The native races of the South Pacific, with the possible exception of the Maori, will have no influence in settling the destiny of the ocean. Neither the Australian aboriginal nor the Kanaka—under which last general title may be grouped all the tribes of Papua, the Solomons, the New Hebrides and other Oceanic islands—will provide the foundation of a nation. It is one of the curiosities of world-history that no great race has ever survived which had its origin in a land south of the Equator. From the earliest civilisations to the latest, there is not a single instance of a people of the southern hemisphere exercising any notable effect on the world's destinies. Sometimes there seems no adequate reason for this. That Africa north of the Equator should have produced a great civilisation, which was the early guide and instructor of the European civilisations, may be explained in part by the curious phenomenon of the Nile delta, a tract of land the irrigation of which at regular intervals by mysterious natural forces prompted inquiry, and suggested that all the asperities of Nature could be softened by effort. (The spirit of inquiry and the desire for artificial comfort are the great promptings to civilisation.) But it is difficult to understand why in America the aboriginal Mexicans should have been so much more warlike than the Peruvians or any other people in South America; and why the West Pacific should wash with its northern waters the lands of two great races, and with its southern waters flow past lands which, though of greater fertility, remained almost empty, or else were peopled by childlike races, careless of progress and keen only to enjoy the simple happiness offered by Nature's bounty.

The Australian aboriginal race is rapidly dwindling: one of its branches, that which populated the fertile and temperate island of Tasmania, is already extinct. In Tasmania, reacting to the influence of a mild and yet stimulating climate, a climate comparable with that of Devon in England, but more sunny, the Australasian native had won to his highest point of development. Apparently, too, he had won to his highest possible point, for there is evidence that for many generations no progress at all had been made towards civilisation. Yet that point was so low in the stage of evolution that it was impossible for the poor natives to take any part, either as a separate race, or by mingling their blood with another race, in the future of the Pacific. The black Australian is a primitive rather than a degraded man. Most ethnologists have concluded that this black Australian is a Caucasian. Wallace ascribes to him kinship with the Veddas and the Ainus of Asia. Stratz takes the Australian as the prototype of all the races of man. Schoetensack contends that the human race had its origin in the Australian continent.

But, however dignified by ancestry, the Australian aboriginal was pathetically out of touch with modern civilisation. He broke down utterly at its advent, not so much because of his bad qualities as because of his childishness. Not only were alcohol, opium and greed strange to him, but also weapons of steel and horses and clothing. He had never learnt to dig, to build, to weave. War organisation had not been thought of, and his tribal fights were prodigal of noise but sparing of slaughter. When the White Man came, it was inevitable that this simple primitive should dwindle from the face of the earth. It is not possible to hold out any hope for the future of the Australian blacks. They can never emulate the Maoris of New Zealand, who will take a small share in the building up of a nation. All that may be hoped for is that their certain end will be kept back as long as is humanly possible, and that their declining days will be softened by all kindness. A great reserve in the Northern Territory—a reserve from which the White population would be jealously excluded, and almost as jealously the White fashions of clothing and house-building—holds out the best hope for their future. It is comforting to think that the Australian Government is now resolved to do all in its power for the aboriginals. Indeed, to be just, authority has rarely lacked in kindness of intention; it has been the cruelty of individuals acting in defiance of authority, but aided by the supineness of authority, that has been responsible for most of the cruelty.

The Maori or native New Zealander was of a different type. The Maori was an immigrant to New Zealand. Some time back there was an overflow of population from the fertile sub-tropical islands of Malaysia. A tribe which had already learned some of the arts of life, which was of a proud and warlike character, took to the sea, as the Norsemen did in Europe, and sought fresh lands for colonisation. Not one wave, but several, of this outflow of colonists struck New Zealand. The primitive people there, the Morioris, could offer but little resistance to the warlike Malaysians, and speedily were vanquished, a few remnants finding refuge in the outlying islets of the New Zealand group. Probably much the same type of emigrant occupied Hawaii at one time, for the Hawaiian and the Maori have much in common. But whilst the perpetual summer of Hawaii softened and enervated its colonists, the bracing and vigorous climate of New Zealand had a precisely opposite effect. The dark race of the Pacific reached there a very high state of development.

