We see, then, that the result of our influence upon the Greenlanders' material circumstances has been a continuous decline from their former well-being and prosperity towards an almost hopeless poverty and weakness.
Many will admit this, but object that it was really to raise the level of their spiritual life and culture that we went to Greenland, and that this cannot be done save at the expense of their temporal welfare. Let us, then, look a little at this side of our activity. Many people think that a highly developed and civilised community can be fashioned at one stroke out of so unpromising material as a primitive race. This is a great mistake; human nature is not to be transformed at the good pleasure of individuals. It is, indeed, capable of modification; but the development always occurs slowly, like development in nature as a whole. We must not imagine, therefore, that we have the right, as we have done in Greenland and in other places, to swoop down upon a primitive race with our civilisation and impose it upon them. 'Try to fit a hand with five fingers into a glove with four,' says Spencer, 'and the difficulty is strikingly like the difficulty of implanting a complex or composite idea in a mind which has not a correspondingly composite faculty.'
The only change which can be brought about
