The Feilding Star. Published Daily. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1894.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 232, 6 February 1894, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Published Daily. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1894.

CIVILISING BY FORCE.

- - --+■ Thh efforts made by the English to civilize the natives in the South Sea Islands may be praiseworthy, but they are also intensely stupid. Of course we make no reference to the labors of missionaries, because with that part of the subject — a most delicate one — it is not our province to deal. We were told yesterday that one of Her Majesty's gunboats, the Goldfinch, was about to proceed to Samoa, owing to the critical state of aft airs there, and, surmised the cablegram, the upshot would be the general disarming of the natives of the whole group. Now, as a matter of fact, if such disarming ever does take place, it will be found, on examination of the weapons, that everyone of them was manufactured in an European factory, aiso, that a vast majority are of English make. Of course we know the same may be truly said of most of the arms used against us here during the good old days in the years 1860-GB, by the natives in New Zealand, or more recently by the natives of Africa, and we gladly accept these facts as evidences of the wonderful enterprise of the English as a commercial people, but that is all the praise we can afford so far. We may assume that every European arm in the hands of the natives of Samoa has been paid for at a hundred times its cost, or perhaps even more than that. They were purchased originally quite as much for defence as offence against their enemies, and from that standpoint they have quite aa good a right to retain them for such purposes as the French, the Germans, the English, or the Americans. Every warship, and we may almost say every trader, which visits Samoa, or any other of the Islands of the Pacific, is well armed; and the desire on the part of the poor innocent natives is, naturally enough, excited to possess instruments for the destruction of human life which are so much prized by races whom the gentle savages are only too willing to recognise as their superiors. Of course when desire is followed by possession, the subsequent feeling that the new arms should be put to some use in extirpating any tribe with whom they are at enmity, is easy to be accounted for, because it is common to all humanity. However wrong we know it to be morally, yet, in that respect, the most civilized and the most savage peoples of the earth meet on common grounds. What we would like to kaow is whether any compensation is to be paid for these arms if taken away, and if so, how the natives are to be prevented from purchasing new and improved rifles and ammunition with the money so received 1 Even supposing that no compensation were paid, and the natives promised to keep the peace towards each other, that promise would soon be forgotten or ignored. It is too much to expect that after enjoying the luxury of firearms they would like to go back to first principles and use the familiar but effective clubs and spears of their ancestors ; neither is it likely that the trade or labor vessels would be idle, and many a young lad and innocent girl would surely be sold into slavery that the coveted firearms might again be in the hands of the warriors. It is horrible, but it is only human nature. We admit that depriving the natives of their arms — of European manufacture — may do some good for a few months, but we do not believe that one tittle of permanent advantage will be gained in the direction of a continuous peace. The time has gone past, we very much fear, when anything could be done to .avert the ultimate extermination of this brave and kindly race, which has every reason to curse the day white men came in contact with them to introduce crime, slavery, and deatli from diseases as horrible as they were strange to these children of the Sunny Isles of the Pacific.