BARBARIAN WARFARE.
_Non avaritia, non crudelitas modum novit.... Quæ clam commissa
capite luerentur, quia paludati fecere laudamus._--SENECA.
Variable notions of honour--Primitive ideas of a military
life--What is civilised warfare--Advanced laws of war among
several savage tribes--Symbols of peace among savages--The Samoan
form of surrender--Treaties of peace among savages--Abeyance of
laws of war in hostilities with savages--Zulus blown up in caves
with gun-cotton--Women and men kidnapped for transport service
on the Gold Coast--Humane intentions of the Spaniards in the
New World contrasted with the inhumanity of their actions--Wars
with natives of English and French in America--High rewards
offered for scalps--The use of bloodhounds in war--The use of
poison and infected clothes--Penn’s treaty with the Indians--How
Missionaries come to be a cause of war--Explanation of the failure
of modern Missions--The Mission Stations as centres of hostile
intrigue--Plea for the State-regulation of Missions--Depopulation
under Protestant influences--The prevention of false rumours,
_Tendenzlügen_--Civilised and barbarian warfare--No real
distinction between them.
A missionary, seeing once a negro furrowing his face with scars, asked
him why he put himself to such needless pain, and the reply was: ‘For
honour, and that people on seeing me may say, There goes a man of
heart.’
Ridiculous as this negro’s idea of honour must appear to us, it bears
a sufficient resemblance to other notions of the same kind that have
passed current in the world at different times to satisfy us of the
extreme variability of the sentiment in question. Cæsar built with
difficulty a bridge across the Rhine, chiefly because he held it
beneath his own dignity, or the Roman people’s, for his army to cross
it in boats. The Celts of old thought it as ignominious to fly from an
inundation, or from a burning or falling house, as to retreat from an
enemy. The Spartans considered it inglorious to pursue a flying foe, or
to be killed in storming a besieged city. The same Gauls who gloried
in broadsword-wounds would almost go mad with shame if wounded by an
arrow or other missile that only left an imperceptible mark. The use
of letters was once thought dishonourable by all the European nations.
Marshal Montluc, in the sixteenth century, considered it a sign of
abnormal overbookishness for a man to prefer to spend a night in his
study than to spend it in the trenches, though, now, a contrary taste
would be thought by most men the mark of a fool.
Such are some of the curious ideas of honour that have prevailed at
different times. Wherein we seem to recognise not merely change but
advance; one chief difference between the savage and civilised state
lying in the different estimates entertained in either of martial
prowess and of military honour. We laugh nowadays at the ancient
Britons who believed that the souls of all who had followed any other
pursuit than that of arms, after a despised life and an unlamented
death, hovered perforce over fens and marshes, unfit to mingle with
those of warriors in the higher and brighter regions; or at the
horsemen who used before death to wound themselves with their spears,
in order to obtain that admission to Walhalla which was denied to all
who failed to die upon a battle-field; or at the Spaniards, who, when
Cato disarmed them, preferred a voluntary death to a life destined to
be spent without arms.[204] No civilised warrior would pride himself,
as Fijian warriors did, on being generally known as the ‘Waster’ or
‘Devastator’ of such-and-such a district; the most he would look for
would be a title and perhaps a perpetual pension for his descendants.
We have nothing like the custom of the North American tribes, among
whom different marks on a warrior’s robe told at a glance whether his
fame rested on the slaughter of a man or a woman, or only on that of a
boy or a girl. We are inferior in this respect to the Dacota tribes,
among whom an eagle’s feather with a red spot on it denoted simply
the slaughter of an enemy, the same feather with a notch and the
sides painted red, that the said enemy had had his throat cut, whilst
according as the notches were on one side or on both, or the feather
partly denuded, anyone could tell after how many others the hero had
succeeded in touching the dead body of a fallen foe. The stride is
clearly a great one from Pyrrhus, the Epirot king, who, when asked
which of two musicians he thought the better, only deigned to reply
that Polysperchon was the general, to Napoleon, the French emperor, who
conferred the cross of the Legion of Honour on Crescentini the singer.
