Military Manners and Customs
The assumption, therefore, that savage races are ignorant of all laws of war, or incapable of learning them, would seem to be based rather on our indifference about their customs than on the realities of the case, seeing that the preceding evidence to the contrary results from the most cursory inquiry. But whatever value there may be in our own laws of war, as helping to constitute a real difference between savage and civilised warfare, the best way to spread the blessing of a knowledge of them would clearly be for the more civilised races to adhere to them strictly in all wars waged with their less advanced neighbours. An English commander, for instance, should no more set fire to the capital of Ashantee or Zululand for so paltry a pretext as the display of British power than he would set fire to Paris or Berlin; he should no more have villages or granaries burnt in Africa or Afghanistan than he would in Normandy; and he should no more keep a Zulu envoy or truce-bearer in chains212 than he would so deal with the bearer of a white flag from a Russian or Italian enemy.
The reverse principle, which is yet in vogue, that with barbarians you must or may be barbarous, leads to some curious illustrations of civilised warfare when it comes in conflict with the less civilised races. In one of the Franco-Italian wars of the sixteenth century, more than 2,000 women and children took refuge in a large mountain cavern, and were there suffocated by a party of French soldiers, who set fire to a quantity of wood, straw, and hay, which they stacked at the mouth of the cave; but it was considered so shameful an act, that the Chevalier Bayard had two of the ringleaders hung at the cavern’s mouth.213 Yet when the French General Pélissier in this century suffocated the unresisting Algerians in their caves, it was even defended as no worse than the shelling of a fortress; and there is evidence that gun-cotton was not unfrequently used to blast the entrance to caves in Zululand in which men, women, and children had hoped to find shelter against an army which professed only to be warring with their king.214
The following description of the way in which, in the Ashantee war, the English forces obtained native carriers for their transport service is not without its instruction in this respect: —
‘We took to kidnapping upon a grand scale. Raids were made on all the Assin villages within reach of the line of march, and the men, and sometimes the women, carried off and sent up the country under guard, with cases of provisions. Lieutenant Bolton, of the 1st West India Regiment, rendered immense service in this way. Having been for some time commandant of Accra, he knew the coast and many of the chiefs; and having a man-of-war placed at his disposal, he went up and down the coast, landing continually, having interviews with chiefs, and obtaining from them large numbers of men and women; or when this failed, landing at night with a party of soldiers, surrounding villages, and sweeping off the adult population, leaving only a few women to look after the children. In this way, in the course of a month, he obtained several thousands of carriers.’215
And then a certain school of writers talks of the love and respect for the British Empire which these exhibitions of our might are calculated to win from the inferior races! The Ashantees are disgraced by the practice of human sacrifices, and the Zulus have many a barbarous usage; but no amount of righteous indignation on that account justifies such dealings with them as those above described. If it does, we can no longer condemn the proceedings of the Spaniards in the New World. For we have to remember that it was not only the Christianity of the Inquisition, or Spanish commerce that they wished to spread; not mere gold nor new lands that they coveted, but that they also strove for such humanitarian objects as the abolition of barbarous customs like the Mexican human sacrifices. ‘The Spaniards that saw these cruel sacrifices,’ wrote a contemporary, the Jesuit Acosta, ‘resolved with all their power to abolish so detestable and cursed a butchery of men.’ The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were in intention or expression every whit as humane as we English of the nineteenth. Yet their actions have been a reproach to their name ever since. Cortes subjected Guatamozin, king of Mexico, to torture. Pizarro had the Inca of Peru strangled at the stake. Alvarado invited a number of Mexicans to a festival, and made it an opportunity to massacre them. Sandoval had 60 caziques and 400 nobles burnt at one time, and compelled their relations and children to witness their punishment. The Pope Paul had very soon (1537) to issue a bull, to the effect that the Indians were really men and not brutes, as the Spaniards soon affected to regard them.
