In 1642, Tasman, a Dutch sailor, discovered Van Diemen's Land, since called Tasmania, the aborigines of which thought themselves alone in the world. Tasman himself never saw them, and a French- man, Marion, in 1772 was the first to communicate with them. They were very abject savages, for the most part utterly naked, rarely making more than wattled huts or sleeping under trees, nomadic, 1 Hatton and Harvey: Newfoundland. G. W. Patterson: Red Indians of Newfoundland. Proc. Roy. Soc. of Canada, 1891.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT ignorant of metals, with pointed wooden spears and whirling sticks for weapons, never cultivating the land or domesticating any animal, producing fire by friction, etc.; but they were bright, with a highly developed language, with abundant food provided by the kangaroo, fowls, and many forms of plant life. They were monogamic, their women almost absolutely chaste and almost as supreme in domestic as men were in extra-domestic affairs. Like so many savages, they were great mimics; loved practical jokes; took such pleasure in killing beyond their needs as to almost exterminate some useful animals; burned half-breed babies; were prone to attack departing guests, as if flight incited them; their women both climbed and swam better than the "men. They held large gatherings and chanted at the full moon with a kind of incantation. The greatest bully was their chief; they greased their bodies for war; their women tried to spare the lives of captives; they could eat and drink enormously upon occasion, and moved from place to place to avoid their offal. The French authors, to whom we owe the fullest and earliest accounts of this extraordinary people, were not, like many Anglo-Saxons, disposed to believe the worst about aborigines, but rather the best. The young girls are described as affectionate, with interesting and often " spirituel " physi- ognomies, gifted with coquetry and attractions which quite carried away some of the early writers.1 The disposition of this very interesting people was entirely amica- ble, and I can find no credible cases of hostility begun by them until they were provoked by a long series of wrongs and outrages. It was their custom to assemble in large numbers to take kangaroo and also for their corroborees. These gatherings were often mistaken by the earliest white residents for hostile demonstrations and were fired upon. In 1810 this people, too independent to be conquered or enslaved, had become thoroughly aroused and hostile. Their resentment had been greatly increased by the general practise of robbing them of their children. To this provocation, jealousy due to the misuse of women by the sailors, adventurers, and even convicts; the degradation caused by intoxicants and the diseases of civilization; the aggressions of land- grabbers — all fanned the flames of the first black war, which is the old, old tale of provocation and revenge. The destruction of the Guanches on the Canary Isles by the Spaniards; the extermination policy of Napoleon against the Zulus; Las Casas in his destruction of the Indies, every line of which is said to be written in blood — all this was paralleled if not exceeded here. To the avarice and cruelty of the white man, blasting this simple life, had been added the outrages of the penal convicts who were released in 1806, in a season of famine, to hunt kangaroo. Brutal white stock-keepers and others shot abo- rigines almost on sight. Soon bands or parties were organized, osten- sibly at first for defense, then avowedly for carrying out the role of 1 James Bonwick: The Lost Tasmanian Race. London, 1884. H. Ling-Roth: Tasmanians. West: History of Tasmania.
654 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE punishing the death of every white by that of ten blacks, and scores of atrocious cruelties and many utterly nameless outrages not only on men, but on women and children, are chronicled in detail. Like all weak people, however brave, the Tasmanians depended on guile and strategy rather than on meeting their foes in open field. Their only weapons were sharp sticks with fire-heated points and waddies. Bor- derers, bushrangers, cattle stealers, and prisoners, who abound on the outskirts of civilization, were the points of contact between the two races.
