HOWITT'S COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY. ACCORDING to Mr. Howirr, "tire object
of this volume is to lay open to the public the most extensive and extraordinary system of crime which the world ever witnessed : but for what purpose, is not quite so clear. The only end, in our opinion, that Coloniza- tion and Christianity seems likely to accomplish, is to raise in the minds of unreflecting readers the same kind of excitement which they enjoy over a horrid murder in the newspapers; whilst per- sons of more sobriety and information, noting the vague decla matron and unmeasured criminations of the author, as well as detecting his want of philosophy, and his unfairness, so far as un- fairness consists in one-sidedness, will be apt to get so weary of the past, which admits of no remedy, that they will neglect the present, over which some beneficial control can be exercised. Whatever horrible deeds might be recounted, no objection could be made to a history of Colonization which narrated all that was done, whether good or evil—which fairly stated the crimes of
men, but noted any redeeming qualities they possessed, as well RS the causes by which their actions were intluenced—and which, tracing the rise, the progress, the decline,or the permanence of the different colonies, should deduce both moral and political lessons from their final failure or success. But the volume before us con- tains, not a history of colonization, but of the crimes committed by the various European colonists who have at any time established settlements in America, Africa, or Asia. It commences with the discoveries Of COLUMBUS, and narrates the atrocities perpetrated by the Spaniards in the West Indian islands and on the mainland; including the conquest of Mexico by Comm% and of Peru by PIZARRO. The author then gives an account of the crimes of the Portuguese in Brazil and India; till the decay of their power, and the arrival of the Dutch, bring the doings of the latter nation upon the stage. As the French, from a variety of causes, have succeeded very ill in colonial matters, a chapter suffices for their deeds ; which, in the main, consist of some individual atrocities committed by adventurers in the West Indies. the wars they fo- mented amongst the Red Indians in Canada, and sundry acts of treachery they exercised against them. The British occupy a space proportionate to their success. Mr. Howirr investigates at length the policy we have pursued in India, and taking some of the more striking atrocities that occurred during our rule—as the rice famine, the tyrannies, or alleged tyrannies, of IVARRItat HASTINGi — works them up for effect. He then travels to North America ; and describes the fi ititious and fraudulent sales of land, or the forcible settlements effe.cted by the early colonists, with the wars and devastations that followed ; episodically continu- ing the subject of the treatment of the Indians under the Ame- rican Government. From the New World he goes to the Cape of Good Ho; e, under Dutch and English sway ; and thenee to Australasia, and New Zealand, and the other Polynesian islands in the Poc:fic,—though these last are not our colonies, and the atrocities, whatever they be, are merely individual crimes—off- shoots of the Newgate Calendar.
We need not tell a reader in the slightest degree acquainted. with colonial history, that so wide a field furnishes a fruitful crap of horrors: and our author exhibits much gusto in the selection: both in detail and in gross. It is not our intention or wish to ex- tenuate the crimes committed by wantonness, bigotry, lust, avarice, fear, passion,—and last, though the root of all, by the gross igno- rance which confoutided man of a different colour with the beasts, and allowed him neither rights nor compassion. But we never find that any permanent good effect is produced by injustice even against the vicious, or hy a want of discrimination as to the real character of offences, or by a disproportion of censure to offence: and traces of each of these errors are found in the book before us. For instance, our territorial acquisitions in India were not sought, as Mr. Howirr insinuates, by a design formed with- out regard to morality and pursued without regard to mercy or compunction, but were forced by circumstances upon the servants of the Company in India; one of those circumstances being the corruption and ty nanny of the native princes, who often had two other title than possession and force. What better right had IIYDER ALI, arid Tierces, whom Mr. Howirr panegyrizes, to their dominions than we have to ours ? Nor should it ever be lost sight of, that the Directors and the English Government have always shown great readiness to apply a remedy to individual tyrannies as fast as they have arisen : and the sudden growth of the empire was such that they could do no more. Other instances of ill-judged and overdone zeal might readily be adduced; but we will promed to the grand fallacy on which the whole is based—the application of the perfect conduct re- gulled by Christianity to the acts of the different colonists. It is highly desirable, ma doubt, that Christian communities should conduct themselves upon Christian principles; but do they—have they ever done so? or is their deviation Limited to their intercourse with barbarians? The Spaniards, who committed such horrible atrocities in the New World, committed similiar atrocities in Italy and the Low Countries, so far its means permitted. Do the crimes of the French in their colonies equal their crimes against their fellow countrymen in the massacre of St. Barth°. lomew ? or the miseries inflicted upon mankind by the ambition of Louis the Fourteenth ? Nay, for that matter, take families, or individuals, and tr)ing the:n by the test of Christianity, who can stand it? This sort of argument, which drags in Scripture at every turn, is worse than illogical—it is liable to be mischievous. It forces upon vulgar muds the notion that conduct is not at all influenced by religion, but by the manners of the age and the cir- cumstances of the individual ; whilst the benign but slowly ope- rating influence of Christianity, upon both these points, is liable to be overlooked. It is still more injudicious to be constantly appealing to the Bible upon the crimes of nations, unless we could penetrate the purposes of Providence ; b2cause it is subjecting the Bible to a stress it will not always bear. Amid his various colonial reading, did Mr. Howirr ever read the history of the set- tlement of Judea?
