Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX.
CONCLUSION.
Two gods divide them all—pleasure and gain:
For these they live, they sacrifice to these,
And in their service wage perpetual war
With conscience and with thee. Lust in their hearts,
And mischief in their hands, they roam the earth
To prey upon each other; stubborn, fierce,
High-minded, pouring out their own disgrace.
Thy prophets speak of such; and, noting down
The features of the last degenerate times,
Exhibit every lineament of these.
Come then, and added to thy many crowns,
Receive one yet, as radiant as the rest,
Due to thy last and most effectual work,
Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.
We have now followed the Europeans to every region of the globe, and seen them planting colonies, and peopling new lands, and everywhere we have found them the same—a lawless and domineering race, seizing on the earth as if they were the first-born of creation, and having a presumptive right to murder and dispossess all other people. For more than three centuries we have glanced back at them in their course, and everywhere they have had the word of God in their mouth, and the deeds of darkness in their hands. In the first dawn of discovery, forth they went singing the Te Deum, and declaring that they went to plant the cross amongst the heathen. As we have already observed, however, it turned out to be the cross of one of the two thieves, and a bitter cross of crucifixion it has proved to the natives where they have received it. It has stood the perpetual sign of plunder and extermination. The Spaniards were reckless in their carnage of the Indians, and all succeeding generations have expressed their horror of the Spaniards. The Dutch were cruel, and everybody abominated their cruelty. One would have thought that the world was grown merciful. Behold North America at this moment, with its disinherited Indians! See Hindustan, that great and swarming region of usurpations and exactions! Look at the Cape, and ask the Caffres whether the English are tender-hearted and just: ask the same question in New Holland: ask it of the natives of Van Dieraan's Land,—men, transported from the island of their fathers. Ask the New Zealanders whether the warriors whose tattooed heads stare us in the face in our museums, were not delicately treated by us. Go, indeed, into any one spot, of any quarter of the world, and ask—no you need not ask, you shall hear of our aggressions from every people that know us. The words of Red-Jacket will find an echo in the hearts of tens of millions of sorrowful and expatriated and enthralled beings, who will exclaim, "you want more land!—you want our country!" It is needless to tell those who have read this history that there is, and can be, nothing else like it in the whole record of mortal crimes. Many are the evils that are done under the sun; but there is and can be no evil like that monstrous and earth-encompassing evil, which the Europeans have committed against the Aborigines of every country in which they have settled. And in what country have they not settled? It is often said as a very pretty speech—that the sun never sets on the dominions of our youthful Queen; but who dares to tell us the far more horrible truth, that it never sets on the scenes of our injustice and oppressions! When we have taken a solemn review of the astounding transactions recorded in this volume, and then add to them the crimes against humanity committed in the slate-trade and slavery, the account of our enormities is complete; and there is no sum of wickedness and bloodshed—however vast, however monstrous, however enduring it may be—which can be pointed out, from the first hour of creation, to be compared for a moment with it.
The slave-trade, which one of our best informed philanthropists asserts is going on at this moment to the amount of 170,000 negroes a year, is indeed the dreadful climax of our crimes against humanity. It was not enough that the lands of all newly discovered regions were seized on by fraud or violence; it was not enough that their rightful inhabitants were murdered or enslaved; that the odious vices of people styling themselves the followers of the purest of beings should be poured like a pestilence into these new countries. It was not enough that millions on millions of peaceful beings were exterminated by fire, by sword, by heavy burdens, by base violence, by deleterious mines and unaccustomed severities—by dogs, by man-hunters, and by grief and despair—there yet wanted one crowning crime to place the deeds of Europeans beyond all rivalry in the cause of evil,—and that unapproachable abomination was found in the slave-trade. They had seized on almost all other countries, but they could not seize on the torrid regions of Africa. They could not seize the land, but they could seize the people. They could not destroy them in their own sultry clime, fatal to the white men, they therefore determined to immolate them on the graves of the already perished Americans. To shed blood upon blood, to pile bones upon bones, and curses upon curses. What an idea is that!—the Europeans standing with the lash of slavery in their hands on the bones of exterminated millions in one hemisphere, watching with remorseless eyes their victims dragged from another hemisphere—tilling, not with their sweat, but with their heart's blood, the soil which is, in fact, the dust of murdered generations of victims. To think that for three centuries this work of despair and death has been going on—for three centuries!