THE SEAMY SIDE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 282, 23 July 1932, Page 8

THE SEAMY SIDE

OUR CIVILISATION PRIMITIVE PEOPLES DO NOT ALWAYS SUFFER BY COMPARISON. MORAL RESULTS. (By Frederick Stubhs, F.R.G.S.) (All Rights Reserved.) Here, at all events, it may be thought, Civilisation will show a clear gain. But even this is doubtful. Uncivilised peoples have naturally a different code of morals, but tbey pay more regard to it. Take TKe Relations of the Sexes, in which we suppose ourselves to be greatly superior. Our ladies contemplate (even now) the more scanty apparel of natives and are shocked; they hear that some men possess two or three wives, and are shocked again. But whether the relations of the sexes among civilised peoples are really worse in point of morality is doubtful. It is eertain that there is less adultery. A medical friend of mine who served with the troops in East Africa during the Great War, told me that he never knew a more moral people than a certain tribe which wore no clothing at all. Civilised ladies of unquestionable respectability make themselves barren in order to escape the inconveniences of cliild-bearing, and lavish their maternal instincts on cats and dogs. Sex is one of the most powerful of instincts, natural, and certainly not wrong, but civilised peoples live in an ovei'-sexed condition, in a self-created atmosphere of nerve-stimulation which is neither natural nor wholesome. This is not the case with the uncivilised. If our type of civilisation .restricts a man to a single wife, it does not prevent a species of concubinage, nor does it prevent a wholesale traffic in virtue and a degradation of the sexual instinct to a marketable commodity. So much for our boasted superiority in "morality." Alcoholism. I am not going to give a temperance leeture: I am not even a Prohibitionist. But no reasonably intelligent and patriotic man can ignore the evils connected with the liquor traffic. Alcoholism is essentially a vice of Civilisation. Uncivilised peoples have also made and still make some simple form of intoxicating drink. But, excepting where white men have taken rum, there is practically no intemperance. I have seen drunken natives, but it has nearly always been the white man's liquor that has made them so. With us the manufacture and supply of intoxicating liquors is a trade, "the trade" as it is significantly and proudly called, and it manages to flourish when nearly every other trade is depressed. Large numbers of men and women and immense suihs of moneys are employed in it. We push its sale; use every art and inducement in order to make liquor attractive; set apart our fmest sites and' hansomest buildings for its sale; we exhaust the resources of civilisation to induce people to consume it. And we succeer, witness our street corners, our magistrates' courts, our prisons, asylums, slums; the reports in our daily papers. Great Britain spends yearly nearly £290,000,000; Australia, £34,047,762; New Zealand £8,116,894. No other interest or institution flourishes to the same extent, cornmercial, educational, philanthropic, or religious. Who can doubt that we are highly civilised! Crime. But what about Crims? Has not Civilisation made men more honest and humane? It ought to do so, but when one considers the army of police and magistrates and lawyers that everywhere attends the progress of Civilsation, and the manner in which jails and penitentiaries spring up in its path, one has one's doubts. For what purpose are all these required? To prevent people robbing and injuring one another: I know of no other reason. Were men not thus restrained by force and fear there would be no security for either life or property. What a confession to have to make! And in spite of all these safeguards, how many crimes are daily perpetrated, assaults, robberies, razor-slashings, murders, crimes against property, crimes against the person. This is true of the most civilised countries in the world. But it is not true of the uncivilised. A gentleman I know who has lived for many years among the Canadian Indians (whom I also have visited) told me he never thought of locking his door. The Indians would come in and look round, but never take anything. On one occasion he was going away from home and asked an Indian friend whether it would be safe to leave his belongings unprotected. "Why not?" was the reply. "There is not a white man for a hundred miles." A missionary told the reporter of a newspaper with which I was long connected that a South African bank manager informed him that before the Zulus came into contact with civilisation, they were employed as runners to carry gold from bank to bank, and were never known to abuse their trust. In Java, a distinguished lady-trav-eller tells us, no door or window needed to be fastened. "I would have trusted my life and fortune in the hands of any of these people," said Dana of the Sandwich Islanders. I myself have made the acquaintance of native races all over the world, including those mentioned above, and have travelled and lived among them, but was never robbed or injured, or even apprehended injury. Before they became civilised, the same might have been said of the natives of New Zealand. All authorities are agreed that before being equipped with the knowledge and vices of the whites, the Maoris were clean-living, vigorous, sober, honest, and truthful. Crimes of Civilisation. Many forms of crime existed, though they were not so eommon,

thousands of years ago, especially such crimes as assault and murder. But there are crimes which may be said to have sprung directly from Civilisation; are peculiar to it, and have grown with its growth, .as certain diseases have done. I refer to such familiar crimes as forgery, embezzlement, the falsification of accounts, the issue of false balancesheets, arson, burglary, shop-lifting, etc., and certain forms of sex-deprav-ity. That these are direct and comparatively recent fruits of Civilisation will not be disputed. Cruelties. It have been reminded of the cruelties perpettrated by native races upon one another, and it cannot be denied that appalling cruelties were formerly practised by nearly all savage peoples. They were suspicious, fearful, superstitious, 0 callous. But equal cruelties have been practised under advanced Civilisations (I do not refer to the well-known atrocities of the Middle Ages, but of modern times) and with far less excuse, for the cruelties of the "heathen" were inflicted upon people much less sensitive to pain, and by men ignorant of any higher moral law. The atrocities committed by European soldiery upon defenceless Chinese at the time of the Boxer rising; the Congo atrocities; the treatment of native races in South America and elsewhere; the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, etc. Nay, eoming nearer home, the cruelties perpetrated in our own cities and described in our daily press, these, also, show that cruelty dwells in the heart of man whenever his passions are excited, whether it be the passion of fear, of greed, of anger, or of sex, and is not peculiar to any one age or to any one type of civilisation. But we, with our superior knowledge, education, and religion, ought to exhibit a better recoi'd. I do not make the above comparisons as an argument for our return to savagery. That is neither desirable nor possible. But what is possible and desirable is that these ugly blots on our civilisation should be removed. They ought to be; they might be; some day, I believe, most of them will be — when the awakened reason and conscience of manlcind demand it.