Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them
are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew
fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards
did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly
with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their
Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not
accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will
expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune,
as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest
simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can
maintain such conditions as conduce to "race suicide," as the
British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment,
that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under
the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race
as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device seems the
least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race
distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery,
as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that
is to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth,
section 1, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimum
wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the
race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would
survive--they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice
from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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