Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the "survival of the
fittest."
"I pictured myself cultivating many hundreds of acres when I first
came here," said Grelet. "I laid out several plantations, and once
shipped much coffee, as good, too, as any in the world. I gather
enough now for my own use, and sell none. I grew cotton and
cocoanuts on a large scale. I raise only a little now.
"There were hundreds of able-bodied men here then. I used to buy
opium from the Chinese labor-contractors and from smugglers, and
give it to my working people. A pill once a day would make the
Marquesans hustle. But the government stopped it. They say that the
book written by the Englishman, Stevenson, did it. We must find
labor elsewhere soon, Chinese, perhaps. Those two Paumotans brought
by Begole are a godsend to me. I wish some one would bring me a
hundred."
The two Paumotan youths, Tennonoku and Kedeko-lio, lay motionless on
the floor of the veranda twenty feet away. They had been sold to
Grelet for a small sum by Begole, captain of a trading-schooner. In
passing the Paumotan Islands, many hundred miles to the south,
Begole had forgotten to leave at Pukatuhu, a small atoll, a few bags
of flour he had promised to bring the chief on his next voyage, and
the chief, seeing the schooner a mile away, had ordered these boys to
swim to it and remind the skipper of his promise. Begole meanwhile
had caught a wind, and the first he knew of the message was when the
boys climbed aboard the schooner many miles to sea. He did not
trouble to land them, but brought them on to the Marquesas and sold
them to Grelet.
They spoke no Marquesan, and Grelet had difficulty in making them
understand that they must labor for him, and in enforcing his orders,
which they could not comprehend. There was little copra being made
in the rainy weather, and they lay about the veranda or squatted
on the _paepae_ of the laborers' cookhouse, making a fire of
cocoanut-husks twice a day to roast their breadfruit. Their savage
hearts were ever in their own atoll, the home to which the native
clings so passionately, and their eyes were dark with hopeless
longing. No doubt they would die soon, as so many do when exiled,
but Grelet's copra crop would profit first.
The dire lack of labor for copra-making, tree-planting, or any form
of profitable activity is lamented by all white men in these
depopulated islands. Average wages were sixty cents a day, but even
a dollar failed to bring adequate relief. The Marquesan detests labor,
which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and
did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white
owners of plantations. Since every man had a piece of land that
yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish
were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for
the government in payment for taxes.
The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races
everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with
the native. They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the
Marquesan to procure a modicum of labor. They saw fortunes to be
made if they could but whip a multitude of backs to bending for them,
but they either could not or would not perceive the situation from
the native's point of view.
In America I often heard men who were out of employment,
particularly in bad seasons, in big cities or in mining camps, argue
the right to work. They could not enforce this alleged natural right,
and in their misery talked of the duty of society or the state in
this direction. But they were obliged to content themselves with the
thin alleviation of soup-kitchens, charity wood-yards, and other
easers of hard times, and with threats of sabotage or other violence.
Here in the islands, where work is offered to unwilling natives, the
employers curse their lack of power to drive them to the copra
forests, the kilns and boats. Thus, as in highly civilized countries
we maintain that a man has no inherent or legal right to work, in
these islands the employer has no weapon by which to enforce toil.
But had the whites the power to order all to do their bidding, they
would create a system of peonage as in Mexico.
An acquaintance of mine in these seas took part in, and profited
largely by, the removal to a distant place of the entire population
of an island on which the people had led the usual life of the
Polynesian. He and his associates sold three hundred men to
plantation labor, which they hated and to which they were
unaccustomed. Within a year two hundred and fifty of them had died
as fast as disease could sap their grief-stricken bodies. Their
former home, which they died longing to see again, was made a
feeding-place for sheep. The merchants reaped a double toll. They
were paid well for delivering the owners of the land to the
plantations, and in addition they got the land.