The whole question was, moreover, argued out at that time between Las Casas and Sepulveda, historiographer to the Emperor Charles V. Sepulveda contended that more could be effected against barbarism by a month of war than by 100 years of preaching; and in his famous dispute with Las Casas at Valladolid in 1550, defended the justice of all wars undertaken against the natives of the New World, either on the ground of the latter’s sin and wickedness, or on the plea of protecting them from the cruelties of their own fellow-countrymen; the latter plea being one to which in recent English wars a prominent place has been always given. Las Casas replied – and his reply is unanswerable – that even human sacrifices are a smaller evil than indiscriminate warfare. He might have added that military contact between people unequally civilised does more to barbarise the civilised than to civilise the barbarous population. It is well worthy of notice and reflection that the European battle-fields became distinctly more barbarous after habits of greater ferocity had been acquired in wars beyond the Atlantic, in which the customary restraints were forgotten, and the ties of a common human nature dissolved by the differences of religion and race.
The same effect resulted in Roman history, when the extended dominion of the Republic brought its armies into contact with foes beyond the sea. The Roman annalists bear witness to the deterioration that ensued both in their modes of waging war and in the national character.216 It is in an Asiatic war that we first hear of a Roman general poisoning the springs;217 in a war for the possession of Crete that the Cretan captives preferred to poison themselves rather than suffer the cruelties inflicted on them by Metellus;218 in the Thracian war that the Romans cut off their prisoners’ hands, as Cæsar afterwards did those of the Gauls.219 And we should remember that a practical English statesman like Cobden foresaw, as a possible evil result of the closer relations between England and the East, a similar deterioration in the national character of his countrymen. ‘With another war or two,’ he wrote, ‘in India and China, the English people would have an appetite for bull-fights if not for gladiators.’220
Nor is there often any compensation for such results in the improved condition of the tribes whom it is sought to civilise after the method recommended by Sepulveda. The happiest fate of the populations he wished to see civilised by the sword was where they anticipated their extermination or slavery by a sort of voluntary suicide. In Cuba, we are told that ‘they put themselves to death, whole families doing so together, and villages inviting other villages to join them in a departure from a world that was no longer tolerable.’221 And so it was in the other hemisphere; the Ladrone islanders, reduced by the sword and the diseases of the Spaniards, took measures intentionally to diminish their numbers and to check population, preferring voluntary extinction to the foul mercies of the Jesuits: till now a lepers’ hospital is the only building left on what was once one of the most populous of their islands.
It must, however, be admitted in justice to the Spaniards, that the principles which governed their dealings with heathen races infected more or less the conduct of colonists of all nationalities. A real or more often a pretended zeal for the welfare of native tribes came among all Christian nations to co-exist with the doctrine, that in case of conflict with them the common restraints of war might be put in abeyance. What, for instance, can be worse than this, told of the early English settlers in America by one of themselves? ‘The Plymouth men came in the mean time to Weymouth, and there pretended to feast the savages of those parts, bringing with them forks and things for the purpose, which they set before the savages. They ate thereof without any suspicion of any mischief, who were taken upon a watchword given, and with their own knives hanging about their necks were by the Plymouth planters stabbed and slain.’222
Among the early English settlers it soon came to be thought, says Mather, a religious act to kill an Indian. In the latter half of the seventeenth century both the French and English authorities adopted the custom of scalping and of offering rewards for the scalps of their Indian enemies. In 1690 the most healthy and vigorous Indians taken by the French ‘were sold in Canada, the weaker were sacrificed and scalped, and for every scalp they had a premium.’223 Caleb Lyman, who afterwards became an elder of a church at Boston, left an account of the way in which he himself and five Indians surprised a wigwam, and scalped six of the seven persons inside, so that each might receive the promised reward. On their petition to the great and general court they received 30l. each, and Penhallow says not only that they probably expected eight times as much, but that at the time of writing the province would have readily paid a sum of 800l. for a similar service.224 Captain Lovewell, says the same contemporary eulogist of the war that lasted from July 1722 to December 1725, ‘from Dunstable with thirty volunteers went northward, who marching several miles up country came on a wigwam where were two Indians, one of whom they killed and the other took, for which they received the promised bounty of 100l. a scalp, and two shillings and sixpence a day besides.’ (December 19, 1724.)225 At the surprise of Norridjwock ‘the number of dead which we scalped were 26, besides Mr. Rasle the Jesuit, who was a bloody incendiary.’226 It is evident that these very liberal rewards must have operated as a frequent cause of Indian wars, and made the colonists open-eared to tales of native outrages; indeed the whites sometimes disguised themselves like Indians, and robbed like Indians, in order, it would appear, the more effectually to raise the war-cry against them.227
Since the Spaniards first trained bloodhounds in Cuba to hunt the Indians, the alliance between soldiers and dogs has been a favourite one in barbarian warfare. The Portuguese used them in Brazil when they hunted the natives for slaves.228 And an English officer in a treatise he wrote in the last century as a sort of military guide to Indian warfare suggested coolly: ‘Every light horseman ought to be provided with a bloodhound, which would be useful to find out the enemy’s ambushes and to follow their tracks. They would seize the naked savages, and at least give time to the horsemen to come up with them.’229 In the Molucca Islands the use of two bloodhounds against a native chief was the cause of a great confederacy between all the islands to shake off the Spanish and Portuguese yoke.230 And even in the war waged by the United States in Florida from 1838 to 1840, General Taylor was authorised to send to Cuba for bloodhounds to scent out the Indians; nor, according to one account, was their aid resorted to in vain.231
Poison too has been called in aid. Speaking of the Yuta Indians, a traveller assures us that ‘as in Australia, arsenic and corrosive sublimate in springs and provisions have diminished their number.’232 And in the same way ‘poisoned rum helped to exterminate the Tasmanians.’233
But there is worse yet in this direction. The Portuguese in Brazil, when the importation of slaves from Africa rendered the capture of the natives less desirable than their extermination, left the clothes of persons who had died of small-pox or scarlet fever to be found by them in the woods.234 And the caravan traders from the Missouri to Santa Fé are said by the same method or in presents of tobacco to have communicated the small-pox to the Indian tribes of that district in 1831.235 The enormous depopulation of most tribes by the small-pox since their acquaintance with the whites is one of the most remarkable results in the history of their mutual connection; nor is it likely ever to be known to what extent the coincidence was accidental.
It is pleasant to turn from these practical illustrations of the theory that no laws of war need be regarded in hostilities with savage tribes to the only recorded trial of a contrary system, and to find, not only that it is associated with one of the greatest names in English history, but also that the success it met with fully justifies the suspicion and disfavour with which the commoner usage is beginning to be regarded. The Indians with whom Penn made his famous treaty in 1682 (of which Voltaire said that it was the only treaty that was never ratified by an oath, and the only treaty that was never broken), were of the same Algonquin race with whom the Dutch had scarcely ever kept at peace, and against whom they had warred in the customary ruthless fashion of those times. The treaty was based on the principle of an adjustment of differences by a tribunal of an equal number of Red men and of White. ‘Penn,’ says the historian, ‘came without arms; he declared his purpose to abstain from violence, he had no message but peace, and not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian’236 For more than seventy years, from 1682 to 1754, when the French war broke out, in short, during the whole time that the Quakers had the principal share in the government of Pennsylvania, the history of the Indians and Whites in that province was free from the tale of murders and hostilities that was so common in other districts; so that the single instance in which the experiment of equal laws and forbearance has been patiently persevered in, can at least boast of a success that in support of the contrary system it were very difficult to find for an equal number of years in any other part of the world.
