Mr. Gill Means

What He Says About Missions

Letter to the Editor IN “PIM” for January, 1945, Mr. F. R.

Isom contents himself with a flat denial of a good deal of what I wrote in the issue for last September. Yet, he is generous enough to admit that I have been “over a long period of years, full of sound commonsense.” I have apparently lost my commonsense, because I found it necessary to criticise certain—not all — missionaries.

Actually, it was a case of the infuriated worm turning at last.

I had become fed-up with missionary attacks on traders and planters, as they were reported in the press; their “ex ploitation” of the natives, and all that.

The time had come to present the other side of the case. Hence my September article in “PIM.”

I have had a long and wide experience of missionaries of different denomina tions. While freely admitting that there are many broad-minded and able men and women in the various mission bodies —I repeat, as an undeniable fact, that, taken by and large, the average mission person is “self-centred, and immersed in a very restricted and narrow orbit.”

Planters and traders deeply resent the diatribes of ill-informed people who step outside of their orbits to attack them on matters of which they have very little knowledge.

As for attacking the local combines: It seems to me that i.f it is right for so many missionaries to attack the planter and trader it would be a better and braver

thing to attack the Big Firms, who are the real exploiters of the Islands. Then the natives might get a better deal.

But the crusading missionary is too economically ignorant to analyse the Islands economic set-up—so misguidedly flails the small men, and leaves Big Busi ness severely alone.

That is what I meant by being “brave,”

“ignorant” and “publicity hunting”—and I still mean it. Every word of it.

I am, etc.,

Leslie F. Gill.

Solomon Islands, March 18, 1945.