Over-Educated?

Are Natives Being

Reply to Dr. Hennessy

Letter to the Editor.

IMAY overlook Dr. James Hennessy’s discourteous and violent reference to myself in his explosive retort in the April number of the “P.1.M.” to my let ter of December, on the matter of na tive education, but 1 cannot ignore his uninformed denial of the decision of the U.S.A. Courts in the Dred Scott case, that a blackman has “no rights which a whiteman is bound to respect”.

This decision, as stated in my letter, Dr. Hennessy declares to be false. There fore I venture to draw attention to the following facts: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed slavery in some States, but not in others. Dred Scott was a slave who had been taken into a State which did not allow slavery. He made ap plication to the Court, asking for a

declaration that he was a free man, but his application was refused on the ground that negroes had always been regarded as “beings of an inferior or der—so far inferior that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect”. (This is a quotation from the judgment of Chief Justice Tansey).

A slave, it was held, is property, and the Court was bound to respect the right to property. So Dred Scott was sent back to the master to whom he belonged. This was in 1856-7. Dr.

Hennessy could have found this out for himself.

My main reason for referring to this decision was to point out how far we have travelled to-day along the road of tolerance in our relations with the primitive savage, and of the advisab ility—or, I should say, the urgent need —of calling a halt to educational schemes, if we are not to destroy for ever the balance of brown and white relationship, and the usefulness of a labour supply, which I stated before is the very life-blood of our economic system in the Pacific.

“Civilisation of the mind and the spirit” is a very beautiful theory for tlhose to work upon in secure posi tions, and a pretty picture could be drawn of happy and contented natives, reading and writing and working at complicated mathematical problems, while smiling missionaries, anthropolo gists, and Government officials stand around waving little flags. But—and there always is a but—where would the harassed settlers and planters stand in this happy throng? One might well answer, nowhere. •It is imperative that the activities ■of these well-meaning sentimentalists should be curbed. We have travelled far since Aristotle’s time, as I said pre viously, when the idea of the unity of the human race was considered ridicu lous; and since Dr. Josey concluded, in his “Race and National Solidarity”, that as man is the first among the creatures, and is therefore allowed to feed upon the animals of the field, the European is the first among human beings, and has the right to impose his will upon the lower races. We have, Dr. Josey thinks, made a mistake in educating these lower races and in admitting them to a share in our science and our know ledge; we should have done better, he considers, if we had kept them in com plete ignorance, for in that case they would have more readily recognised their true position.

Dr. Josey was anticipated by an other well-known authority, Nicolaus Engelhard, for Engelhard almost exactly the same when he points out the advantage “de maintenir le Javan ais dans cet abrutissement si avanta geux pour nous”, which prevents him from realising his strength and from recognising how much better off he would be without the white men.

These sentiments we naturally regard with wonder to-day, and even shocked wonder, on reading that Charles Car roll regarded the negro as a beast “created with articulate speech and

hands that he may be of service to his Master the white man”, and indeed, I suggest that the opinions of these gen tlemen would carry little weight to-day and would be denounced as untenable.

But, however crude they may appear to our enlightened minds, it cannot be denied that throughout them all runs a thread of truth and reason.

And, I ask, who are we to disparage the findings of these learned men, who had the wisdom and vision to appre hend the dangers of soft measures to our white civilisation ? At least they stood fast in this struggle for self preservation, and held to the old maxim, “Charity begins at Home”.

I repeat that the preservation and extension of white civilisation—and, by that, is meant Commerce and Capital, and the Enterprise of Capital—is a matter of life and death to any Colon ial occupation; and that Native Educa tion constitutes a grave danger to this extension. Once the native is permit ted to question our supremacy and the policy of differentiation, every white ,*nan, woman, and child, will be in danger of a brown invasion.

I am, etc.,

Papuan.

Port Moresby, May 21, 1938.

EDITORIAL NOTE: The opinions of “Papuan” are so amazing that, like Dr. Hennessy, we can not believe they are presented seriously. Yet— incredible as it may seem—there are in the Is lands reactionaries who think this way. They talk about the “right” of the European—a “right, presumably, conferred by a mere accident of so cial evolution—to enslave more backward peo ples. Yet, 600 years ago, before the Renaissance, 90 per cent, of the people of Europe were sunk as deeply in ignorance, superstition, cruelty and debauchery as any New Guinea tribe is to-day.

Over-populated countries have a right to seize and occupy regions that are fertile, unpopula ted, and occupiable, and that applies to many great areas in the Western Pacific. But the oc cupation of those regions by Europeans imposes upon the newcomers most definite obligations to protect and educate the aboriginal people, and assist them eventually to exercise civil rights, equal to those of the Europeans. The recogni tion of this principle is being placed ever more prominently in the forefront of Anglo-Saxon (British and American) Colonial policy. It may be wrong, economically; but, from every point of view other than that of unimaginative pro fit-making, it is basically it is not likely to be abandoned in Papua and New Guinea.

The slavers of 1838, who regarded negroes as “beings of an inferior order”, are in 1938 held up as objects of approbrium and public loath ing. The world will make greater progress in the next hundred years.