It may also be said against Sepulveda’s doctrine, that the habits of a higher civilisation, where they are really worth spreading, spread more easily and with more permanent effect among barbarous neighbours by the mere contagion of a better example than by the teaching of fire and sword. Some of the Dyak tribes in Borneo are said to have given up human sacrifices from the better influences of the Malays on the coast district.237 The Peruvians, according to Prescott, spread their civilisation among their ruder neighbours more by example than by force. ‘Far from provoking hostilities, they allowed time for the salutary example of their own institutions to work its effect, trusting that their less civilised neighbours would submit to their sceptre from a conviction of the blessings it would secure to them.’ They exhorted them to lay aside their cannibalism, their human sacrifices, and their other barbarities; they employed negotiation, conciliatory treatment, and presents to leading men among the tribes; and only if all these means failed did they resort to war, but to war which at every stage was readily open to propositions of peace, and in which any unnecessary outrage on the persons or property of their enemy was punished with death.
Something will have been done for the cause of this better method of civilising the lower races, if we forewarn and forearm ourselves against the symptoms of hostilities with them by a thorough understanding of the conditions which render such hostilities probable. For as an outbreak of fever is to some extent preventable by a knowledge of the conditions which make for fevers, so may the outbreak of war be averted by a knowledge of the laws which govern their appearance. The experience which we owe to history in this respect is amply sufficient to enable us to generalise with some degree of confidence and certainty as to the causes or steps which produce wars or precede them; and from the remembrance of our dealings with the savage races of South Africa we may forecast with some misgivings the probable course of our connection with a country like New Guinea.
A colony of Europeans in proximity with barbarian neighbours naturally desires before long an increase of territory at the expense of the latter. The first sign of such a desire is the expedition of missionaries into the country, who not only serve to spy it out for the benefit of the colony, but invariably weaken the native political force by the creation of a division of feeling, and of an opposition between the love of old traditions and the temptation of novel customs and ideas. The innovating party, being at first the smaller, consisting of the feeblest and poorest members of the community, and of those who gladly flock to the mission-stations for refuge from their offences against tribal law, the missionaries soon perceive the impossibility of further success without the help of some external aid. The help of a friendly force can alone turn the balance of influence in their favour, and they soon learn to contemplate with complacency the advantages of a military conquest of the natives by the colony or mother-country. The evils of war are cancelled, in their eyes, by the delusive visions of ultimate benefit, and, in accordance with a not uncommon perversion of the moral sense, an end that is assumed to be religious is made to justify measures that are the reverse.
When the views and interests of the colonial settlers and of the missionaries have thus, inevitably but without design, fallen into harmony, a war is certain to be not far distant. Apparently accidental, it is in reality as certain as the production of green from a mixture of blue and yellow. Some dispute about boundaries, some passing act of violence, will serve for a reason of quarrel, which will presently be supported by a fixed array of collateral pretexts. The Press readily lends its aid; and in a week the colony trembles or affects to tremble from a panic of invasion, and vials of virtue are expended on the vices of the barbarians which have been for years tolerated with equanimity or indifference. Their customs are painted in the blackest colours; the details of savage usages are raked up from old books of travel; rumours of massacres and injuries are sedulously propagated; and the whole country is represented as in such a state of anarchy, that the majority of the population, in their longing for deliverance from their own rulers, would gladly welcome even a foreign conqueror. In short, a war against them comes speedily to be regarded as a war in their behalf, as the last word of philanthropy and beneficence; and the atrocities that subsequently ensue are professedly undertaken, not against the unfortunate people who endure them, but to liberate them from the ruler of their choice or sufferance, in whose behalf however they fight to the death.
