268 THE STATUS OF MAN. 



of "their own sort" have rights above other people, even if 

 they choose to live in the other people's country. Wars have 

 frequently been waged over such difficulties. Or rather, let 

 me say, very often it has been found possible to base the sup- 

 port and the sympathy of a people for a proposed war on this 

 feeling of solidarity irrespective of other peoples rights. 



A commisioner of our Government had to travel in some 

 haste to a very small and remote and unimportant island to 

 investigate a report about trouble. He found the few hundred 

 inhabitants considerably agitated, and two poor Chinamen 

 frightened out of their wits, barricaded in their little shop 

 which they had recently put up in the village. He found that 

 the villagers had attempted to kill the Chinese. By question- 

 ing, he found this state of affairs: Were they disapproving 

 of the shop? No, they thought the shop was wonderful and a 

 matter of considerable local pride. A-ny-thing that was made in 

 the whole wide world was assembled right here in this shop. 

 They had real round mirrors, and velvet skull-caps, and steel 

 fish-hooks, and papers of pins and fire-crackers and ginger-bread 

 and fine dried fish, no, they would not be without the shop 

 for anything. Had the Chinamen misbehaved? No, they had 

 not, they were very useful, they had already made them a 

 market for their cocoa-nuts and they had shown them how to 

 prepare beche de mer in such a way, that is became worth 

 real money and produced striped silk handkerchiefs and 

 knives. Had the Chinamen insulted them? No, they had not, 

 but they were different. We people of the island own our trees, 

 and we have each our boat, and we fish in the sea and plant 

 rice in our clearings and shoot birds and build our houses in 

 the forest, wherever we please. These men are not our brothers 

 or our uncles, they can therefore not build a house here and 

 have their pigs run with our pigs. We thought that killing 

 them was the best we could do, for already our young men 

 were fighting and quarreling about them. In other words, the 

 islanders had their first taste of the immigration problem. 



Mr. Colyn settled the difficulty in the following way. He 