And as the pursuit of arms comes with advancing civilisation to occupy
a lower level as compared with the arts of peace, so the belief is the
mark of a more polished people that the rapacity and cruelty which
belong to the war customs of a more backward nation, or of an earlier
time, are absent from their own. They invent the expression _civilised
warfare_ to emphasise a distinction they would fain think inherent
in the nature of things; and look, by its help, even on the mode of
killing an enemy, with a moral vision that is absurdly distorted. How
few of us, for example, but see the utmost barbarity in sticking a man
with an assegai, yet none whatever in doing so with a bayonet? And why
should we pride ourselves on not mutilating the dead, while we have
no scruples as to the extent to which we mutilate the living? We are
shocked at the mention of barbarian tribes who poison their arrows,
or barb their darts, yet ourselves think nothing of the frightful
gangrenes caused by the copper cap in the Minié rifle-ball, and reject,
on the score of the expense of the change, the proposal that bullets of
soft lead, which cause needless pain, should no longer be used among
the civilised Powers for small-arm ammunition.[205]
But whilst the difference in these respects between barbarism and
civilisation is thus one that rather touches the surface than the
substance of war, the result is inevitably in either state a different
code of military etiquette and sentiment, though the difference is
far less than in any other points of comparison between them. When
the nations of Christendom therefore came in contact with unknown
and savage races, whose customs seemed different from their own and
little worthy of attention, they assumed that the latter recognised
no laws of war, much as some of the earlier travellers denied the
possession or faculty of speech to people whose language they could not
interpret. From which assumption the practical inference followed, that
the restraints which were held sacred between enemies who inherited
the same traditions of military honour had no need to be observed in
hostilities with the heathen world. It is worth while, therefore, to
show how baseless was the primary assumption, and how laws of war, in
no way dissimilar to those of Europe, may be detected in the military
usages of barbarism.
To spare the weak and helpless was and is a common rule in the warfare
of the less civilised races. The Guanches of the Canary Islands, says
an old Spanish writer, ‘held it as base and mean to molest or injure
the women and children of the enemy, considering them as weak and
helpless, therefore improper objects of their resentment; neither
did they throw down or damage houses of worship.’[206] The Samoans
considered it cowardly to kill a woman:[207] and in America the Sioux
Indians and Winnebagoes, though barbarous enough in other respects, are
said to have shown the conventional respect to the weaker sex.[208]
The Basutos of South Africa, whatever may be their customs now, are
declared by Casalis, one of the first French Protestant missionaries
to their country, to have respected in their wars the persons of
women, children, and travellers, and to have spared all prisoners who
surrendered, granting them their liberty on the payment of ransom.[209]
Few savage races were of a wilder type than the Abipones of South
America; yet Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, assures us not only
that they thought it unworthy of them to mangle the bodies of dead
Spaniards, as other savages did, but that they generally spared the
unwarlike, and carried away boys and girls uninjured. The Spaniards,
Indians, negroes, or mulattoes whom they took in war they did not
treat like captives, but with kindness and indulgence like children.
Dobritzhoffer never saw a prisoner punished by so much as a word or a
blow, but he bears testimony to the compassion and confidence often
displayed to captives by their conquerors. It is common to read of the
cruelty of the Red Indians to their captives; but Loskiel, another
missionary, declares that prisoners were often adopted by the victors
to supply the place of the slain, and that even Europeans, when it came
to an exchange of prisoners, sometimes refused to return to their own
countrymen. In Virginia notice was sent before war to the enemy, that
in the event of their defeat, the lives of all should be spared who
should submit within two days’ time.
Loskiel gives some other rather curious testimony about the Red
Indians. ‘When war was in contemplation they used to admonish each
other to hearken to the good and not to the evil spirits, the former
always recommending peace. They seem,’ he adds with surprise, ‘to
have had no idea of the devil as the prince of darkness before the
Europeans came into the country.’ The symbol of peace was the burial
of the hatchet or war-club in the ground; and when the tribes renewed
their covenants of peace, they exchanged certain belts of friendship
which were singularly expressive. The principal belt was white, with
black streaks down each side and a black spot at each end: the black
spots represented the two people, and the white streak between them
signified, that the road between them was now clear of all trees,
brambles, and stones, and that every hindrance was therefore removed
from the way of perfect harmony.
The Athenians used the same language of symbolism when they declared
war by letting a lamb loose into the enemy’s country: this being
equivalent to saying, that a district full of the habitations of men
should shortly be turned into a pasture for sheep.[210]
The Fijians used to spare their enemy’s fruit trees; the Tongan
islanders held it as sacrilege to fight within the precincts of the
burial place of a chief, where the greatest enemies were obliged to
meet as friends.
Most of the lower races recognise the inviolability of ambassadors and
heralds, and have well-established emblems of a truce or armistice.
