THE ABORIGINES OP THE ISLANDS OP THE PACIPIC OCEAN. 83 



ferocious cannibals ; the Papuas of New Guinea, wlio are seldom 

 over five feet high, and who have often been treated almost as 

 wild beasts ; and some in Australia, who as some say have 

 little to distinguish them from the brute, except their form, 

 their power of speech, and their ideas of a good and evil 

 spirit." 



This is far too vague, and the author generalises about races 

 which have little affinity, as if they were all one. 



I have often heai'd the cry of " the lowest and most degraded 

 people in the world." From my observations of the human race 

 I should say this remark applied most particularly to the lower or 

 criminal classes of many European countries, for they have had 

 opportunities of knowing better which they have wilfully 

 neglected, they have many vices of which the savages are 

 ignorant, and have scarcely any of the virtues common to 

 savages. 



When will the public learn that absence of dress in a climate, 

 where it is not required ; neglect to cultivate in lands where 

 Nature without assistance gives all the food required ; and an 

 absence of hypocrisy, do not constitute a savage ; and when will 

 they learu that it is a criminal waste of money to supply missions, 

 etc., to the so-called savages who do not require them, when both 

 money and missions are urgently required by real savages who 

 are living round their doors ? 



Of the Australian blacks I know nothing, and they have 

 always been rather a puzzle to me, as they seem, contrary to other 

 races, to have degraded from a higher state ; but vvhy are the 

 Papuans looked dowii upon, morally and intellectually, merely 

 because, owing to their being "seldom over five feet high," it is 

 possible to do so physically. Also, by whom have these Papuans 

 been treated as wild beasts ? 



From what I have read of them I gather it is by the sailors of 

 merchant ships trading ia the Pacific. Now I have been for two 

 and a half years in a merchant sailing vessel, and if there is an 

 unintellectual and animal brut,e beast, it is the avei-age European 

 merchant sailor. This is shown by the fact that such lines as the 

 " P. and 0." do not employ them. 



When we have stopped the infamous " blackbirding " in the 

 Pacific Islands it will be time enough fur us to talk of savages 

 being lower than ourselves. 



G 2 



