560 ETHNOLOGY 



examples of backward peoples being helped by the wise leadership 

 of Europeans. I may instance the cases of British New Guinea, 1 

 Torres Straits, 2 and especially that of Sarawak, 3 where many varied 

 tribes are helped, under the "mild despotism" of His Highness 

 Rajah Sir Charles Brooke, to govern themselves; the central idea 

 of the Government being the benefit of the natives and the gradual 

 betterment of their condition by natural growth from within, and 

 this is successfully accomplished by a sympathetic knowledge of 

 the people. 



Other examples of wise administration of native states by Euro- 

 peans could easily have been adduced, but I preferred to limit my 

 remarks to those regions that have come under my personal obser- 

 vations. May I be permitted to utter one word of warning? For 

 social evolution to be efficient and permanent it should be the result 

 of a response to needs felt by the people themselves, and conse- 

 quently such progress is usually very slow, for even the recent rapid 

 advance of Japan is the result of long years of discipline and train- 

 ing, without which she could not have seized her opportunities and 

 improved upon her teachers. The Western world is passing through 

 a phase of " hustle" which also manifests itself in a tendency un- 

 duly to accelerate the cultural evolution of backward peoples. 



We have now to consider the problems of ethnology and the 

 direction the development of the science should take in the imme- 

 diate future. From almost whatever point of view we regard history, 

 we find that the comparative studies of the ethnologist afford ex- 

 planations of historical phenomena which the historical records 

 are usually too imperfect to elucidate with sufficient detail. As a 

 matter of fact it is hardly going too far to suggest that in the existing 

 state of our knowledge the present explains the past more than the 

 past explains the present. Hence the pressing need for complete 

 ethnological investigations before the data are lost. 



I may be wrong, but it appears to me that there are few special 

 problems in ethnology that require elucidation to the exclusion 

 of others. Some departments of inquiry are of greater importance 

 in the cultural history of man than are others, but owing to the far- 

 spreading interactions of human ideas and deeds, it is often very 

 difficult to pronounce with any degree of certitude that a particular 

 branch of inquiry is of such relative unimportance that it can safely 

 be neglected, or even merely postponed. 



It may not be unprofitable, however, to glance at the five groups 

 of subjects, 4 which, as I have previously stated, are regarded by 



1 W. Macgregor, British New Guinea: Country and People, 1897, pp. 41, 97. 



2 Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, 

 1904, v p. 264. 



3 Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown, 1901, p. 293. 



4 These five fields of ethnological study were formally stated by J. W. Powell 



