UPLIFTING THE HEATHEN. How It Is Being Done.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 220, 17 September 1904, Page 6

UPLIFTING THE HEATHEN. How It Is Being Done.

SOME hundreds of New Britain natives are about to be slaughtered because they happen to be savages, and a lesson in civilised usages requires to be driven home in the usual way Reading the horrible details of the massacre of German missionaries and sisters, who were, according to their lights, nobly rescuing the heathen from darkness, one is sorry that such self-sacrificing people should meet so violent a death The cable gives us to understand that the ungleaders were Christianised natives—favourites, in fact — which seems to show that the heathen might have been left m his blindness to bow down to wood and stone with less terrible results Following savage instinct, the natives have taken nine lives in revenge for" the flogging of one of their number after the gentle German method Civilisation has already repaid the raid with interest by killing sixteen natives, and "a warship has gone to investigate." That is to say, if those kind-hearted, whole-souled missionaries had stayed at home m Geimany, and tried to inculcate morality into the army, raised up the poor, or fought sweating, there would be a great many more happy savages in New Britain, and no murders of white people to avenge Ever and anon we hear of delicate girls and noble parsons throwing up comparative comfort to go into China or elsewhere, to wean the people from age-old -habits that are frequently not wors>e habits than the habits of civilisation There always follow troubles and bloodshed The missionaries cover the nakedness of the savage, and the savages develop consumption The missionaries and kind young idles get martyred often, and then the "punitive" expeditions The savages who are "punished" are not martys Following m the wake of the missionary come the traders and the rum, the "blackbirder" and the mean white A great deal of missionary work is therefore entirely misdirected, and leads to dreadful results There are no civilised countries m the world that can afford to send their

most spnitual and self-sacrificing men and women away into heathendom It isn't a fair thing to the savage, and it isn't a fair thing to those whites who want help more than the savages. We read about, parsons who marry and ffo into the mission field accompanied by then "devoted wives " We don't think anything of the devotion of the said parsons to their wives The parson who goes abroad to teach the heathens to wear trousers would be better employed teaching his own poor countrymen how to earn enough to buy a pair As fox sending the women to cannibal countries, it is little less than criminal, especially as, has been shown by this latest massacre, it only irritates natives to acts of violence There never has been any charity in Christianising or civilising heathens. Wherever the mssionary has gone there has been trouble "Go ye into all the world" may be interpreted too literally