Putting sentiment aside, the truth seems to be. that, by an in- scrutable but no doubt a wise law of Providence, weakness must always perish when it comes in collision with strength; and safety will be found in exact proportion to the strength of the opposing body. The laws of motion or gravitation are not sus- pended to prevent an avalanche from overwhelming a village; the plough turns up the mountain-daisy ; the wild beast, the animals of chase, and the rarer birds, recede from advancing cul- tivation, till they gradually disappear ; and so it is when nun encounters man, unless there is some innate power of resistance. The West Indian aborigines, a weak and timorous race, were completely extinct within a few years after their first dis- covery by COLUMBUS; the Red Indian, a nobler animal, but without the artificial strength which cultivation imparts, survives in scanty numbers to this day ; the Mexicans and Peruvians, a more advanced people, still remain in considerable strength, but so inferior, it is said, is their nature, that they are unable to use the rights which the revolutions of the native countries have at last given them; the Negro, higher in the scale of the genus home, makes head against the devastations of the slave-trade and slavery, but cannot of himself resist thew,—save the Kroomau, who defies captivity by voluntary death, and so is always safe, because nobody will buy him ; the Hindoo, weaker in body, but more civilized, escapes with a change of dynasty ; the wiser Chi- nese effectually resists at the threshhold ; whilst the luxurious in- habitants of Asia Minor awl the barbarians of Northern Europe amalgamated with the Greeks and Romans, and perhaps improved the breed. Why this is so, we cannot tell, any more than we can tell why America was not inhabited by a nobler race, hardy enough to have kept their ground, and intelligent enough for civilized progression. Pondering over and puzzled by these anomalies, pious men have considered the weaker races as accursed of Gud, and have deprecated resistance to the slave-trade as a resistance to Providence. It may be as rational a theory, that each race was originally best adapted to the physical circumstances of the earth where it was placed; and when the end of their being was ful- filled, man was as much an instrument for their extinction as volcanoes and other violent natural forces for the destruction of the animals of a primeval world : so that these apparent injus- tices may be necessary laws in working out the progress of our race. The development on the grandest scale may be seen in Britain, as it was on GiESAICS invasion, and as it is now : a result in embryo may be found in the settled territory of North Ame- rica, which perhaps maintained a million of Indians, and now sup- ports, though not half reclaimed, fourteen times that number of the Anglo-Saxon race. The end of the whole is a greater amount of sentient and rational enjoyment; which a fact of ATALTE-BRUN.S puts in an arithmetical shape. One Indian wanders over one square mile : in England and France, one square mile supports from 150 to 200 inhabitants.