The wish for peace which the Zulu king in vain sought from his English
invaders by the symbol of an elephant’s tusk (1879), was conveyed
in the Fiji Islands by a whale’s tooth, in the Sandwich by a young
plantain tree or green branch of the ti plant, and among most North
American tribes by a white flag of skin or bark. The Samoan symbol
for an act of submission in deprecation of further hostilities conveys
some indication of the possible origin of these pacific symbols. The
conquered Samoan would carry to his victor some bamboo sticks, some
firewood, and some small stones; for as a piece of split bamboo was
the original Samoan knife, and small stones and firewood were used for
the purpose of roasting pigs, this symbol of submission was equivalent
to saying: ‘Here we are, your pigs, to be cooked if you please, and
here are the materials wherewith to do it.’[211] In the same way the
elephant’s tusk or the whale’s tooth may be a short way of saying to
the victor: ‘Yours is the strength of the elephant or the whale; we
recognise the uselessness of fighting with you.’
In the same way many savage tribes take the greatest pains to impress
the terms of treaties as vividly as possible on the memory of the
contracting parties by striking and intelligible ceremonies. In the
Sandwich Islands a wreath woven conjointly by the leaders of either
side and placed in a temple was the chief symbol of peace. On the Fiji
Islands, the combatant forces would meet and throw down their weapons
at one another’s feet. The Tahitians wove a wreath of green boughs,
furnished by each side; exchanged two young dogs; and having also
made a band of cloth together, deposited the wreath and the band in
the temple, with imprecations on the side which should first violate
so solemn a treaty of peace.[212] On the Hervey Islands, the token of
the cessation of war was the breaking of a number of spears against
a large chestnut tree; the almost imperishable coral tree was planted
in the valleys to signify the hope that the peace might last as long
as the tree; and after the drum of peace had been solemnly beaten
round the island, it was unlawful for any man to carry a weapon, or
to cut down any iron-wood, which he might turn into an implement of
destruction.
Even our custom of proclaiming that a war is not undertaken against
a people but against its rulers is not unknown in savage life. The
Ashantee army used to strew leaves on their march, to signify that
their hostility was not with the country they passed through but only
with the instigators of the war; they told the Fantees that they had
no war with them collectively, but only with some of them.[213] How
common a military custom this appeal to the treason of an enemy is,
notwithstanding the rarity of its success, everybody knows. When,
for instance, the Anglo-Zulu war began, it was solemnly proclaimed
that the British Government had no quarrel with the Zulu people; it
was a war against the Zulu king, not against the Zulu nation. (Jan.
11, 1879.) So were the Ashantees told by the English invading force;
so were the Afghans; so were the Egyptians; and so were the French
by the Emperor William before his merciless hordes laid waste and
desolate some of the fairest provinces of France; so, no doubt, will
be told the Soudan Arabs. And yet this appeal to treason, this premium
on a people’s disloyalty, is the regular precursor of wars, wherein
destruction for its own sake, the burning of grain and villages for
the mere pleasure of the flames, forms almost invariably the most
prominent feature. The military view always prevails over the civil,
of the meaning of hostilities that have no reference to a population
but only to its government. In the Zulu war, for instance, in spite
of the above proclamation, the lieutenant-general ordered raids to be
made into Zululand for the express purpose of burning empty kraals or
villages; defending such procedure by the usual military logic, that
the more the natives at large felt the strain of the war, the more
anxious they would be to see it concluded; and it was quite in vain for
the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to argue that the burning of empty
kraals would neither do much harm to the Zulus nor good to the English;
and that whereas the war had been begun on the ground that it was waged
against the Zulu king and not against his nation, such conduct was
calculated to alienate from the invaders the whole of the Zulu people,
including those who were well disposed to them. Such arguments hardly
ever prevail over that passion for wanton destruction and for often
quite unnecessary slaughter, which finds a ready and comprehensive
shelter under the wing of military exigencies.
The assumption, therefore, that savage races are ignorant of all laws
of war, or incapable of learning them, would seem to be based rather on
our indifference about their customs than on the realities of the case,
seeing that the preceding evidence to the contrary results from the
most cursory inquiry. But whatever value there may be in our own laws
of war, as helping to constitute a real difference between savage and
civilised warfare, the best way to spread the blessing of a knowledge
of them would clearly be for the more civilised races to adhere to
them strictly in all wars waged with their less advanced neighbours.
An English commander, for instance, should no more set fire to the
capital of Ashantee or Zululand for so paltry a pretext as the display
of British power than he would set fire to Paris or Berlin; he should
no more have villages or granaries burnt in Africa or Afghanistan
than he would in Normandy; and he should no more keep a Zulu envoy or
truce-bearer in chains[214] than he would so deal with the bearer of a
white flag from a Russian or Italian enemy.
