Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/86

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THE TYRANNY OF SHAMS

have been considered “savage” are already proving educable, either as a body or in large numbers of instances. Many peoples have not been tested at all. We are only just at the fringe of this vast and interesting problem.

In regard to the races which, after humane and thorough experiment, prove entirely ineducable, the solution does not offer much difficulty. Once their primitive habits are disturbed, and they begin to live on a pension allotted them by the European nations which have seized their territory, they gradually die out. A very good case may be established by those writers who hold that races which cling incurably to barbarism ought to be painlessly extirpated, or prevented from multiplying. Such races as the Australian blacks are quite familiar with a process of sterilisation which does not interfere with their enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the life led by these domesticated but ineducable savages is hardly worth preserving at all. However, as they are disappearing, one need not press that point. The claim of sane humanitarians, that we have no right to interfere with their conditions and seize their territory, is quite unsound. The human family has a right to see large fertile regions of the earth developed. Who regrets to-day that the Amerinds were pensioned in order to find room for Canada and the United States and Brazil and Argentina? Who does not see the advantage of peopling Australia with a fine and advancing civilisation of (eventually) twenty or