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TUESDAY, July 13, 1937.
SINO-JAPANESE CONFLICT
01
Far
F418
Was
SAVAGES Are NOT So UNCIVILISED
by
Jock Marshall
AM an Australlan, and I have never been in England before. I have come straight from a journey of scientific exploration In New Guinea, the big island lying at the top of Australia, where men still cut down trees with stone axes.
"
Within a few weeks I have been transported from
prehistoric Jungle to the biggest city in the civilised world.
When I look into things, I'm not too sure about that word "civilised." I doubt whether, after all, my black companions are really so "savage" and you "civilised" people are basically better or happler than they. Where your ways differ, I'm none too sure yours are best.
So let me put myself in the place of the savage, and compare his life (as I have shared it on my expeal- tions) with yours.
You all have your pet cures for Indigestion; laxatives, nerve-tonics and health-restorers. You make yourselves 1 by faulty feeding; those of you who live in towns take little exercise, fail out of health, and spend a king's ransom trying to get well again.
We know no such worries. We eat an abundance from the well- balanced diet of our ancestors. Our very mode of existence ensures that we take a proper amount of exer- cise, with the result that we never suffer frout indigestion, never have bad teeth. Most of us are of splen- did physique.
T
O our primitive women, childbirth is but an in- oldent. Again, correct exercise, suitable food and plenty of sunlight keep them safe.
Our puerperal mortality rate is negligible: the dusky Jungle woman runs infinitely less risk than the civilised woman.
But, of course, it is only com- paratively few "civilised" women who can obtain the best attention that science and money can supply. Here again Our savage system differs.
Everybody in a primitive jungle. community eats much the same sort of food and the same amount.
Our houses are identical, too; the Idea of one man owning a better house because, he owned more property would be laughed to scorn in any healthy primitive community. Every house is warm, and keeps out the rain; and this 19 considered suffelent. Every home contains much the same sort of things-enough of everything necessary and very little of any thing that isn't.
Our women work in the gardens, while we men hunt in the forests, Sweet potatoes, nuts and fruit,
"Untutored in politics, novar droaming that such a thing ex- ists, we have a system of living that never fails."
yams and taro. sago from the heart of the sago palm, ment and fish from the jungle.
Everyone has plenty to eat, ex- cept in the extremely rare occa- slons of crop failure-"time be- long hungry." we call it-and then every person in the com munity has as little to ent as hle neighbour.
There is a communal belt- lightening, and the bush is scoured as never before.
The economic shape of our life is something very like Socialism; in fact, if it's not that I don't know what it is,
Untutared in politics, never dreaming that such a thing exists, we have a system of living. which never fails. One for all, all for one, is our creed, und wo stick to it.
UR villages are run on communal lines, our gardens are communal, and altogether my crude cannibal friends provide an object lesson in living which you could very well learn.
The sight of a responsible Euro- pean concern dumping hundreds of cases of fruit into the sea, or burning coffee by the ton. would All us with horror, and we should entertain grave doubts of your sunily.
The spectacle of American farmers ploughing back into the
DEATH IN THE MACHINE
Whatever the rights wrongs of the Sino-Japanese) clash in North China, the situa- tion is one which, unless care- fully handled, may well have the most serious consequences to the general peace of the East. There have been varying versions of the actual cause of the resort to hostilities. The [original Japanese claim was that whilst manoeuvres were being carried out, Japanese troops were subjected to machine-gun Are from a Chinese pill-box. Then there was a Chinese story that the Japanese attacked; Chinese troops when the latter refused to withdraw from an area which the Japanese desired to convert into an aerodrome, Another version is that during the manoeuvres a shot heurd and when the Japanese roll-call was ordered it found that one of their men was missing, whereupon the Japan- ese demanded the right to enter the Chinese defence area and to search the city of Wang-| ping, a procedure which the Chinese resisted. In the mul- tiplicity of accounts, the truth - is hard to discover. There seems little doubt, however, that the | Japanese, with covetous eyes on
North China, have long wished; to see the 29th Army, one of the biggest and most efficient in OR some months I have tried to China, to be forced out of its obtain rellable official statistics present sphore. Friction be- showing how we in Britain compare with frst-class foreign countries in tween
and this Army
the
the matter of safety on the roads. Japanese forces WBS always This information, which seems to has been liable to lead to trouble-and, me to have vital interest,
difficult to
come
by. But as past experience has shown,
extremely at length, after an interval of six
inter "incidents" are easily created.
