The Commercial Viewpoint

Have Papuan Natives

Any "Rights' 1 ?

Letter to the Editor TN every Pacific journal to-day we are * confronted with dissertations on schemes for educating the primitive savage.

Have we not enough problems at hand in the Pacific, without creating new ones to confuse our already harassed ter ritories? Have we lost our sense of pro portion ? Does no one see the precipice ahead ?

It seems we are to raise the neolithic savage to a level where he will no longer be a useful unit in commercial develop ment.

Everyone must know that successful colonial administration must be founded on Commerce, and the establishment of industries that utilise to the full the raw material provided by nature. Here in the Pacific we have one of the essential means to successful enterprise, namely, cheap labour, and a primitive subject race. And we, dependent on our labour supply for our very existence, and in total disregard of the blessing, as we might say, bestowed upon us by Divine Providence, are allowing ourselves to be blinded and led by the sickly sentiment ality of an irresponsible few, into lend ing ourselves to fantastic educational schemes which will eventually deprive us of our very means of existence.

We need the native far more than the

native needs us. The maintenance and the extension of a white civilisation—and by that is meant Commerce and the Enterprise of Capital—is a matter of life and death to any colonial occupation.

Native education constitutes a grave danger to this extension. Once the native is permitted to question the supremacy and superiority of the whites, and the policy of differentation, every white man, woman and child will have to look for protection against a brown invasion.

It is ridiculous to suppose that the primitive savage, even with education, can ever range his intelligence with that of the white man. In every aspect, the European is undoubtedly the superior.

Even Aristotle, the “Master of those who know,” expelled as he thought for ever the ridiculous idea of the unity of the

human race, by establishing the un doubted fact that mankind is divided into two classes—those who are born to be masters, and those who, as Aristotle put it, are “by nature slaves.”

Anyone not blinded by maudlin humanitarianism, must see that the European must necessarily be master and the native the servant—a condition that is an integral part of the natural order of human society, We have travelled far since Aristotle’s time, and even since 1856, when the Courts of the U.S.A. decided in the Dred Scott case that a black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect; and since Renan denied that there was any reason for supposing that a Papuan (for instance) had an immortal soul, And though, to-day, we are willing

enough to cede certain rights to our primitives, though perhaps not an im mortal soul, it is clearly inadmissible that these ‘ rights” should be extended to educational schemes which will not only wrench the unfortunate savage out of his natural sphere, but hinder the pro gress of a territory’s development.

Natives have no rights, neither have we duties towards them beyond the com mon laws of humanity; and if the development of these business proposi tions which we call territories, cannot be achieved without infringing on these so called rights, it is indeed unfortunate; but no European to-day can afford to permit Commerce and development to go to the wall for the sake of “high falutin” schemes which will destroy the balance of brown and white relationship, and the usefulness of a labour supply which is the very life blood of a country’s eco nomic system.

There are signs to-day that our pre sent policy of Native Administration is gradually ruining, not only the colonies in Africa, but those in the Pacific as well—as, indeed, must necessarily be the result of any policy that rests upon the repudiation not only of sciences, but ordinary common-sense.

I am, etc.,

Papuan.

Pt. Moresby, Papua.

Nov. 29, 1937.