The Maori system of government was tribal, and there does not seem to have been, up to the time of the coming of the White Man, any attempt on the part of one chief to seize supreme power and become king. Land was held on a communal system, and cultivated fairly well. Art existed, and was applied to boat-building, to architecture, to the embroidering of fabrics, to the carving of stone and wood. War was the great pastime, and cannibalism was customary. Probably this practice was brought by the Maoris from their old home. If it had not been, it might well have sprung up under the strange conditions of life in the new country, for New Zealand naturally possessed not a single mammal, not a beast whose flesh might be eaten. There were birds and lizards, and that was all. The Maoris brought with them dogs, which were bred for eating, but were too few in number to provide a satisfactory food-supply; and rats, which were also eaten. With these exceptions there was no flesh food, and the invitation to cannibalism was clear.

A more pleasant feature of the national life of the Maori was a high degree of chivalry. In war and in love he seems to have had very much the same ideas of conduct as the European of the Age of Chivalry. He liked the combat for the combat's own sake, and it is recorded as one of the incidents of the Maori War that when a besieged British force ran short of ammunition, the Maori enemy halved with them their supply, "so as to have a fair fight."

In his love affairs the Maori was romantic and poetic. His legends and his native poetry suggest a state of society in which there was a high respect for women, who had to be wooed and won, and were not the mere chattels of the men-warriors. Since this respect for womenkind is a great force for civilisation, there is but little doubt that, if the Maoris had been left undisturbed for a few more centuries, they would have evolved a state of civilisation comparable with that of the Japanese or the Mexicans.

When Captain Cook visited New Zealand in 1769 the Maori race probably numbered some 100,000. The results of coming into contact with civilisation quickly reduced that number to about 50,000. But there was then a stay in the process of extinction. The Maori began to learn the virtues as well as the vices of civilisation. "Pakeha" medicine and sanitation were adopted, and the Maori birth-rate began to creep up, the Maori death-rate to decrease. It is not probable that the Maori race will ever come to such numbers as to be a factor of importance in the Pacific. But it will have some indirect influence. Having established the right to grow up side by side with the White colonists, possessing full political and social rights, the Maoris will probably modify somewhat the New Zealand national type. We shall see in New Zealand, within a reasonable time, a population of at least 10,000,000 of people, of whom perhaps 1,000,000 will be Maoris. The effect of this mixture of the British colonising type with a type somewhat akin to the Japanese will be interesting to watch. In all probability New Zealand will shelter a highly aggressive and a fiercely patriotic nation in the future (as indeed she does at present).

The Malay States bred a vigorous and courageous race of seamen, and Malay blood has been dispersed over many parts of the Pacific, Malays probably providing the chief parent stock both for the Hawaiians and the Maoris. But the Malay Power has been broken up to such an extent that a Malay nation is now impossible. Since the British overlordship of the Malay Peninsula, the Chinese have been allowed free access to the land and free trading rights; and they have ousted the original inhabitants to a large extent.

The Maori excepted, no race of Polynesia or Melanesia will survive to affect the destinies of the Pacific Ocean. Nature was cruelly kind to the Kanaka peoples in the past, and they must pay for their happiness now. In the South Pacific islands, until White civilisation intruded, the curse of Adam, which is that with the sweat of the brow bread must be won, had not fallen. Nature provided a Garden of Eden where rich food came without digging and raiment was not needed. Laughing nations of happy children grew up. True, wars they had, and war brought woe. But the great trouble, and also the great incentive to progress of life, they had not. There was no toiling for leave to live. Civilisation, alas! intrudes now, more urgent each year, to bring its "blessings" of toil, disease, and drabness of fettered life; and the Paradise of the South Sea yields to its advance—here with the sullen and passionate resentment of the angry child, there with the pathetic listlessness of the child too afraid to be angry. But, still, there survives in tree and flower, bird and beast, and in aboriginal man, much that has the suggestion rather of the Garden of Eden than of this curious world which man has made for himself—a world of exacting tasks and harsh taskmasters, of ugly houses and smoke-stained skies, of machinery and of enslaving conventions.

