force, and the expedition was a failure." Had it succeeded, it would have " added fully twenty tons of rubber to the monthly crop," until the impossible was required of the tribe and they revolted and re- sumed their massacres.
The tortures described and photographed in this heart-rending book, of natives scalped alive, slowly cut and stabbed to death, and hacked to pieces, with portions of the bodies of other victims tied about their necks, make painful reading. We are not surprised that this book has been suppressed, and we must add that at least one of the two authors seems animated by personal resentment connected with his leaving the Belgian service, so that the animus of the book- may be suspected. It has happened that such conditions have brought out facts, notorious on the ground, but which the public has great difficulty in learning. Most of the facts here stated seem not incredi- ble, and many are vouched for by official records, competent persons, 670 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE or photographs, but the question always is, How far are they repre- sentative? 1 Joseph Thomson,2 who has carefully studied Africans on the spot, has little respect for the popular claim of civilization, progress, the good or conversion of the negro, or the habit of calling the trader " the pioneer of civilization, thinking only of the native first and of himself afterward." We see the work of other nations, he says, in its true light, when they bespatter the ruined homes and jungles with the blood of the people, all for the good of the negro. He contrasts this with the early Portuguese expansion to advance God's kingdom, when missionary zeal rose to a pitch never surpassed, till there was a chain of mission posts almost around the coast line and far up the Congo and Zambesi. With the fall of Portugal, England, Spain, 1 Two English soldiers, A. G. Leonard 3 and F. W. Sykes,4 have written amaz- ingly frank books which show in every chapter contempt of the natives and the dominance of commercial interests over every humanitarian point of view. The stories of midnight massacre, captains burning native kraals, and the appearance at the dramatic moment of Cecil Rhodes, the peace lover, the modern Colossus, with his intense magnetism and his splendid cuisine — all reveal a state of the Saxon military mind, in which, were it supreme, the native can read his swift doom. The splendid book of Sir Harry Johnston,5 the discoverer of the Okapia half deer and half zebra, is written in a spirit in extreme contrast with that of Fielding Hall or Furniss. To him the natives have too little interest to make it worth while to get into sympathetic rapport with them. Very different is the frankness of Miss Colenso,6 who describes the twenty years of peace between the Zulus and the colo- nists of Natal. When the former refused to give up two refugees, war broke out, in which one of the young men was killed and the other captured and set free with no punishment. " Rivers of blood flowed to enforce demands that were in the end put on one side as utterly valueless." It is a long and sad story in which the natives " showed immense courage and the highest warlike qualities and were well led by Cetewayo, one of the ablest leaders of men." The culminating tragedy of the war, the death, and the final capture and isolation of Cetewayo, gives it all a pathetic ck>se.
When General Gordon found the work he was expected to do among the Ba- sutos was unprovoked and unjust, he wrote that he could not do it " without sink- ing his conscience," and so resigned.7 He declared that " government by coercion is essentially rotten," and that " the history of the South African wars is essentially that of wars undertaken in support of unjustifiable acts."
3 The Results of European Intercourse with the African. Contemporary Re- view, March, 1890.
3 How we Made Rhodesia. London, 1896, p. 356.
4 With Plummer in Matabeleland. An account of the operations of the Matabele- land relief force during the rebellion of 1896. Westminster, 1897, p. 291.
5 The Uganda Protectorate, 2 vols., pp. 1018. London, 1902.
6 History of the Zulu War and its Origin, by Frances E. Colenso. London, 7 Boulger: Life of General Gordon, vol. ii, p. 77 et seg.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 6?1 France, and Holland were hard at work perpetrating " one of the most gigantic crimes that has ever stained the annals of history."
Mr. Blyden,1 our colored minister to Liberia, in a recent article shows how superior the Mohammedan methods have been in many respects over white civilization in Africa, and the repressive effects of our methods there. They have not abolished polygamy nor slavery, but it should not be forgotten that both have their partial justification, and at a certain stage slavery may be the best discipline for lowly races. Bartle Frere,2 in discussing laws relating to the differences between savage and civilized life, as bearing on the deal- ing of colonies with aborigines, has to admit that in temperate cli- mates on islands where the English settle, although not so much in hot climates, the natives are seen slowly to disappear. The whites check black races by Europeanizing them, and the latter react and drag the whites down.