At last a line of demarcation was laid down across which the natives were not to be allowed. Beyond this line, banished from their summer homes and the graves of their fathers and the richer hunting fields, they were on no account to trespass. All who did not keep bounds were to be captured and brought in at five pounds a head. So hard pressed were the natives that they often relentlessly slew their young children that their cries might not betray their whereabouts, that they might not delay forced marches or fall into the hands of their enemies. Not a single white woman was ever known to have been abused by any native. Gradually they were driven into a corner by a cordon and many were captured. Three thousand white men in one hundred and nineteen squads, each with its leader, were con- tinuously engaged in line operations. Many philanthropists objected with the utmost vehemence to this policy, and an intelligent brick- layer, G. A. Robinson, undertook a policy of conciliation. Quick to recognize a friend, the natives hung about his workshop, and he was finally given a very small salary by the Government to devote his entire time to mitigating the bitterness of the natives' hostility. He went from place to place, interviewed and expostulated with representatives of the different tribes, and had many hair-breadth escapes. In 1832 many captive and other volunteer aborigines were transported to Flinder's Island. This colony grew under Robin- son's directorship, and in 1835 the very last of the Tasmanians were brought in. These denizens of the thicket and forest, with no mari- time tastes and with only the hated waters on every side, pined in their rocky prison. They would sit all day gazing across the sea to their native hills. Home-sickness, the lack of activity here, where everything was provided for them, caused them to die off rapidly — their enemies said, in the sulks or from sheer spite. The missionary and teacher now had free access to them; they were protected from strong drink; married in due European form; and glowing accounts were printed of their progress in letters, religion, and industry. Their sudden development here was compared to that of Athens under Peri- cles, and everything pointed toward another miracle of civilization, which, it was prophesied, would soon be realized here but for the " only drawback of the great mortality among them." Good catechists taught them fluent answers to the points of Bible history and orthodox the- ology. Of the two hundred captured in 1835, there were only one hundred survivors. In 1847 the forty-four survivors were removed ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 655 from Flinder's Island to Oyster Cove. Here they continued to learn gardening, the value of money, cleanliness, and cloth-making, but diminished rapidly in numbers. They were more exposed to the " bad white fellows," who here stole their clothes and made them drink. The survivors became discouraged because no one cared for them. From Bacon and Puffendorff downward, it had been asserted that cannibals were beyond law and could be legally slain, and English law asserts that native hunting tribes have no 'right nor title to the land on which they dwell if they refuse to till it. The forcing system with natives completely in the power of their instructors produced several limp prodigies, but self-respect and hope were gone. One pupil who took prizes at Sydney College, spoke good Latin and be- haved like a gentleman, returned to the bush, socially ostracized, and wished he had never been taken from it. It was a pseudo civilization, and the cry to rescue the remnant came too late. William Lanny, a magnificent physical specimen, descended from a chief, became a whaler. He was young and handsome, proud of the gold band around his cap, but, worn out with dissipation, died at the age of thirty-four in 1869. He was the last male. The scandal attending his funeral and the disappearance of his head from the hospital are suggestive. The last Tasmanian woman, Truganina, or Lalla Rookh, died in 1876, and in her a race unique, and with perhaps great possibilities of develop- ment, was utterly wiped out.
The inhabitants of Oceanica, says Keane, have no future but in heaven. Missionaries are hastening and tell us they will soon be Christianized, and anthropologists add that a little later all will be dead. Three captains confessed to Dr. Paton that they had repeatedly landed measles patients at different points " to sweep these creatures away and let the white man occupy the soil." Darwin thought some mysterious influence at work and that human varieties exterminate each other as do different animal species. The weaker sink before the stronger, just as the older and far more interesting Polynesians, with their wealth of tradition, sank before the Malays.
