MELANESIA AND ITS PEOPLE. 189 
provoke fear rather than love, and are invoked from a desire that their 
influence should be used to stave off any possible evil that might hap- 
pen rather than because they are conceived of as kindly dispositioned 
beings who love and want to do good to their worshippers. To a 
people with such a religion the knowledge of the Great Spirit God as 
a loving Father comes with the utmost force and power. 
Melanesians on the one hand are more or less incapable of individual 
and separate action; each one is just a copy of his neighbor, and every- 
thing is done by concerted agreement among the whole people; on the 
other hand, they have no means of preserving the welfare of themselves 
as a whole. They have no tribes, no kingdoms, no laws beyond the 
unwritten social laws relating to marriage, etc.; life is insecure, accu- 
sations of witchcraft are easily made, and death follows as a matter of 
course; infanticide is a common practice, big families are almost un- 
known, polygamy is a recognized thing. So Christianity comes to 
them as a means of insuring both individual and social vigor and only 
in so far as they become Christian will they be saved from extinction. 
If only from a humanitarian point of view, it were a charity to enlighten 
the darkness of these benighted people and to give them something to 
strive for, to set before them some spiritual end, to give them a higher 
standard of existence than their present one. F 
There can, however, be no question of leaving them alone now, what- 
ever may have been the case in past years; civilization, 1. ¢., trade, is 
coming in fast and the inevitable consequence will be that the white 
man’s view of life will alter the old style of things. Experience has 
taught us that wherever a people without a settled state and a kingdom 
and the external power of law is invaded by any of our western peoples, 
with their vigor and personality, the less-developed people lose all their 
pristine distinctiveness, all bonds are loosed, and inevitable decay sets 
in; in other words, the white man destroys the black. Benjamin 
Kidd shows this most conclusively in his book “Social Evolution.’’ 
In the case of Melanesia the process may take time, but that the 
result is certain in the end is proved by the disappearance of the nomad 
Australian aboriginal, and with a people of a higher culture by the story 
of the capable Maori people of New Zealand under modern conditions. 
Drink and idleness are two of the main factors that have tended 
to the downfall of both the Maori and the Australian aboriginal; low- 
class whites have done much to ruin the latter, nor has the Maori 
been free from their influence. There is no fear of a large influx of 
whites into Melanesia, and the governments have it in their power to 
deport any undesirable person, but in the south of Melanesia, ¢. g., 
on Omba, unscrupulous traders have done incalculable harm. Under 
the Condominium of the New Hebrides, drink and firearms can still 
be obtained by natives, but the Solomon Island government entirely 
prohibits the sale of both. 