The reverse principle, which is yet in vogue, that with barbarians
you must or may be barbarous, leads to some curious illustrations of
civilised warfare when it comes in conflict with the less civilised
races. In one of the Franco-Italian wars of the sixteenth century,
more than 2,000 women and children took refuge in a large mountain
cavern, and were there suffocated by a party of French soldiers, who
set fire to a quantity of wood, straw, and hay, which they stacked
at the mouth of the cave; but it was considered so shameful an act,
that the Chevalier Bayard had two of the ringleaders hung at the
cavern’s mouth.[215] Yet when the French General Pélissier in this
century suffocated the unresisting Algerians in their caves, it was
even defended as no worse than the shelling of a fortress; and there
is evidence that gun-cotton was not unfrequently used to blast the
entrance to caves in Zululand in which men, women, and children had
hoped to find shelter against an army which professed only to be
warring with their king.[216]
The following description of the way in which, in the Ashantee war, the
English forces obtained native carriers for their transport service is
not without its instruction in this respect:--
‘We took to kidnapping upon a grand scale. Raids were made on all
the Assin villages within reach of the line of march, and the men,
and sometimes the women, carried off and sent up the country under
guard, with cases of provisions. Lieutenant Bolton, of the 1st West
India Regiment, rendered immense service in this way. Having been
for some time commandant of Accra, he knew the coast and many of the
chiefs; and having a man-of-war placed at his disposal, he went up and
down the coast, landing continually, having interviews with chiefs,
and obtaining from them large numbers of men and women; or when
this failed, landing at night with a party of soldiers, surrounding
villages, and sweeping off the adult population, leaving only a few
women to look after the children. In this way, in the course of a
month, he obtained several thousands of carriers.’[217]
And then a certain school of writers talks of the love and respect for
the British Empire which these exhibitions of our might are calculated
to win from the inferior races! The Ashantees are disgraced by the
practice of human sacrifices, and the Zulus have many a barbarous
usage; but no amount of righteous indignation on that account justifies
such dealings with them as those above described. If it does, we can
no longer condemn the proceedings of the Spaniards in the New World.
For we have to remember that it was not only the Christianity of the
Inquisition, or Spanish commerce that they wished to spread; not mere
gold nor new lands that they coveted, but that they also strove for
such humanitarian objects as the abolition of barbarous customs like
the Mexican human sacrifices. ‘The Spaniards that saw these cruel
sacrifices,’ wrote a contemporary, the Jesuit Acosta, ‘resolved with
all their power to abolish so detestable and cursed a butchery of
men.’ The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were in intention or
expression every whit as humane as we English of the nineteenth. Yet
their actions have been a reproach to their name ever since. Cortes
subjected Guatamozin, king of Mexico, to torture. Pizarro had the Inca
of Peru strangled at the stake. Alvarado invited a number of Mexicans
to a festival, and made it an opportunity to massacre them. Sandoval
had 60 caziques and 400 nobles burnt at one time, and compelled their
relations and children to witness their punishment. The Pope Paul had
very soon (1537) to issue a bull, to the effect that the Indians were
really men and not brutes, as the Spaniards soon affected to regard
them.
The whole question was, moreover, argued out at that time between
Las Casas and Sepulveda, historiographer to the Emperor Charles V.
Sepulveda contended that more could be effected against barbarism by a
month of war than by 100 years of preaching; and in his famous dispute
with Las Casas at Valladolid in 1550, defended the justice of all wars
undertaken against the natives of the New World, either on the ground
of the latter’s sin and wickedness, or on the plea of protecting them
from the cruelties of their own fellow-countrymen; the latter plea
being one to which in recent English wars a prominent place has been
always given. Las Casas replied--and his reply is unanswerable--that
even human sacrifices are a smaller evil than indiscriminate warfare.
He might have added that military contact between people unequally
civilised does more to barbarise the civilised than to civilise the
barbarous population. It is well worthy of notice and reflection
that the European battle-fields became distinctly more barbarous
after habits of greater ferocity had been acquired in wars beyond the
Atlantic, in which the customary restraints were forgotten, and the
ties of a common human nature dissolved by the differences of religion
and race.
The same effect resulted in Roman history, when the extended dominion
of the Republic brought its armies into contact with foes beyond the
sea. The Roman annalists bear witness to the deterioration that ensued
both in their modes of waging war and in the national character.[218]
It is in an Asiatic war that we first hear of a Roman general poisoning
the springs;[219] in a war for the possession of Crete that the
Cretan captives preferred to poison themselves rather than suffer the
cruelties inflicted on them by Metellus;[220] in the Thracian war
that the Romans cut off their prisoners’ hands, as Cæsar afterwards
did those of the Gauls.[221] And we should remember that a practical
English statesman like Cobden foresaw, as a possible evil result of the
closer relations between England and the East, a similar deterioration
in the national character of his countrymen. ‘With another war or
two,’ he wrote, ‘in India and China, the English people would have an
appetite for bull-fights if not for gladiators.’[222]
Nor is there often any compensation for such results in the improved
condition of the tribes whom it is sought to civilise after the method
recommended by Sepulveda. The happiest fate of the populations he
wished to see civilised by the sword was where they anticipated their
extermination or slavery by a sort of voluntary suicide. In Cuba, we
are told that ‘they put themselves to death, whole families doing
so together, and villages inviting other villages to join them in a
departure from a world that was no longer tolerable.’[223] And so it
was in the other hemisphere; the Ladrone islanders, reduced by the
sword and the diseases of the Spaniards, took measures intentionally to
diminish their numbers and to check population, preferring voluntary
extinction to the foul mercies of the Jesuits: till now a lepers’
hospital is the only building left on what was once one of the most
populous of their islands.