The Australians are among the most interesting of primitive people, but they are fast dying out, and the twenty-eight remaining will soon follow the Adelaide, Burra, Rupus, and other extinct tribes. Lum- holtz l says " the same fate as that which overtook their brothers in Tasmania is in store for the natives of Australia. They are without a future, without a home, without a hope — a doomed race. After a few generations, his race will have disappeared from the face of the earth." He declares that once or twice colonists offered to shoot blacks for him so that he could get their skulls. " On the borders of civilization men would think as little of shooting a black man as a dog. The law imposes death by hanging as the penalty for killing a black man, but people live so far apart in these uncivilized regions that a white man may in fact do what he pleases with the blacks." " In 1 Among Cannibals Four Years' Travel in Australia. London, 1889, 656 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE North Queensland I often heard this remark: The only treatment proper for the blacks is to shoot them all. They are unwilling to work, I have heard colonists say, and hence they are unfit to live." " There are instances where young men have employed the Sunday in hunting blacks not only for some definite purpose, but also for the sake of the sport. The blacks have also been killed with poison." " A farmer whom I met at Lower Herbert boasted that he had cremated some blacks that he had shot.!' " The murder of in- fants increases, syphilitic diseases become common, and the women having become prostitutes cease to bear children." The natives are by no means immoral by themselves, and the " young black women had originally a certain amount of modesty," but the frontier white man is rather brutal, and as soon as he comes " immorality knows no bounds and the black race hasten on to the inevitable ruin awaiting them." " Sometimes the most brutal settlers even make use of the revolver to compel the natives to surrender their women. Sometimes they even kill the black man if he makes resistance." Matthew says: l " It seems probable that in Victoria and New South Wales, at least, there will not be a single pure aborigine surviving fifty years hence."
New Zealand is the Switzerland of the southern hemi- sphere and the most advanced social democracy on earth.2 P. W. Reeves tells us that the native Maori, once numbering about one hundred and fifty thousand, will soon be as extinct as their own moa. " Partial civilization has blighted their natural life," says E. Hodder,3 " while with one hand his English brother has ennobled the Maori, with the other he has destroyed; his Christianity has striven to say, ' Arise and go to the Father/ civilization has actually said, ' Succumb and go to the devil/ ' Macaulay's prophecy of the native viewing the ruins of London from the bridge will be unfulfilled. J. Grattan Grey 4 gives a vivid picture of the court where they can deed away their land, stimulated thereto by licensed liquor- houses near by, which reap a golden harvest. The work of W. Colenso and Rusden and others have given their char- acter, myths, and customs a pathetic charm.
2 H. D. Lloyd: Newest England. New York, 1900. 8 The Long White Cloud. Ao Tea Toa, 1898, p. 30.
4 See also The Maori at Home, 1901. Also in this connection, H. Mager: Le Monde Polynesien. 1902; Swettenham: The Real Malay, London, 1900- Codrington: The Melanesians, Oxford, 1891; W. W. Skeat: Malay Magic, Lori ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 657 Dr. A. Jacoby 1 described the Samoyeds of a generation or two ago as among the most fortunate and interesting of primitive people, and thinks they would still be so could the Russian laws concerning them be carried out. They migrated hundreds of miles over the steppes each year, some families possessing two or three thousand reindeer to which new set- tlers brought anthrax, and robbed them of the rich pasturage they must have in the fall, and sapped the roots of their strange religious idealism, so elaborately developed in the meditations of the long arctic nights. The contempt of the new settlers is their death sentence, and they will not long survive, save a remnant in the Greenland of Denmark, which best knows how to treat the northern races. Nisbet describes, like the others I name, not as a partizan or even historian, but merely as an anthropologist, the Papuans of New Guinea — their government almost identical with that of the old Scotch clan, their courtesy, affability, Spartan simplicity, admirable bodies — but the twilight of their race is already well ad- vanced. The same story is told by Keate of the Pelew Island- ers; by Gautier of the Hovas, the best of the native races in Madagascar, which Wallace thought Lemuria, the original home of the human race; and of the Todas of India, whom some call proto-Aryans, with remarkable physical develop- ment, and now reduced to a few hundred individuals.