—while Europe has been priding itself on the growth of knowledge and the possession of the Christian faith; while mercy, and goodness, and brotherly love, have been preached from pulpits, and wafted towards heaven in prayers! That from Africa to America, across the great Atlantic, the ships of outrage and agony have been passing over, freighted with human beings denied all human rights. The mysteries of God's endurance, and of European audacity and hyrocrisy are equally marvellous. Why, the very track across the deep seems to me blackened by this abominable traffic;—there must be the dye of blood in the very ocean. One might surely trace these monsters by the smell of death, from their kidnapping haunts to the very sugar-mills of the west, where canes and human flesh are ground together. The ghosts of murdered millions, were enough, one thinks, to lead the way without chart or compass! The very bed of the ocean must be paved with bones! and the accursed trade is still going on! We are still strutting about in the borrowed plumes of Christianity, and daring to call God our father, though we are become the tormentors of the human race from China to Peru, and from one pole to the other![1]
The whole history of European colonization is of a piece. It is with grief and indignation, that passing before my own mind the successive conquests and colonies of the Europeans amongst the native tribes of newly-discovered countries, I look in vain for a single instance of a nation styling itself Christian and civilized, acting towards a nation which it is pleased to term barbarous with Christian honesty and common feeling. The only opportunity which the aboriginal tribes have had of seeing Christianity in its real form and nature, has been from William Penn and the missionaries. But both Penn and the missionaries have in every instance found their efforts neutralized, and their hopes of permanent good to their fellow-creatures blasted, by the profligacy and the unprincipled rapacity of the Europeans as a race. Never was there a race at once so egotistical and so terrible! With the most happy complacency regarding themselves as civilized and pious, while acting the savage on the broadest scale, and spurning every principle of natural or revealed religion. But where the missionaries have been permitted to act for any length of time on the aboriginal tribes, what happy results have followed. The savage has become mild; he has conformed to the order and decorum of domestic life; he has shewn that all the virtues and affections which God has implanted in the human soul are not extinct in him; that they wanted but the warmth of sympathy and knowledge to call them forth; he has become an effective member of the community, and his productions have taken their value in the general market. From the Jesuits in Paraguay to the missionaries in the South Seas, this has been the case. The idiocy of the man who killed his goose that he might get the golden eggs, was wisdom compared to the folly of the European nations, in outraging and destroying the Indian races, instead of civilizing them. Let any one look at the immediate effect amongst the South Sea Islanders, the Hottentots, or the Caffres, of civilization creating a demand for our manufactures, and of bringing the productions of their respective countries into the market, and then from these few and isolated instances reflect what would have been now the consequence of the civilization of North and South America, of a great portion of South Africa, of the Indian Islands, of the good treatment and encouragement of the millions of Hindustan. Let him imagine, if he can, the immense consumption of our manufactured goods through all these vast and populous countries, and the wonderful variety of their natural productions which they would have sent us in exchange.
There is no more doubt than of the diurnal motion of the earth, that by the mere exercise of common honesty on the part of the whites, the greater part of all these countries would now be civilized, and a tide of wealth poured into Europe, such as the strongest imagination can scarcely grasp; and that, too, purchased, not with the blood and tears of the miserable, but by the moral elevation and happiness of countless tribes. The waste of human life and human energies has been immense, but not more immense than the waste of the thousand natural productions of a thousand different shores and climates. The arrow-root, the cocoa-nut oil, the medicinal oils and drugs of the southern isles; the beautiful flax of New Zealand; sugar and coffee, spices and tea, from millions of acres where they might have been raised ill abundance—goods and gums, fruits and gems and ivories, have been left unproduced or wasted in the deserts, because the wonderful and energetic race of Europe chose to be as lawless as they were enterprising, and to be the destroyers rather than the benefactors of mankind. For more than three centuries, and down to the very last hour, as this volume testifies, has this system, stupid as it was wicked, been going on. Thank God, the dawn of a new era appears at last!