It must, however, be admitted in justice to the Spaniards, that the
principles which governed their dealings with heathen races infected
more or less the conduct of colonists of all nationalities. A real
or more often a pretended zeal for the welfare of native tribes came
among all Christian nations to co-exist with the doctrine, that in
case of conflict with them the common restraints of war might be put
in abeyance. What, for instance, can be worse than this, told of the
early English settlers in America by one of themselves? ‘The Plymouth
men came in the mean time to Weymouth, and there pretended to feast
the savages of those parts, bringing with them forks and things for
the purpose, which they set before the savages. They ate thereof
without any suspicion of any mischief, who were taken upon a watchword
given, and with their own knives hanging about their necks were by the
Plymouth planters stabbed and slain.’[224]
Among the early English settlers it soon came to be thought, says
Mather, a religious act to kill an Indian. In the latter half of the
seventeenth century both the French and English authorities adopted
the custom of scalping and of offering rewards for the scalps of their
Indian enemies. In 1690 the most healthy and vigorous Indians taken
by the French ‘were sold in Canada, the weaker were sacrificed and
scalped, and for every scalp they had a premium.’[225] Caleb Lyman, who
afterwards became an elder of a church at Boston, left an account of
the way in which he himself and five Indians surprised a wigwam, and
scalped six of the seven persons inside, so that each might receive
the promised reward. On their petition to the great and general court
they received 30_l._ each, and Penhallow says not only that they
probably expected eight times as much, but that at the time of writing
the province would have readily paid a sum of 800_l._ for a similar
service.[226] Captain Lovewell, says the same contemporary eulogist of
the war that lasted from July 1722 to December 1725, ‘from Dunstable
with thirty volunteers went northward, who marching several miles up
country came on a wigwam where were two Indians, one of whom they
killed and the other took, for which they received the promised bounty
of 100_l._ a scalp, and two shillings and sixpence a day besides.’
(December 19, 1724.)[227] At the surprise of Norridjwock ‘the number of
dead which we scalped were 26, besides Mr. Rasle the Jesuit, who was a
bloody incendiary.’[228] It is evident that these very liberal rewards
must have operated as a frequent cause of Indian wars, and made the
colonists open-eared to tales of native outrages; indeed the whites
sometimes disguised themselves like Indians, and robbed like Indians,
in order, it would appear, the more effectually to raise the war-cry
against them.[229]
Since the Spaniards first trained bloodhounds in Cuba to hunt the
Indians, the alliance between soldiers and dogs has been a favourite
one in barbarian warfare. The Portuguese used them in Brazil when
they hunted the natives for slaves.[230] And an English officer in
a treatise he wrote in the last century as a sort of military guide
to Indian warfare suggested coolly: ‘Every light horseman ought to
be provided with a bloodhound, which would be useful to find out the
enemy’s ambushes and to follow their tracks. They would seize the
naked savages, and at least give time to the horsemen to come up with
them.’[231] In the Molucca Islands the use of two bloodhounds against
a native chief was the cause of a great confederacy between all the
islands to shake off the Spanish and Portuguese yoke.[232] And even
in the war waged by the United States in Florida from 1838 to 1840,
General Taylor was authorised to send to Cuba for bloodhounds to scent
out the Indians; nor, according to one account, was their aid resorted
to in vain.[233]
Poison too has been called in aid. Speaking of the Yuta Indians, a
traveller assures us that ‘as in Australia, arsenic and corrosive
sublimate in springs and provisions have diminished their number.’[234]
And in the same way ‘poisoned rum helped to exterminate the
Tasmanians.’[235]
But there is worse yet in this direction. The Portuguese in Brazil,
when the importation of slaves from Africa rendered the capture of the
natives less desirable than their extermination, left the clothes
of persons who had died of small-pox or scarlet fever to be found by
them in the woods.[236] And the caravan traders from the Missouri to
Santa Fé are said by the same method or in presents of tobacco to have
communicated the small-pox to the Indian tribes of that district in
1831.[237] The enormous depopulation of most tribes by the small-pox
since their acquaintance with the whites is one of the most remarkable
results in the history of their mutual connection; nor is it likely
ever to be known to what extent the coincidence was accidental.