II. The Hawaiian Islands have lessons of unique psycho- genetic as well as pedagogic interest for us.
No navigator was ever welcomed as was Captain Cook in 1778, and " no greater opportunity than his was ever offered to a civilized man to impress better ideas upon a savage people." 2 Cook " was treat- ed as a god, as the long-looked-for Lono who had departed generations ago and was waited for with a sort of Messianic instinct. While the natives, true to their Spartan training, stole whatever they could lay their hands on, they withheld nothing from him, for his ships were loaded with their gifts. They turned on him only when he stole their chief; they killed him because, when they struck him with a stone, he gave a cry of pain. ' Gods do not cry/ they said, and stabbed him in the neck. His visit was the seedtime of the fatal disease that has 1 Ueber das Erloschen der Naturvolker des hohen Nordes. Archiv f. Anthro- pologie, vol. xxiii, 1895, p. I et set/.
2 Lessons from the Hawaiian Islands, by S. C. Armstrong.
658 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE diminished the population from his estimate of 400,000 (probably far too large) to about 43,000 in 1883," and 39,504 in 1896. Long after his death ships avoided the islands from fear, but firearms and far more deadly fire-water were in demand, and trade gradually pressed in and made for peace. Vancouver in 1793 refused to sell liquor or guns; landed the first cattle, sheep, poultry; gave new seeds, settled quarrels, and saw in the same prince that Cook thought a brutal savage an enlightened sovereign. " The golden age of Polynesian barbarism was undoubtedly from 1800 till the death in 1820 of Kamehameha I, whose equal as a warrior or ruler has never appeared in the annals of Oceanica." He was a conqueror and a wise colonizer; forbade the premature cutting of sandalwood, a point of great importance here; prohibited drink; broke up taboo; and his heathen subjects were far more amenable to Christianity than the outcasts of civilization. He uprooted idolatry so that his subjects presented the rare spectacle of a race with great ability without a religion. The results of pursuing labor, which began in 1820, were slight until 1837, when the emotional natives broke out into a religious frenzy which swept the islands, the complete Christianization of which is one of the standing missionary marvels without parallel in history. With his changed religion, the native's habits of indolence and licentiousness were not much modified. It was soon found that " the commercial instinct of New England was far stronger in Hawaii than its religious enterprise," yet the Christian- ization was wholesale and unprecedentedly sudden and complete, but the old warfare between the' teachers of religion and the lust of gain broke out. The missionaries were denounced and the lowest passions of the natives appealed to, so that Christianity declined for a time as rapidly as it had grown. As epoch-making as Kamehameha anni- hilating taboo by the single act of conspicuously sitting at the table of the women on a great occasion, was the defiance of Pele by his queen after his death, who descended alone into the crater Kilauea to prove to her people the folly of their superstitious fear. " In spite of their persuasions and threats of vengeance awaiting her, she accomplished her purpose, singing, as she went to face the wrath of the goddess, a Christian song, and returned unharmed, a living witness against the false gods from whose sway she had so lately escaped."