With the White Man came sugar plantations and cotton fields. The Kanaka heard the words "work" and "wages." He laughed brightly, and went on chasing the butterfly happiness. To work a little while, for the fun of the thing, he was willing enough. Indeed, any new sort of task had a fascination for his childish nature. But steady toil he abhorred, and for wages he had no use.

Some three years ago I watched for an hour or two, from the veranda of a house at Suva, a Fijian garden-boy at work. This was a "good" garden-boy, noted in the town for his industry. And he played with his work with an elegant naÏvetÉ that was altogether charming to one who had not to be his paymaster. Almost bare of clothing, his fine bronzed muscles rippled and glanced to show that he had the strength for any task if he had but the will. Perhaps the gentleness of his energy was inspired by the Æsthetic idea of just keeping his bronze skin a little moist, so as to bring out to the full its satin grace without blurring the fine anatomical lines with drops of visible sweat. His languid grace deserved that it should have had some such prompting. If a bird alighted on a tree, the Fijian quickly dropped his hoe and pursued it with stones, which—his bright smile said—were not maliciously meant, but had a purpose of greeting. An insect, a passing wayfarer, the fall of a leaf, a cloud in the sky, all provided equally good reasons for stopping work. Finally, at three a little shower came, and the "model boy" of Fijian industry thankfully ceased work for the day.

A gracious, sweet, well-fed idleness was Nature's dower to the Pacific Islander, until the White Man came with his work, as an angel with a flaming sword, and Paradise ended. Now the fruit of that idleness is that the Kanaka can take no part in the bustling life of modern civilisation.

In one British settlement, Papua, a part of New Guinea, the Australian Government is endeavouring to lead a Kanaka race along the path of modern progress. "Papua for the Papuans," is the keynote of the administration, and all kinds of devices are adopted to tempt the coloured man to industry. His Excellency, Colonel Murray, the Administrator of Papua, told me in London (where he was on leave) last year (1911) that he had some hopes that the cupidity of the Papuans would in time tempt them to some settled industry. They had a great liking for the White Man's adornments and tools, and, to gratify that liking, were showing some inclination for work. The effort is well meant, but probably vain. "Civilisation is impossible where the banana grows," declared an American philosopher: and the generalisation was sound. The banana tree provides food without tillage: and an organic law of this civilisation of ours is that man must be driven, by hunger and thirst and the desire for shelter, to plan, to organise, to make machines, to store.

Every nation in the Pacific has the same experience. In the Hawaiian Group, the American Power finds the native race helpless material for nation-making. The Hawaiian takes on a veneer of civilisation, but nothing can shake him from his habits of indolence. He adopts American clothes, lives in American houses, learns to eat pie and to enjoy ice-cream soda. He plays at the game of politics with voluble zeal. But he is still a Kanaka, and takes no real part in the progress of the flourishing territory of Hawaii. Americans do the work of administration. Imported Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and others, are the coolies and the traders. The Hawaiian talks, basks in the sun, adorns himself with wreaths of odorous flowers, and occasionally declaims with the pathetic bleat of an enraged sheep at "American tyranny."

When White civilisation came to the South Pacific, the various islands held several millions of coloured peoples, very many of them enjoying an idyllically happy system of existence. To-day, 50,000 Maoris, beginning to hold their own in the islands of New Zealand, represent the sole hope of all those peoples to have any voice at all in the Pacific. Humanitarian effort may secure the survival for a time of other groups of islanders, but the ultimate prospects are not bright. Probably what is happening at Fiji, where the Fijian fades away in the face of a more strenuous coolie type imported from India, and at Hawaii, will happen everywhere in the South Pacific.