It is pleasant to turn from these practical illustrations of the theory
that no laws of war need be regarded in hostilities with savage tribes
to the only recorded trial of a contrary system, and to find, not
only that it is associated with one of the greatest names in English
history, but also that the success it met with fully justifies the
suspicion and disfavour with which the commoner usage is beginning to
be regarded. The Indians with whom Penn made his famous treaty in 1682
(of which Voltaire said that it was the only treaty that was never
ratified by an oath, and the only treaty that was never broken), were
of the same Algonquin race with whom the Dutch had scarcely ever kept
at peace, and against whom they had warred in the customary ruthless
fashion of those times. The treaty was based on the principle of an
adjustment of differences by a tribunal of an equal number of Red
men and of White. ‘Penn,’ says the historian, ‘came without arms;
he declared his purpose to abstain from violence, he had no message
but peace, and not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an
Indian’[238] For more than seventy years, from 1682 to 1754, when the
French war broke out, in short, during the whole time that the Quakers
had the principal share in the government of Pennsylvania, the history
of the Indians and Whites in that province was free from the tale of
murders and hostilities that was so common in other districts; so
that the single instance in which the experiment of equal laws and
forbearance has been patiently persevered in, can at least boast of a
success that in support of the contrary system it were very difficult
to find for an equal number of years in any other part of the world.
It may also be said against Sepulveda’s doctrine, that the habits of
a higher civilisation, where they are really worth spreading, spread
more easily and with more permanent effect among barbarous neighbours
by the mere contagion of a better example than by the teaching of
fire and sword. Some of the Dyak tribes in Borneo are said to have
given up human sacrifices from the better influences of the Malays
on the coast district.[239] The Peruvians, according to Prescott,
spread their civilisation among their ruder neighbours more by
example than by force. ‘Far from provoking hostilities, they allowed
time for the salutary example of their own institutions to work its
effect, trusting that their less civilised neighbours would submit to
their sceptre from a conviction of the blessings it would secure to
them.’ They exhorted them to lay aside their cannibalism, their human
sacrifices, and their other barbarities; they employed negotiation,
conciliatory treatment, and presents to leading men among the tribes;
and only if all these means failed did they resort to war, but to war
which at every stage was readily open to propositions of peace, and in
which any unnecessary outrage on the persons or property of their enemy
was punished with death.
Something will have been done for the cause of this better method
of civilising the lower races, if we forewarn and forearm ourselves
against the symptoms of hostilities with them by a thorough
understanding of the conditions which render such hostilities probable.
For as an outbreak of fever is to some extent preventable by a
knowledge of the conditions which make for fevers, so may the outbreak
of war be averted by a knowledge of the laws which govern their
appearance. The experience which we owe to history in this respect
is amply sufficient to enable us to generalise with some degree of
confidence and certainty as to the causes or steps which produce wars
or precede them; and from the remembrance of our dealings with the
savage races of South Africa we may forecast with some misgivings the
probable course of our connection with a country like New Guinea.
A colony of Europeans in proximity with barbarian neighbours naturally
desires before long an increase of territory at the expense of
the latter. The first sign of such a desire is the expedition of
missionaries into the country, who not only serve to spy it out for
the benefit of the colony, but invariably weaken the native political
force by the creation of a division of feeling, and of an opposition
between the love of old traditions and the temptation of novel customs
and ideas. The innovating party, being at first the smaller, consisting
of the feeblest and poorest members of the community, and of those who
gladly flock to the mission-stations for refuge from their offences
against tribal law, the missionaries soon perceive the impossibility of
further success without the help of some external aid. The help of a
friendly force can alone turn the balance of influence in their favour,
and they soon learn to contemplate with complacency the advantages of
a military conquest of the natives by the colony or mother-country.
The evils of war are cancelled, in their eyes, by the delusive visions
of ultimate benefit, and, in accordance with a not uncommon perversion
of the moral sense, an end that is assumed to be religious is made to
justify measures that are the reverse.