Perhaps the best record of the customs of the Bantu, Zulu, and other South African tribes is the Blue-Book report of Sir Bartle Frere, published 1^1883. All sources of information — natives, mis- sionaries, judges, soldiers, etc. — were utilized to find whether the aboriginal customs of marriage, land tenure, criminal procedure, local government, etc., should be legalized or superseded. The result was a surprise, for it was found that in tribes that had not been disturbed by outside white influences all these and other matters were regu- lated by unwritten but rigid tradition, and that in many, if not most, respects the whites had more to learn than to teach. The chief, while absolute in some respects, can make no laws and is subject to all that exist when he comes to power. His conduct is in most matters con- trolled by hereditary headmen or councillors, who are themselves governed by the opinion of the people. A chief who decreed without consultation would find his decision defied if it did not chance to coincide with the popular whim. All rests on oral traditions of old men, and so conservative are they that in one tribe but one change was made for fifty years. Each tribe has its territory, and after selecting his portion the chief allots districts to sub-chiefs, who assign it to individuals, who build their kraal and hut, sub-allots to younger brothers, etc., who plow and till but do not exchange or sell. As land is not manured, and mealies exhaust the soil in a very few years, moving is easy and land has little value. Each kraal reserves its own grazing land, sharply marked off from cultivated areas. Primogeni- ture prevails, and all its contingencies are provided for. Each wife, son, and daughter has well-defined rights and duties. They do not countenance wills. All is so provided by custom that it would be impossible for a man in his last weak moments to disturb the regula- tion. The giving of cattle for a wife insures a father's interest in 1 See Journal of the African Society, 1901. •Jour. Anthrop. Inst., 1882, pp. 313-354.
&72 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE his daughter's chastity, without which his dower is smaller. If she is treated badly she can run away and the husband does not receive back his cattle, but he does if she misbehaves, so her relatives have an interest in her good conduct. The wife takes pride in the size of the gift and does not respect herself till it is all paid. When this custom is disregarded, as is often the case under missionary influence, conjugal unhappiness follows. Divorce is very rare, and adultery is fined. The wife owns all her father gives her. Each sex has its own duties, and the women work hard only about eight weeks per year, so that " the actual labor performed by the women bears no compari- son to what is performed by the women of the lower class in Eng- land." Polygamy is always believed in and often practised. Women favor it, for it is their pride to belong to a large establishment. Women at about thirty-six years of age often " retire " from wed- lock and go to live with the children. She aids her husband to find and dower a second wife, stays a year to direct her, and then with- draws. The kraal to which she goes treats her with great respect. A man is entitled to take the widow of his deceased brother, and the children born "to him are legally those of his brother. Crimes are graded according to the dignity of the person against whom they are committed. Every man must report to his superior any wrong or unusual act, and if he does not do so is held responsible for it. In native tribunals accuser and accused are heard and examined, as are all their witnesses, and the chief retires and renders his judgment in private. Torture in obtaining evidence is unknown save for witch- craft. The spoor law tracks stolen cattle, their only wealth, to a kraal, which is collectively liable if it can not show that they passed on. If the trail is lost between two villages, both are liable. Thus cattle are almost always rescued. The English object to being re- sponsible for others, and so, as the community have no interest in informing, theft multiplies. An English reviewer * says, " Any candid reader of the Blue Book, after considering the evidence of the magis- trates and missionaries who lived for years in constant contact with the Kaffirs, must rise from its perusal with a feeling that the native is neither vicious nor hopelessly lazy. His faults seem to be in great measure the faults of children or animals when acting under the influence of fright, hardly knowing what they are doing. The con- tact of Europeans with the native has in the first instance, at least, not tended to improve him." But even this writer, with a character- istic English eye to utility, adds that " the native, if treated intelli- gently, with due regard to his history and traditions, will undoubtedly prove a valuable asset in the labor market in South Africa."
