The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of CustomThomson, Basil
History
The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom
Thomson, Basil
Ethnology -- Fiji; Fijians
But though all peoples are teachable there are racial idiosyncrasies
which we are only beginning to discover. Why, for instance, should the
Hausa and the Sudanese have a natural aptitude for European military
discipline while the Waganda find it irksome? Why do the Masai, whose
social development is Palæolithic in its simplicity, make trustworthy
policemen and prison warders, while the Somalis have been found utterly
worthless in both capacities? Why are the Maoris and Solomon Islanders
natural artists in wood-carving while the tribes most nearly allied to
them are almost destitute of artistic skill? These natural aptitudes
suggest what these races may become when we have struck off their
fetters of custom and have forced them to compete with us.
Cheap and rapid means of transit are sweeping away the distinctions of
dress, of custom, and, to some extent, of language, which underlie the
feeling of nationality, and the races now uncivilized will soon settle
for themselves the vital question whether they are to remain hewers of
wood and drawers of water for the white man, or whether they are to take
their place in free competition with him. The "Yellow Peril," which
implies national cohesion among the Mongolians, may be a chimera, but it
is impossible to believe that a white skin is to be for ever a sort of
patent of nobility in the world state of the future.
History teaches us that there can be no middle course. Either race
antipathy and race contempt must disappear, or one breed of men must
dominate the others. The psychology of race contempt has never been
dispassionately studied. It is felt most strongly in the United States
and the West Indies; a little less strongly in the other British
tropical colonies. In England it is sporadic, and is generally confined
to the educated classes. It is scarcely to be noticed in France, Spain,
Portugal or Italy. From this it might be argued that it is peculiar to
races of Teutonic descent were it not for the fact that Germans in
tropical countries do not seem to feel it. It is, moreover, a sentiment
of modern growth. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Englishmen
did not regard coloured people as their inferiors by reason of the
colour of their skin. It appears, in fact, to date only from the time of
slavery in the West Indian colonies, and yet the Romans, the Spaniards,
and the Portuguese, who were the greatest slave-owners in history, never
held marriage with coloured people in contempt. The only race hatred in
the Middle Ages was anti-Semitic, and this was due to the Crusader
spirit. The colour line, as it is called, is drawn more firmly by men
than by women, and deep-seated as it is in the Southern States just now
it may be nothing more than a passing phase of sentiment, a subconscious
instinct of self-preservation in a race which feels that its old
predominance is threatened by equality with its former servants. If you
analyze the sentiment it comes to this. You may tolerate the coloured
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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