Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World — John Shaqi
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the WorldTwain, Mark
General
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
Twain, Mark
Equator -- Description and travel; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Travel; Voyages around the world
“Is the tide of civilization to roll only to the foot of the Rocky
Mountains, and is the sun of knowledge to set at last in the waves
of the Pacific? No; the mighty day of four thousand years is
drawing to its close; the sun of humanity has performed its destined
course; but long ere its setting rays are extinguished in the west,
its ascending beams have glittered on the isles of the eastern seas
. . . . And now we see the race of Japhet setting forth to
people the isles, and the seeds of another Europe and a second
England sown in the regions of the sun. But mark the words of the
prophecy: 'He shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be
his servant.' It is not said Canaan shall be his slave. To the
Anglo-Saxon race is given the scepter of the globe, but there is not
given either the lash of the slave-driver or the rack of the
executioner. The East will not be stained with the same atrocities
as the West; the frightful gangrene of an enthralled race is not to
mar the destinies of the family of Japhet in the Oriental world;
humanizing, not destroying, as they advance; uniting with, not
enslaving, the inhabitants with whom they dwell, the British race
may,” etc., etc.
And he closes his vision with an invocation from Thomson:
“Come, bright Improvement! on the car of Time,
And rule the spacious world from clime to clime.”
Very well, Bright Improvement has arrived, you see, with her
civilization, and her Waterbury, and her umbrella, and her third-quality
profanity, and her humanizing-not-destroying machinery, and her
hundred-and-eighty death-rate, and everything is going along just as
handsome!
But the prophet that speaks last has an advantage over the pioneer in the
business. Rev. Mr. Gray says:
“What I am concerned about is that we as a Christian nation should
wipe out these races to enrich ourselves.”
And he closes his pamphlet with a grim Indictment which is as eloquent in
its flowerless straightforward English as is the hand-painted rhapsody of
the early prophet:
“My indictment of the Queensland-Kanaka Labor Traffic is this
“1. It generally demoralizes and always impoverishes the Kanaka,
deprives him of his citizenship, and depopulates the islands fitted
to his home.
“2. It is felt to lower the dignity of the white agricultural
laborer in Queensland, and beyond a doubt it lowers his wages there.
“3. The whole system is fraught with danger to Australia and the
islands on the score of health.
“4. On social and political grounds the continuance of the
Queensland Kanaka Labor Traffic must be a barrier to the true
federation of the Australian colonies.
“5. The Regulations under which the Traffic exists in Queensland are
inadequate to prevent abuses, and in the nature of things they must
remain so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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