In February, 1903, twenty-six African chiefs were summoned in council to answer the question, " Can native owners of land sell outright; that is, part with land in perpetuity for themselves, their 1 E. Blackwood Wright: Jour, of the African Society, April, 1903, p. 274.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT children, their family, and tribe? " Each chief gave a clear and in- telligent negative answer, some detailing reasons. All, without ex- ception, said land could not thus be sold, that this was a foreign cus- tom. A writer holds that " in a new country like Africa, where mil- lions of people are to be ruled by a very few white men, whose work' can not be continuous owing to the climate, so deleterious to Euro- peans, and where the means of enforcing law and order are chiefly conspicuous by their absence, it is indeed a serious thing to sanction new measures in place of those which the natives have worked out in the course of centuries for themselves. It is beginning to be better understood than it was in old times that the best means of governing the people is through their own chiefs." 1 Allen Upward, late resident administrator in Kabba, reports2 sin- gular indifference to the interests of the natives, even merchants losing trade to foreign rivals because they do not consult the tastes of their customers. He was urged by Mr. Aitken, agent of the Church Missionary Society, to induce the natives to embrace Christianity by Government proclamation as the Mohammedans did, insisting that they would not appreciate the difference. Mr. Upward found the natives mostly honest and sensible, with a high standard of morality. He quotes Lieutenant Drysdale, who says of the Basutos that " the worst class of natives is the converted one, as is often the case. They are generally very dishonest and also very dirty," and he adds for himself the extreme view that " in the face of all the evidence it is difficult to resist the conviction that the person who lends any help to Christianize the African is a wilful evildoer." " To say that we are in Africa for the good of the native is cant. It is cant of which Englishmen are much too fond, and foreigners find it easier to par- don our greed of dominion than the unctuous professions by which we love to disguise the truth from ourselves."
Sir Harry Johnston 3 thinks the negro more than any other race is marked out by mental and physical traits as a possible slave. He has " great physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused grati- tude"; has little homesickness provided he is well fed; can toil hard under the hot sun and in an unhealthy climate; has little race fellow- ship; and makes not only a good workman but a good soldier. They have been and are still sold throughout the Mohammedan world, and captured and often treated with the greatest cruelty. They began to be imported into America as early as 1503, and the trade was regu- 1 English Governors and African Chiefs. Col. J. G. B. Stafford, Jour, of the African Society, April, 1903.
'The Province of Kabba, North Nigeria. Jour, of the African Society, April, 3 A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races. Cambridge, 1899, 674 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE larly established by Charles V in 1517. Dr. Robert Brown1 estimates that from 1680 to 1786, 2,130,000 negro slaves were imported into the English-American colonies. Near the end of the eighteenth cen- tury over 70,000 a year were imported into America. Occasionally a negro prince was captured. It is hard to say whether slaves have suffered more when transported by sea, where many of them have perished or been thrown overboard to escape detection, or by the in- human methods of land traffic. Boys are in chief demand in the East, and they are usually made eunuchs before they are sold, and sometimes branded, insufficiently fed, and subjected to nameless hor- rors; and only in the early part of the century was the traffic defi- nitely abolished. England has attempted to do penance by founding Sierra Leone and by helping Liberia. Denmark first forbade the trade for her subjects in 1792; in 1804 the United States forbade the introduction of more slaves; in 1807 Parliament abolished the trade so far as British subjects were concerned; in 1815 Napoleon ended the trade; it was abolished in all the British dominions in the '305, and Spain and Portugal were paid to abolish the traffic. France gave it up in all her possessions in 1840. It continued in Portuguese possessions till 1878 and in the United States till 1863. This traffic across the Sahara has been greatly reduced; the slave raids of the Zulus and Angoni ended; but the Arabs in east Central Africa still continue their raids. This business has filled Africa with war and suffering. Johnston holds that a slight modicum of good has been mixed with the great evil in its prosecution. The races that will not work are made to. In general, the negro has now been given back his freedom, but if he does not use it aright and continues his heedless life, his subjection in some form or other is certain.