When the views and interests of the colonial settlers and of the
missionaries have thus, inevitably but without design, fallen into
harmony, a war is certain to be not far distant. Apparently accidental,
it is in reality as certain as the production of green from a mixture
of blue and yellow. Some dispute about boundaries, some passing act of
violence, will serve for a reason of quarrel, which will presently be
supported by a fixed array of collateral pretexts. The Press readily
lends its aid; and in a week the colony trembles or affects to tremble
from a panic of invasion, and vials of virtue are expended on the vices
of the barbarians which have been for years tolerated with equanimity
or indifference. Their customs are painted in the blackest colours; the
details of savage usages are raked up from old books of travel; rumours
of massacres and injuries are sedulously propagated; and the whole
country is represented as in such a state of anarchy, that the majority
of the population, in their longing for deliverance from their own
rulers, would gladly welcome even a foreign conqueror. In short, a war
against them comes speedily to be regarded as a war in their behalf,
as the last word of philanthropy and beneficence; and the atrocities
that subsequently ensue are professedly undertaken, not against the
unfortunate people who endure them, but to liberate them from the ruler
of their choice or sufferance, in whose behalf however they fight to
the death.
To every country, therefore, which would fain be spared from these
discreditable wars with barbarian tribes on the borders of its
colonies, it is clear that the greatest caution is necessary against
the abuses of missionary propagandism. The almost absolute failure of
missions in recent centuries, and more especially in the nineteenth,
is intimately associated with the greater political importance which
the improved facilities of travel and intercourse have conferred upon
them. Everyone has heard how Catholicism was persecuted in Japan, till
at last the very profession of Christianity was made a capital crime in
that part of the world. But a traveller, who knew the East intimately
at the time, explains how it was that the Jesuits’ labours resulted
so disastrously. On the outbreak of civil dissensions in Japan, ‘the
Christian priests thought it a proper time for them to settle their
religion on the same foundation that Mahomet did his, by establishing
it in blood. Their thoughts ran on nothing less than extirpating the
heathen out of the land, and they framed a conspiracy of raising an
army of 50,000 Christians to murder their countrymen, that so the whole
island might be illuminated by Christianity such as it was then.’[240]
And in the same way, a modern writer, speaking of the very limited
success of missions in India, has asserted frankly that ‘in despair
many Christians in India are driven to wish and pray that some one, or
some way, may arise for converting the Indians by the sword.’[241]
Nor are the heathen themselves blind to the political dangers which
are involved in the presence of missionaries among them. All over the
world conversion is from the native point of view the same thing as
disaffection, and war is dreaded as the certain consequence of the
adoption of Christianity. The French bishop, Lefebvre, when asked by
the mandarins of Cochin China, in 1847, the purpose of his visit, said
that he read in their faces that they suspected him ‘of having come
to excite some outbreak among the neophytes, and perhaps prepare the
way for an European army;’ and the king was ‘afraid to see Christians
multiply in his kingdom, and in case of war with European Powers,
combine with his enemies.’[242] How right events have proved him to
have been!
The story is the same in Africa. ‘Not long after I entered the
country,’ said the missionary, Mr. Calderwood, of Caffraria, ‘a leading
chief once said to me, “When my people become Christians, they cease to
be my people.”’[243] The Norwegian missionaries were for twenty years
in Zululand without making any converts but a few destitute children,
many of whom had been given to them out of pity by the chiefs,[244]
and their failure was actually ascribed by the Zulu king to their
having taught the incompatibility of Christianity with allegiance
to a heathen ruler.[245] In 1877, a Zulu of authority expressed the
prevalent native reasoning on this point in language which supplies
the key to disappointments that extend much further than Zululand: ‘We
will not allow the Zulus to become so-called Christians. It is not the
king says so, but every man in Zululand. If a Zulu does anything wrong,
he at once goes to a mission-station, and says he wants to become a
Christian; if he wants to run away with a girl, he becomes a Christian;
if he wishes to be exempt from serving the king, he puts on clothes,
and is a Christian; if a man is an umtagati (evil-doer), he becomes a
Christian.’[246]
It is on this account that in wars with savage nations the destruction
of mission-stations has always been so constant an episode. Nor can
we wonder at this when we recollect that in the Caffre war of 1851,
for instance, it was a subject of boast with the missionaries that
it was Caffres trained on the mission-stations who had preserved the
English posts along the frontiers, carried the English despatches, and
fought against their own countrymen for the preservation and defence
of the colony.[247] It is rather a poor result of all the money and
labour that has been spent in the attempt to Christianise South Africa,
that the Wesleyan mission-station at Edendale should have contributed
an efficient force of cavalry to fight against their countrymen in
the Zulu campaign; and we may hesitate whether most to despise the
missionaries who count such a result as a triumph of their efforts, or
the converts whom they reward with tea and cake for military service
with the enemies of their countrymen.[248]
It needs no great strain of intelligence to perceive that this use of
mission-stations as military training-schools scarcely tends to enhance
the advantages of conversion in the minds of the heathen among whom
they are planted.