The wrongs of the Hottentots and Caffres, brought to the public attention by Dr. Philip and Pringle,[2] have led to Parliamentary inquiry; that inquiry has led to others;—the condition of the natives of the South Seas, and finally of all the aboriginal tribes in our colonies, has been brought under review. The existence of a mass of evils and injuries, so enormous as to fill any healthy mind with horror and amazement, has been brought to light; and it is impossible that such facts, once made familiar to the British public, can ever be lost sight of again. Some expiation has already been made to a portion of our victims. Part of the lands of the Caffres has been returned, a milder and more rational system of treatment has been adopted towards them. Protectors of the Aborigines have in one or two instances been appointed. New and more just principles of colonization have been proposed, and in a degree adopted. In the proposed Association for colonizing New Zealand, and in the South Australian settlement[3] already made, these better notions are conspicuous. But these symptoms of a more honourable conduct toward the Aborigines, are, with respect to the evils we have done, and the evils that exist, but as the light of the single morning star before the sun has risen. Many are the injuries and oppressions of our fellow-creatures which the philanthropic have to contend against; but there is no evil, and no oppression, that is a hundredth part so gigantic as this. There is no case in which we owe such a mighty sum of expiation: all other wrongs are but the wrongs of a small section of humanity compared with the whole. The wrongs of the Negro are great, and demand all the sympathy and active attention which they receive; but the numbers of the negroes in slavery are but as a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers of the aborigines who are perishing beneath our iron and unchristian policy. The cause of the aborigines is the cause of three-fourths of the population of the globe. The evil done to them is the great and universal evil of the age, and is the deepest disgrace of Christendom. It is, therefore, with pleasure that I have seen the "Aborigines' Protection Society" raise its head amongst the many noble societies for the redress of the wrongs and the elevation of humanity that adorn this country. Such a society must become one of the most active and powerful agents of universal justice: it must be that or nothing, for the evil which it has to put down is tyrannous and strong beyond all others. It cannot fail without the deepest disgrace to the nation—for the honour of the nation, its Christian zeal, and its commercial interests, are all bound up with it. Where are we to look for a guarantee for the removal of the foulest stain on humanity and the Christian name? Our government may be well disposed to adopt juster measures; but governments are not yet formed on those principles, and with those views, that will warrant us to depend upon them.
There is no power but the spirit of Christianity living in the heart of the British public, which can secure justice to the millions that are crying for it from every region of the earth. It is that which must stand as the perpetual watch and guardian of humanity; and never yet has it failed. The noblest spectacle in the world is that constellation of institutions which have sprung out of this spirit of Christianity in the nation, and which are continually labouring to redress wrongs and diffuse knowledge and happiness wherever the human family extends. The ages of dreadful inflictions, and the present condition of the native tribes in our vast possessions, once known, it were a libel on the honour and faith of the nation to doubt for a moment that a new era of colonization and intercourse with unlettered nations has commenced; and I close this volume of the unexampled crimes and marvellous impolicy of Europe, with the firm persuasion—
That heavenward all things tend. For all were once
Perfect, and all must be at length restored.
So God has greatly purposed; who would else
In his dishonoured works himself endure
Dishonour, and be wronged without redress.
Haste, then, and wheel away a shattered world
Ye slow revolving seasons! We would see—
A sight to which our eyes are strangers yet—
A world that does not hate and dread His laws,
And suffer for its crime; would learn how fair
The creature is that God pronounces good,
How pleasant in itself what pleases Him.—Cowper.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY MANNING AND SMITHSON,
IVY-LANE, PATERNOSTER-ROW.
- ↑ Everything connected with this trade is astonishing. Queen Elizabeth eagerly embarked in it in 1563, and sent the notorious John Hawkins, knighted by her for this and similar deeds, out to Sierra Leone for a human cargo, with four vessels, three of which, as if it were the most pious of expeditions, bore the names of Jesus! Solomon! and John the Baptist!—See Hakluyt's Voyages.
- ↑ This excellent man was a martyr to his advocacy of the claims of the Caffres. Powerful appeals on behalf of his widow, left in painful circumstances, have been made by Mr. Leitch Ritchie, in his "Life of Pringle," and by Mr. Bannister, in his "Colonization and the Coloured Tribes," which, if they are not effective, will reflect but little credit upon the government, or the philanthropic public.
- ↑ See a Lecture on this settlement, with letters from the settlers, by Henry Watson, of Chichester.