Hardly any class of persons enjoys complete immunity from injustice
and calumny, even if “armed with the ballot”; but probably no
class has so severely suffered from Slander’s mordant tooth as our
man-eating brethren of that indefinite region known as the “Cannibal
Islands.” Nations which do not eat themselves, and which, with even
greater self-denial, refrain from banqueting on other nations, have
for generations been subjected to a species of criticism that must
be a sore trial to their patience. Every reprobate among us who has
sense enough to push a pencil along the measured mile of a day’s task
in a newspaper office without telling the truth has experienced a
sinful pleasure in representing anthropophagi as persons of imperfect
refinement and ailing morals. They have been censured even, for murder;
though surely it is kinder to take the life of a man whom you set apart
for your dinner than to eat him struggling. It has been said of them
that they are particularly partial to the flesh of missionaries.
It appears that this is not so. The Rev. Mr. Hopkins, of the Methodist
Church, who returned to New York after a residence of fifteen years in
the various islands of the South Pacific, assured his brethren that in
all that period he could not recollect a single instance in which he
was made to feel himself a comestible. He averred that his spiritual
character was everywhere recognized, and so far as he knew he was never
in peril of being put to the tooth.
His testimony, unluckily, has not the value that its obvious sincerity
and truth merit. In point of physical structure he was conspicuously
inedible; so much so, in truth, that an unsympathetic reporter coldly
described him as “fibrous” and declared that in a country where
appetizers are unknown and pepsin a medicine of the future, Mr. Hopkins
could under no circumstances cut any figure as a viand. And this same
writer meaningly inquired of the cartilaginous missionary the present
address of one “Fatty Dawson.”
Fully to understand the withering sarcasm of this inquiry it is
necessary to know that the person whose whereabouts it was desired to
ascertain was a co-worker of Mr. Hopkins in the same missionary field.
His success in spreading the light was such as to attract the notice
of the native king. In the last letter received from Mr. Dawson he
explained that that potentate had just done him the honor to invite him
to dinner.
Mr. Hopkins being a missionary, one naturally prefers his views to
those of anyone who is still in the bonds of iniquity, and moreover,
writes for the newspapers; nevertheless, I do not see that any harm
would come of a plain statement of the facts in the case of the Rev.
Mr. Dawson. He was not eaten by the dusky monarch—in the face of Mr.
Hopkins’ solemn assurance that cannibalism is a myth, it is impossible
to believe that Mr. Dawson was himself the dinner to which he was
invited. That he was eaten by Mr. Hopkins himself is a proposition
so abysmally horrible that none but the hardiest and most impenitent
calumniator would have the depravity to suggest it.