For these reasons, and because it is becoming daily more apparent that
wars are less a necessary evil than an optional misery of human life,
the principal measure for a country which would fain improve, and
live at peace with, the less civilised races which touch the numerous
borders of its empire, would be the legal restraint or prevention
of missionary enterprise: a proposal that will appear less startling
if we reflect that in no quarter of the globe can that method of
civilising barbarism point to more than local or ephemeral success.
The Protestant missions of this century are in process of failure,
as fatal and decided as that which befel the Catholic missions of
the French, Portuguese, or Spanish, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and very much from the same causes. The English wars in
South Africa, with which the Protestant missionaries have been so
closely connected, have frustrated all attempts to Christianise that
region, just as ‘the fearful wars occasioned directly or indirectly by
the missionaries’ sent by the Portuguese to the kingdoms of Congo and
Angola in the sixteenth century rendered futile similar attempts on the
West Coast.[249]
The same process of depopulation under Protestant influences may now
be observed in the Sandwich Islands or New Zealand that reduced the
population of Hispaniola, under Spanish Christianity, from a million to
14,000 in a quarter of a century.[250] No Protestant missionary ever
laboured with more zeal than Eliot did in America in the seventeenth
century, but the tribes he taught have long since been extinct:
‘like one of their own forest trees, they have withered from core to
bark;’[251] and, in short, the history of both Catholic and Protestant
missions alike may be summed up in this one general statement: either
they have failed altogether of results on a sufficient scale to be
worthy of notice, or the impartial page of history unfolds to us one
uniform tale of civil war, persecution, conquest, and extirpation in
whatever regions they can boast of more at least of the semblance of
success.
Another measure in the interests of peace would be the organisation of
a class of well-paid officials whose duty it should be to examine on
the spot into the truth of all rumours of outrages or atrocities which
are circulated from time to time, in order to set the tide of public
opinion in favour of hostile measures. Such rumours may, of course,
have some foundation, but in nine cases out of ten they are false. So
lately as the year 1882, the _Times_ and other English papers were
so far deceived as to give their readers a horrible account of the
sacrifice of 200 young girls to the spirits of the dead in Ashantee;
and people were beginning to ask themselves whether such things could
be suffered within reach of an English army, when it was happily
discovered that the whole story was fictitious. Stories of this sort
are what the Germans call _Tendenzlügen_, or lies invented to produce a
certain effect. Their effect in rousing the war-spirit is undeniable;
and, although the healthy scepticism which has of recent years been
born of experience affords us some protection, no expenditure could be
more economical than one which should aim at rendering them powerless
by neutralising them at the fountain-head.
In the preceding historical survey of the relations in war between
communities standing on different levels of civilisation, the
allusion, among some of the rudest tribes, to laws of war very similar
to those supposed to be binding between more polished nations tends to
discredit the distinction between civilised and barbarian warfare. The
progress of knowledge threatens the overthrow of the distinction, just
as it has already reduced that between organic and inorganic matter,
or between animal and vegetable life, to a distinction founded rather
on human thought than on the nature of things. And it is probable that
the more the military side of savage life is studied, the fewer will be
found to be the lines of demarcation which are thought to establish a
difference in kind in the conduct of war by belligerents in different
stages of progress. The difference in this respect is chiefly one of
weapons, of strategy, and of tactics; and it would seem that whatever
superiority the more civilised community may claim in its rules of
war is more than compensated in savage life both by the less frequent
occurrence of wars and by their far less fatal character.
But, however much the frequency and ferocity of the wars waged by
barbarian races as compared with those waged by civilised nations has
been exaggerated, there is no doubt but that in warfare, more than
in anything else, there is most in common between civilisation and
savagery, and that the distinction between them most nearly disappears.
In art and knowledge and religion the distinction between the two is so
wide that the evolution of one from the other seems still to many minds
incredible; but in war, and the thoughts which relate to it, the points
of analogy cannot fail to strike the most indifferent. We see still
in either condition, the same notions of the glory of fighting, the
same belief in war as the only source of strength and honour, the same
hope from it of personal advancement, the same readiness to seize any
pretext for resorting to it, the same foolish sentiment that it is mean
to live without it.
Then only will the distinction between the two be final, complete,
and real, when all fighting is relegated to barbarism, and regarded
as unworthy of civilised humanity; when the enlightenment of
opinion, which has freed us already from such curses as slavery, the
torture-chamber, or duelling, shall demand instinctively the settlement
of all causes of quarrel by peaceful arbitration, and leave to the
lower races and the lower creation the old-fashioned resort to a trial
of violence and might, to competition in fraud and ferocity.