Great Britain -- Social conditions; Moral conditions; Social problems
In regard to the races which, after humane and thorough experiment,
prove entirely ineducable, the solution does not offer much
difficulty. Once their primitive habits are disturbed, and they begin
to live on a pension allotted them by the European nations which have
seized their territory, they gradually die out. A very good case may
be established by those writers who hold that races which cling
incurably to barbarism ought to be painlessly extirpated, or prevented
from multiplying. Such races as the Australian blacks are quite
familiar with a process of sterilisation which does not interfere with
their enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the life led by these
domesticated but ineducable savages is hardly worth preserving at all.
However, as they are disappearing, one need not press that point. The
claim of sane humanitarians, that we have no right to interfere with
their conditions and seize their territory, is quite unsound. The
human family has a right to see large fertile regions of the earth
developed. Who regrets to-day that the Amerinds were pensioned in
order to find room for Canada and the United States and Brazil and
Argentina? Who does not see the advantage of peopling Australia with a
fine and advancing civilisation of (eventually) twenty or thirty
million progressive whites instead of a few hundred thousand miserable
aboriginals?
At the other end of the scale we have, as I said, peoples who are most
probably or certainly educable. At a hazard one might instance the
Thibetans and Siberian Mongolians, the Koreans, the Maoris and
Polynesians, the Lapps (of the same blood as the Finns), and a large
number of Asiatic and African peoples. We must keep in mind the high
civilisation reached by the Amerinds of Peru, whereas their modern
descendants, the Quichwas, seem so negligible. In Africa there is a
vast amount of experiment and classification to do, and already the
pure Bantu races are furnishing scores of men who are susceptible of a
university education. I know several of them who are as competent and
well-educated as the average English university man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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