Hitherto, the results which have followed the spread of civili- zation over regions " where wild in woods the noble savage ran," have been founded by individual enterprise, and accomplished with a fearful amount of individual crime, national supineness, and national suffering. Whether the protection of these inferior races can pri,duce an amalgamation, or only procure for them an euthanasia, remains to be seen. The experiment in the most favourable of places, New Zealand,* has been stopped for the present, by a combination of Whigs in office, Tories expecting office, and canters doing their best to fulfil the promise that the saints shall inherit the earth. Should the New Zealand Bill be again brought forward, and the same combination be suc- cessful in again thwarting a plan which has for one of its objects the civilization and amalgamation of the aboriginal race with the new settlers, it will be the bounden duty of Government to prevent the crimes which its subjects are daily perpetrating in that country and over the South Seas : a perpetration which has neither purpose nor policy to induce any one to wink at it,—for the miscreants who corrupt the morals and infect the health of the natives, and very often murder them, do not pretend, like the Spaniards, to be in search of gold, which is to pay a heavy tax to the state; or, like the first settlers in America, to extend the dominion of the Crown ; or, like the East India Company, to advance the commerce, or even, like the founders of a penal settlement, to afford a sink for the vice of the mother country. They are mere outcasts— runaway whalers and escaped convicts. And the evil does not rest on individual evidence ; for it was some years since thus an- nounced by Lord GODERICH, when Colonial Secretary- " It is impossible to read, without shame and indignation, the details which these documents disclose. The unfortunate natives of New Zealand, unless some decisive measures of prevention be adopted, will, I fear, be shortly added to the number of the barbarous tribes who, in different parts of the globe, have fallen a sacrifice to their intercourse with civilized men, who bear and di,- grace the name of Christians. I cannot contemplate the too pro- bable results without the deepest anxiety. There can be no more sacred duty than that of using every possible method to rescue the natives of those extensive islands from the further evils which impend over them, and to deliver our own country from the disgrace and crime of having either occasioned or tolerated such enormities."
How Lord GODERICH (now Theism) discharged his "most sacred duty," is known to those who attended the Lords' Commit- tee which lately sat on this subject : how the Colonial 011ice dis- charges its "most sacred duty," may be understood from the fact, That matters are worse now than when the above passage was written, and, if not daily getting worse still, it is owing to some lucky accident, and not to any exertions of the Colonial Minister, or the people under him. Here are some particulars,—not very new perhaps, and rather injured in their etlect by Mr. HOM'ITT'S .exaggerated style, but still very repulsive.
" The same savages that laid waste the West Indies—that massacred the South Americans—that have chased the North Americans to the "tar west "—that shot the Caffres for their cattle—that have covered the coasts of Africa with the blood and fires and rancorous malice of the slave-wars—that have exterminated
• The experiment may appear to be on its trial in South Australia ; but its success will be more conclusive than its failure, on account of the paucity of its inhabitants, and their obviously inferior nature. The New Zealanders have given one of the best proofs of aptitude, by sometimes drubbing the Europeans.
millions of Hindus by famine, and hold a hundred millions of them at tlfs moment in the most abject condition of poverty and oppression—the oat savages that are at this moment also carrying the Hill Coolies from the East (as if they had not a scene of enormities there wide enough for their capscit,i of cruelty) to sacrifice them in the West, on the graves of millions of murders,' Negroes —the same savages are come hither also. The savages of Europe, the meg heartless and merciless race that ever inhabited the earth—a race, for the range and continuance of its atrocities, without a parallel in this world, and, it may' be safely believed, in any other—are busy in the South Sea Islands. A rosins clan of sailors and runaway convicts have revived once snore the crimes ssi character of the old buccaniers. They go from island to island, diffusing debauchery, loathsome diseases, and murder, as freely as if they were the greatest blessings that Europe had to bestow. They are the restless and trim. phant apostles of misery and destruction ; and such are the achievements, shit It is declared that, unless our Govei want interpose some check to their pro, gress, they will as completely annihilate the islanders as the Charibs were ann. hilated in the West Indies. When Captain Cook was at the Sandwich Islands, he estimated the inhabitants at 400,000. In 1823, Mr. Williams made s calculation, and found them about 150,000. Mr. Daniel Wheeler, a member of the Society of Friends, who has just returned from those regions, state that they now are reduced to 110,000; a diminution of 40,000 in fifteen year,. Captain Cook estimated the population of Tahiti at 200,000; when the Missionaries arrived there, there were not above 8,000."
If Mr. HOW1TT could impose the necessary curb on his feeling% and the tendency to talk in " Ercles vein," we would advise him to turn his attention from the past, to a branch of Colonization on which some service might really be rendered—the present condi- tion and treatment of the aborigines in our colonies, with some practical suggestions for remedying the evils under which they labour as this part, which is really the most important division of the subject, is not very well handled in the present volume.
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