To every country, therefore, which would fain be spared from these discreditable wars with barbarian tribes on the borders of its colonies, it is clear that the greatest caution is necessary against the abuses of missionary propagandism. The almost absolute failure of missions in recent centuries, and more especially in the nineteenth, is intimately associated with the greater political importance which the improved facilities of travel and intercourse have conferred upon them. Everyone has heard how Catholicism was persecuted in Japan, till at last the very profession of Christianity was made a capital crime in that part of the world. But a traveller, who knew the East intimately at the time, explains how it was that the Jesuits’ labours resulted so disastrously. On the outbreak of civil dissensions in Japan, ‘the Christian priests thought it a proper time for them to settle their religion on the same foundation that Mahomet did his, by establishing it in blood. Their thoughts ran on nothing less than extirpating the heathen out of the land, and they framed a conspiracy of raising an army of 50,00 °Christians to murder their countrymen, that so the whole island might be illuminated by Christianity such as it was then.’238 And in the same way, a modern writer, speaking of the very limited success of missions in India, has asserted frankly that ‘in despair many Christians in India are driven to wish and pray that some one, or some way, may arise for converting the Indians by the sword.’239
Nor are the heathen themselves blind to the political dangers which are involved in the presence of missionaries among them. All over the world conversion is from the native point of view the same thing as disaffection, and war is dreaded as the certain consequence of the adoption of Christianity. The French bishop, Lefebvre, when asked by the mandarins of Cochin China, in 1847, the purpose of his visit, said that he read in their faces that they suspected him ‘of having come to excite some outbreak among the neophytes, and perhaps prepare the way for an European army;’ and the king was ‘afraid to see Christians multiply in his kingdom, and in case of war with European Powers, combine with his enemies.’240 How right events have proved him to have been!
The story is the same in Africa. ‘Not long after I entered the country,’ said the missionary, Mr. Calderwood, of Caffraria, ‘a leading chief once said to me, “When my people become Christians, they cease to be my people.”’241 The Norwegian missionaries were for twenty years in Zululand without making any converts but a few destitute children, many of whom had been given to them out of pity by the chiefs,242 and their failure was actually ascribed by the Zulu king to their having taught the incompatibility of Christianity with allegiance to a heathen ruler.243 In 1877, a Zulu of authority expressed the prevalent native reasoning on this point in language which supplies the key to disappointments that extend much further than Zululand: ‘We will not allow the Zulus to become so-called Christians. It is not the king says so, but every man in Zululand. If a Zulu does anything wrong, he at once goes to a mission-station, and says he wants to become a Christian; if he wants to run away with a girl, he becomes a Christian; if he wishes to be exempt from serving the king, he puts on clothes, and is a Christian; if a man is an umtagati (evil-doer), he becomes a Christian.’244
It is on this account that in wars with savage nations the destruction of mission-stations has always been so constant an episode. Nor can we wonder at this when we recollect that in the Caffre war of 1851, for instance, it was a subject of boast with the missionaries that it was Caffres trained on the mission-stations who had preserved the English posts along the frontiers, carried the English despatches, and fought against their own countrymen for the preservation and defence of the colony.245 It is rather a poor result of all the money and labour that has been spent in the attempt to Christianise South Africa, that the Wesleyan mission-station at Edendale should have contributed an efficient force of cavalry to fight against their countrymen in the Zulu campaign; and we may hesitate whether most to despise the missionaries who count such a result as a triumph of their efforts, or the converts whom they reward with tea and cake for military service with the enemies of their countrymen.246
It needs no great strain of intelligence to perceive that this use of mission-stations as military training-schools scarcely tends to enhance the advantages of conversion in the minds of the heathen among whom they are planted.
For these reasons, and because it is becoming daily more apparent that wars are less a necessary evil than an optional misery of human life, the principal measure for a country which would fain improve, and live at peace with, the less civilised races which touch the numerous borders of its empire, would be the legal restraint or prevention of missionary enterprise: a proposal that will appear less startling if we reflect that in no quarter of the globe can that method of civilising barbarism point to more than local or ephemeral success. The Protestant missions of this century are in process of failure, as fatal and decided as that which befel the Catholic missions of the French, Portuguese, or Spanish, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and very much from the same causes. The English wars in South Africa, with which the Protestant missionaries have been so closely connected, have frustrated all attempts to Christianise that region, just as ‘the fearful wars occasioned directly or indirectly by the missionaries’ sent by the Portuguese to the kingdoms of Congo and Angola in the sixteenth century rendered futile similar attempts on the West Coast.247