William Torrens 2 gives us many interesting details of the efforts within recent years to suppress this traffic, especially by British cruisers, and characterizes the endeavors of the different nations of Europe. Very often men are slain, and the traffic largely consists of boys, who are made eunuchs, and of girls. Thomson's summary state- ment is, " I unhesitatingly affirm in the plainest language that so far our intercourse with African races, instead of being a blessing has been little better than an unmitigated curse to them." The frightful miscarriage of the desire of religious people has been due to the nature of commerce, to the slave trade, the gin trade, and gunpowder " Chiefs have been tempted to sell their subjects, mothers their chil- dren, men their wives. Tribe was set against tribe." " Twenty mil- lions of human beings probably underestimates the number of killed and captured for European gain, and his was not the most fortunate fate who lived to become a slave. For him was reserved the spectacle of slaughtered relatives and a ruined home."
Now it is precisely drink that Mohammedanism most strenuously 1 The Story of Africa.
'The East African Slave Trade. Fortnightly Review, vol xlix, 1888.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 675 and successfully sets its face against, so that, as compared with its progress in Africa, Christianity is at a standstill. Mohammedan seed seems to have all taken root, but Christianity has ever been a delicate exotic. The reason is that Mohammedanism has been elastic and adaptable; it asks apparently little, but really very much. Its very in- feriority as a religion has caused its success; it has given just what could succeed. The Christian, on the other hand, has done so little because he tried to do so much, and has so little comprehended his problem. He has great enthusiasm, but great ignorance and errone- ous ideas. He ignores all pedagogical principles, and acts as if in a single generation he could lift individuals or even races from the bottom to the top of the culture ladder and graft Christianity upon brutish brains. At best he has only stupefied them with doctrine be- yond their grasp. " Before any great advances will be made in the Christian propaganda of Africa a total revolution in the methods of work must be accomplished. Surely the time has come when pro- fessorships for the preparation of missionaries should be founded," so that they be freed.from the unworkable traditions of the past and from the hampering influences of unsuitable theological training. At bottom the negro is very religious. He can accept the lofty idea of God which Islam presents.
In 1900 the negroes in the United States numbered 8,840,789, and they are increasing at the rate of about 150,000 per year. Mr. C. D. Warner,1 while commending the progress made since the time it was an offense to teach the negro the alphabet because it made human property insecure, insists that the education of the children of the negroes of this country should be of the lower and not of the higher kind. They are, he says, an inferior race. While Africa has seen the civilization of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, and Saracens, and while a negro emperor ruled the large and well-ordered empire of Songhay on the Niger in the fourth century, he urges that no negro ever invented an alphabet; that they have been relatively un- affected by higher races; that while by nature the negro is cheerful, contented, fond of music, very emotional, he is also shiftless and irre- sponsible, lacks stamina and trustworthiness, is injured by the mere top-dressing of culture as well as by being the pawn of politics, and should not be treated like superior races. His training should be essentially practical, domestic, agricultural, chiefly if not entirely in- dustrial, and he makes no provision even for the training of the few exceptional negroes.
In slavery the negro did not worry; was not fired by ambitions about his possible future, but led a humble if somewhat animal life in his little cabin. There were many hygienic restraints; habits were regular and food and clothing, though often plain, were sufficient for the master's interests in his well-being if no more. He was kept in- 1 The Education of the Negro. President's Address, Am. Soc. Sci. Ass'n, Washington, May 7, 1900.
676 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE doors at night, and there were no liquor saloons for him to frequent, and in sickness he was cared for. When he became free and invested with the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, new and heavy demands were made upon his intellect. Many heads were turned by roseate dreams of the future. During the flush times immediately following the war, when cotton was high, this increase was not noted, but with the depreciation of farm products and the loss of labor which followed he has often lost his mental equilibrium, and that from stress and strain which would not affect a race mentally stronger. Religious excitement is often ascribed as one cause of insanity, and while this is sometimes true of the negroes, the relation of cause and effect is often just the reverse of this. His disease expresses itself often through his highly emotional, religious nature. Perhaps his- tory presents no parallel to the sudden creation of a nation in a day by the proclamation of emancipation, but the fact of mental inferior- ity according to the established standards of measuring culture and civilization is unquestionable. The negro is excitable and lives in his emotions, and his insanity is of a more demonstrative type, states of exaltation being vastly more frequent than those of depression.
