POSSIBILITIES OF THE FUTURE
“Decadent” or “Primitive”--A Dream of White Saviours from the West.
Whether the Formosan aborigines are a “decadent” people, in the sense
suggested in the last chapter, or whether they are “primitive,” in
the sense that they are at the beginning of what would be a long
racial life--a life with possibilities of intellectual and social
evolution--were they given opportunities for the unhampered development
of that life, is a question that will probably never be answered. No
race, whatever its virility or potentiality for development, can long
survive the military despotism of a conquering people; especially when
that conquering people is consistently ruthless in the methods it
adopts for crushing out the racial individualities of the peoples whom
it conquers.
It seems probable that under the dominance of the Japanese the
aborigines of Formosa will in a few decades, or, at the longest, in a
century or two, have ceased to exist as a people. Unless, indeed, their
dream of being rescued from the rule of both Chinese and Japanese by
“White Saviours from the West” ever come true; and of this there seems
no prospect at the present time. Nor has the white man--if one face
the matter honestly--always proved a “saviour” to the aboriginal races
with whom he has come into contact. As Bertrand Russell has recently
intelligently remarked (_Manchester Guardian Weekly_, Friday, December
2, 1921) apropos of Japan’s policy in China: “Japan has merely been
copying Christian morals.”[101]
The faith of the aboriginal Formosans, however, both in the power
and the goodness of the white man--and white woman--is touching
in the extreme. This does not happen to be due to the efforts of
present-day missionaries, since the efforts of the latter are, as
has been previously stated, confined to attempts at Christianizing
Chinese-Formosans (those who are usually known as “Formosans”). The
reverence among the aborigines for the white race is the result of the
Dutch occupation of three hundred years ago--a tradition which has been
handed down from generation to generation.
FOOTNOTE:
[101] It is possible, however, that if Mr. Russell had been in
Korea in March 1919, and had seen the hideous cruelty practised at
that time--cruelty which took the form of peculiarly ingenious and
diabolical modes of torture on the part of Japanese officialdom
towards unarmed Koreans, women and children as well as men--he might
have modified his statement to the extent of saying that present-day
Japan is copying Christian morals of the age of the Inquisition. That
Japan is not a “Christian country” has no bearing on the question,
since Buddhism, quite as much as Christianity, enjoins forbearance and
gentleness, and stresses--as its key-note--“harmlessness.” But the
teachings of Gautama, like those of Christ, have little effect upon
“the direction taken by the criminal tendencies,” as Mr. Russell puts
it, of the nominal followers of these teachings--in Orient or Occident.