Christianity changed the character of these people, transmuting their pride into humility and kindness, so that in 1843 the king volun- tarily gave what other races had to fight for — a constitution and lib- erty, relinquishing also two-thirds of his individual property and private lands. Among tropical races, not ignorance, but weakness of character, idleness and the vices it breeds, is the chief difficulty. The missionaries have often planted but not watered, and have neglected the patient and vigilant paternal care which these adult children need. The savage's intellect is quick and ready and his memory strong, and knowledge gives him emancipation and a great sense of power, but his moral nature is inert and sluggish. He lacks self-control, so that if higher education is attempted at all among backward races it must ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 659 be with a constant sense of proportion. " Long before 1850 a church was in sight from every hamlet; the Bible was in every hut; and the people were giving more to religious charities according to their means than any people in Christendom. There were over 10,000,000 printed pages in their own language, mostly educational matter, and in 1843 18,000 children attended school. This was the maximum. There were (I follow here, in the main, Armstrong) all the outward signs of a nation of steady habits, but the energy of the whites was behind and sustained it all; the people were passive, plastic, and prac- tically infants. Of the white man's signatures on the public pages of that day, one-half were made by marks, while only one native failed to write his own name. In reading and writing the natives were the equals of the average New Englander, but being made of very unequal stuff the growth was not from within outward. The two races were in effect two thousand years apart in real civilization. The Hawaiians in their little Pacific paradise were, like Adam and Eve in Eden, with- out hardship, and it is a question whether humanity can develop well under paradisical conditions. They accepted civilization but did not adopt it; they did not know what it meant." " The action of the American Board must in the light of results be put down as a mistake as to facts and an error in judgment." "In -thirty years they had received into church membership 50,000 souls, of whom 20,000 had died, while 8,000 had been excommunicated." " Not that the natives were altogether hypocrites, but hospitality and desire to please are national traits, and they easily took the point of view of their guests." There was too little training in- practical life, and no training can " make heathen into Puritans." " A maxim of mission work might well be, ' Ideas take root in a moment, habits only in generations.' " The period of decay, which began about 1850, gathered momentum. Intermarriage with a stronger race is changing the native's mental and bodily traits as in Siam, while education divorces him from his early traditions. It also increases his aversion to manual labor and makes him " shun the field as the owl does the light of day." He prefers clerkships, and is utterly unable to compete with the Chinaman, who in Hawaii monopolizes the trades, the money, and the women, the offspring with whom is, like many Eurasian compounds, better than either parents. The lower class woman married to a Chinaman, or one of the upper class to a white man, becomes an excellent wife and mother, and nowhere else are race distinctions more completely oblit- erated, so that every cross is possible. The Chinaman who came in as a laborer soon hired his former employer, brought up a good class of children, and soon outnumbered the male population of all other nationalities. Probably the period that C. L. Brace describes has already been reached, but the moral condition of a decadent race " seems to be beyond the reach of any system of morality or of the purest religion." The whole history is summed up in " a swift adop- tion of the externals of civilization going hand in hand with a steady physical decline, and a promising but suddenly arrested moral develop- 660 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ment." The first stage of mission work, which acts upon the head, and perhaps upon the heart, is liable to bring conceit and self-confi- dence; while the second stage, which works upon the life, is incal- culably more difficult.
The missionaries in Hawaii destroyed heathen temples, built churches, and preached humanity and Christianity. " The Kanaka was impoverished, while his converters came into possession of vast territories which brought in yearly golden harvests." The silk cul- ture 1 was introduced by the English with everything in its favor and developed very rapidly until the missionaries forbade Sunday work, and by the methods here necessary the silkworms had to forego their Sunday food and died, and with them the industry became extinct. Every missionary report enlarged upon the great advantages of civili- zation and Christianity, but omitted to mention the steady decline of the native population.
Twombly 2 says of the Hawaiian " that the white man fastened on them an ineradicable curse. There have never been snakes on the island, but the most venomous serpents would have been a merciful visitation in comparison with the vipers in human form who, for more than thirty years, poisoned their bodies and contaminated their minds." The missionaries came a generation too late. Now in their degradation they care little even for the possession of land, and where the aboriginal soil is held by others there can be little national aspiration. " In no respect are the native Hawaiians holding their own or making progress." " The native to-day is an anomaly in civilization; he can not understand its significance or adjust himself to its requirements." " The native neither fights his destiny nor his enemies. These happy people laugh and sing; they deck themselves with flowers without a thought of the future and not much more for the present hour. It is not fatalism, but a want of mental and physical energy. Such are the 30,000 natives invested by Congress with a political power that no other Polynesian race ever possessed." Their character has been marked by striking contrasts. " A mirthful people, they had a most somber religion; they loved flowers, but worshiped hideous idols; poetic in temperament and delighting in their bards, they had no written language; kindly, they propitiated their gods by bloody sacrifices; holding women under strict taboo, their customs concerning kinship and inheritance were generally in favor of the female lineage; docile and amiable, they delighted in warfare; their weapons were rude but effective; they ate little meat and yet were strong."