Paresis, from which the negroes used to be thought exempt, is now abundantly demonstrated among them, and seems essentially a metro- politan disease. The problems of the Southern insane asylum are peculiar. Their lack of education restricts the means of diversion, and most are farm hands unable to take up the ordinary hospital occupations; but on the other hand, while the inmates are unusually recalcitrant against negro attendants, they are especially amenable to white control. Heredity seems more dominant with them than with the more cultivated races. Emancipation seems to have greatly in- creased disease. " As compared with insanity in the whites, mental disease among the negroes has risen from one-fifth as common in 1850 to one-half as common in 1890." * Consumption, now the scourge of the race, has also increased.
On the other hand, the Atlanta University publications on the negro question are of great value. In 1890 there were 25,000 colored teachers, and they now practically conduct the schools for their race. In the second quarter of the century many Southern States made it a penal offense to teach the negro or permit him or cause him to be taught. From 1870 to 1899 the negro school systems of the former slave States have not cost the white taxpayers a cent, except possibly in a few city systems. " It is a conservative statement to say, then, that American negroes have in a generation paid directly $40,000,000 in hard-earned cash for educating their children." Negro teachers are needed to teach their race. On the whole, they are far less trained and less paid than whites, so that one great and growing need 1 G. F. Miller, M. D.: The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro of the South. An Address before the So. Med. Psy. Ass'n, Asheville, N. C, September, 1896.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT °77 is training schools for teachers. " The backwardness of education of the white people is in no degree due to the presence of the negroes, but their presence has actually been contributing to the sustenance of the white schools."
There is now reason to believe that the educational opportunities afforded to negroes in the South along industrial lines are better than those enjoyed by the poor whites, and indeed in some significant pedagogic respects the best in the world, as I pointed out in Chapter III. Slavery made labor degrading for white men, and to engage in it they would forfeit race standing. Now the negroes are in a sense a wedge dividing the whites of the poor from those of the upper class. If the negroes — thanks to Tuskegee and Hampton — attain the means of better industrial and social well-being than the poor whites, race hate on their part will be intensified. No one familiar with these schools and with the lowest whites in the South can doubt that the latter are likely to be soon outstripped in education and prosperity by the blacks. The future of the entire black race is to-day more hopeful than ever before, chiefly from the work of one negro, Booker Wash- ington, who is perhaps solving not only our negro problem but that of the Dark Continent, as well as providing object-lessons for colonial statecraft the world over. As autocrat of the Philippines he would probably accomplish what armies and white pedagogues and Congress can never do. At any rate, no one can study the above two institu- tions without increased respect for the race and without dreams of a possible new type of higher civilization for them. There is danger that race hostility will be intensified, and that the poor whites will be led to desperate efforts to assert the superiority of their color. Few desire less for the negro, but only more, while the necessity of indus- trial education for the children of the poor whites is clear and strong.
V. Of all the aborigines of America those of Greenland have been known ever since Eric the Red reached them from Iceland in 986. The Eskimos, numbering some 40,000, very widely spread yet very unique, homogeneous in language and custom, are perhaps preglacial and descended from cave- men. They are cheerful, peaceful, kind to each other, per- haps because of their stern environment, and, according to Rink,1 " before their degeneration by contact with the whites they were truthful and honest." They have a Shamanistic religion, with definite belief in another life, which anthropolo- gists have suggested might be utilized in many ways by mis- sionaries— whom Rink thinks helpful, and to whom Nansen charges up most evils. No more interesting people exist, and Esquimaux Tales and Traditions.
6 7 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE a few anthropologists have rivaled religious teachers in their zest and self-denial in studying them. In the tenth century there were twelve Christians in Greenland, and in 1900 the Moravians withdrew considering their work complete,1 but they are prone to lapse to old ways.
In Patagonia, at the other end of the New World, there are no ruins or any other indications of a once higher civi- lization. The natives, the tallest race on earth, living on the pampas a life that has such fascination that no one having once tasted can ever forget it, are passing to extinction, chiefly from rum and smallpox. H. H. Prichard 2 says " it is probable that I may be their last chronicler." Their de- pendence on the guanaco is very analogous to that of the Eskimo on the seal, and their relation to horses, which they ride so much that their lower limbs are often undeveloped and bent, is like that of the Eskimo to his kayak. The latter has never seen a horse, and the Tehuelche never used a boat. The fat hunger of both is sometimes almost an obsession.