade the Papuan in the first instance, and to 
entirely exterminate the race eventually, no one who has studied 
the history of black versus white throughout the world, can 
doubt. How long will alcohol be kept from them? Or who 
can stop their being taught to manufacture Kawa from palm 
juice? And I hold that if spirits are once introduced into New 
Guinea, disease will surely follow, and disease among a people 
who are ignorant of medicine means decimation. 
Cooktown, 22nd June, 1885. 
APPENDIX. 
I find that I have unwittingly omitted a few very important 
customs from my paper, and as I think it would be incomplete 
without them, J jot them down here as an appendix. 
Wherever I landed among the Islands adjacent to South 
Cape and Milne Bay, I was at first puzzled by the chiefs 
