CHAPTER XCIX 

 CONCLUSION 



THE merest glance at the map is sufficient to impress the 

 observer with the importance of Torres Strait to 

 Australia and the British Empire. No argument is 

 required to strengthen the impression. 



If Australia's white population were equally distributed through- 

 out, and the Cape York Peninsula held a share of the people in 

 proportion to her area, one of the problems of the Empire would 

 be amazingly simplified. No chance of such a solution is in sight 

 within a reasonable time. The tropical North can only be 

 populated as it ought to be by the slow process of pressure from 

 an already sufficiently occupied South. In all probability some 

 generations will have come and gone before pressure from behind 

 can be expected to operate in this direction. 



If the Cape York Peninsula, almost joining on, as it does, to 

 New Guinea, were even occupied by a virile indigenous race carrying 

 within itself the seeds of progress and logically satisfied that its 

 best interests are bound up with the prosperity of the British 

 Empire, the problem would be met with a satisfactory, if still a 

 second-best solution. Unhappily no such race is indigenous, and 

 it is no more possible to import one than it would be to permit 

 one to settle of its own accord. 



The case is indeed far otherwise. This northern land is thinly 

 peopled by a feeble folk inevitably doomed to vanish from the face 

 of the earth within the current century. Fair dealing, kindness, 

 philanthropy and Christianity alike have proved their inability to 

 stay the operation of a natural law, mysterious and deplorable 

 though the law may be. The most experienced missionary, who 

 has tried many experiments for the amelioration of the aborigines, 

 during an effort sustained over a twenty-eight years' residence, 

 goes no further than to claim that the natives may be taught to 

 a limited extent the advantages of civilised living, but admits that 

 the teaching is less successful with the pure-blooded natives than 

 with their half-caste offspring. Logically, it may be assumed as 

 a corollary that the more the native blood is diluted the better. 

 To any stud-master or student of eugenics the idea of leaving the 

 future of the North to a breed tainted at its fountain-head is in 

 the last degree repugnant, and politically it is full of danger. In 



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