Now, my acquaintance is a man of university education, a quoter of
Haeckel and Darwin, with "survival of the fittest" as his guiding
motto since his Jena days. Says he, quoting a Scotchman:
"Tone it down as you will, the fact remains that Darwinism regards
animals as going up-stairs, in a struggle for individual ends, often
on the corpses of their fellows, often by a blood-and-iron
competition, often by a strange mixture of blood and cunning, in
which each looks out for himself and extinction besets the hindmost."
Further says my stern acquaintance, specially when in his cups:
"The whole system of life-development is that of the lower providing
food for the higher in ever-expanding circles of organic existence,
from protozoea to steers, from the black African to the educated and
employing man. We build on the ribs of the steers, and on the backs
of the lower grade of human."
Scientific books have taken the place of the Bible as a
quotation-treasury of proof for whatever their reader most desires
to prove. Now I am no scientist and take, indeed, only the casual
interest of the average man in the facts and theories of science.
But it appears to me that in his theory of the survival of the
fittest my acquaintance curiously overlooks the question of man's
own survival as a species.
If we are to base our actions upon this cold-blooded and inhuman
view of the universe, let us consider that universe as in fact
inhuman, and having no concern for man except as a species of animal
very possibly doomed to extinction, as many other species of animal
have been doomed in the past, unless he proves his fitness to
survive not as an individual, but as a species.
Now man is a gregarious animal; he lives in herds. The
characteristic of the herd is that within it the law of survival of
the fittest almost ceases to operate. The value of a herd is that
its members protect each other instead of preying upon each other.
Nor, in what we are pleased to call the animal kingdom, do herds of
the same species prey upon each other. They rather unite for the
protection of their weaker members.
So far as I am informed, mankind is the only herd of which this is
not true. Cattle and horses unite in protecting the young and feeble;
sheep huddle together against cold and wolves; bees and ants work
only for the welfare of the swarm, which is the welfare of all. This,
we are told, is the reason these forms of life have survived. But
ship officers beat sailors because sailors have no firearms and fear
charges of mutiny. Policemen club prisoners who are poorly dressed.
Employees make profits from the toil of children. Strong nations
prey on weak peoples, and the white man kills the white man and the
black and brown and yellow man in mine, plantation, and forest the
world over.
He defends this murder of his own kind by the pat phrase "survival
of the fittest." But man is not a solitary animal, he is a herd
animal, and within the herd nature's definition of fitness does not
apply. The herd is a refuge against the law of tooth and fang.
Importing within the herd his own interpretation of that law, man is
destroying the strength of his shelter. By so much as one man preys
upon or debases another man, he weakens the strength of the man-herd.
And for man it is the herd, not the individual, that must meet that
stern law of "the survival of the fittest" on the vast impersonal
arena of the universe.
"Bully 'Ayes was the man to make the Kanakas work!" said Lying Bill
Pincher. "I used to be on Penryn Island and that was 'is old 'ang-out.
'Ayes was a pleasant man to meet. 'E was 'orspitable as a 'ungry
shark to a swimming missionary. Bald he was as a bloomin' crab,
stout and smiling.
"'E 'ad two white wives a-setting in his cabin on the schooner, and
they called it the parlor. Smart wimmen they was, and saved 'is life
for 'im more 'n once. 'E 'd get a couple of chiefs on board by
deceiving 'em with rum, and hold 'em until 'is bloomin' schooner was
chock-a-block with copra. The 'ole island would be working itself to
death to free the chiefs. Then when 'e 'ad got the copra, 'e 'd
steal a 'undred or two Kanakas and sell 'em in South America.
"'E was smart, and yet 'e got 'is'n. 'Is mate seen him coming over
the side with blood in his eye, and batted 'im on 'is conch as 'is
leg swung over the schooner's bul'ark. 'Ayes dropped with 'is knife
between 'is teeth and 'is pistols in both 'ands.
"'E'd murdered 'undreds of white and brown and black men, and 'e was
smart, and 'e got away with it. But 'e made the mistake of not
having made a friend of 'is right 'and man."