CHAPTER XIII 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[199] 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.