1 months, have managed to get proximately what I wanted inrough But whatever the precise act which created the present our most courteous foreign Embassies. The foreign countries- I selected trouble, it will be conceded that
were the United States, France, Ger- the presence of large numbers of
many, and Italy, as I took those to be in social Japanese troops on Chinese soil, the nearest to ourselves and the practice of carrying out conditions. manoeuvres over extensive areas close to Chinese defence regions, must produce irritation, if it does not actually invite trouble. That danger is all the more emphasised when Japan's policies in North China are borne in: mind. What the upshot of the present trouble will be remains to be seen. Nanking's attitude has not been too clearly defined; Marshal Chiang Kai-shek has Return: £76. been silent so far. But it is clear that China as a whole is in no mood to make undue con-
Sailing Monday, 9th August for Saigon, Manila, Sandakan. Salamaua, Rabaul, Sydney & Melbourne.
A COMPARISON BY
"AN OLD STAGER"
the
The figures are extremely interest ing. In the case of America, home and eradio of the automobile, where even tramps run their own cars, the death-roll on the roads in 1034 totalled 30,101, and 37,000 in 1935. This works out in the latter case at 20 per hundred thousand of the population and 144.5 per hundred thousand cars on the roads.
earth fruitful crops, and wastefully slaughtering, at the behest of econ- omists, thousands of pigs. would render us speechless
In Melanesia, in Darkest Africa, in the centro of Australia; in fact. in every primitive society, an over- abundance of food in the signal for
grand communal distribution among the people. Great cere monial feasts, great joy-making by everybody.
N civilised communities mep's clothing is all -wrong. YouT women, perhaps, wear sensible clothes, but even in the heat of summer your men wear heavy sults more de- algned for a polar winter. men's sults are unwashable, they harbour dirt and disease germs.
And
My New Guinea savage friends wear just enough, and not a single man or woman wears a stitch more. There clothes do not make the mand in fact, a shirt or even a strip of the white man's calico ac- tually detracts from his appear- ance
The women move with an irre- sistible grace in short fibre string skirts, threaded with pretty blue bead-seeds or stained with native pigments.
In ornamentation, they ore superior to white women. Their comparative lack of clothing pro- vides them with an excuse to wear bangles, wristbands, earrings, decorative combs, and flowers In their hair.
They paint their faces rather than their lips. They do not paint their Anger-nalls, but many of them paint their teeth. They do not paint their toenails, but they pluck their eyebrows and shave their bodies.
M
ARRIAGE is a much saner and simpler busi- ness with us in New Guinen. If a boy wishes to marry n girl he makes her a present and if it is accepted he makes more presents to her people. A date 13 set, more reciprocal gift-making takes place, and she goes to live in the home which ho hus prepared.
If after a certain time the mar- riage is not a success, the gifts are returned and she goes to live with
come Finally, we
to
Germany.
her people or somebody else. Her valute is not depreciated; no doubt her next marriage will be an un- qualified success.
The idea of one of the wise old men of the tribe having the un- speakable audacity to set her value down na the equivalent of one farthing would strike the aver-- age healthy-minded native as be-- lig too creamingly funny for words. He would not understand,
We, have our superstitions, of course. Every "civilised Euro- pean laughs at savage customs. primitive superstitions
But tons of salt are thrown over English left shoulders every year; boots are worn out making tours around
countless ladders, and holes are worn in pockets with "lucky stones." A short time ago In England I met a seemingly- normal person who told me that he would never have any tuck be- cause he once ran over a China- inan In New York!
Y
OU laugh at storles of the Incredible powers of native Sorcerers anci medicine meu, but any honest English doctor will admit that
In many cases the medicines he ad- ministers have no real effect. The rest is psychological encourage- ment coupled with the fact that about seventy per cent. of people get weil naturally!
In England. herbal and spiritual "healers
establish vast reputu- tions and make much money- from the Bis and superstitions of- their fellows.
In this they are little different from our native sorcerer with his
JUL "magic."
In fact in all matters right up to religion itself savage life is one. plece," a communal pattern made - up of the whole tribe.
And the whole system really works to protect all its members. If A
a "bad-hat" among my stone- age companions wants to cheat a friend out of the possession of
he knows his toro-patch
the penalties and runs the risk of them; he does not expect to get away with it by saying, "Bualnoss is Business," and appealing to his fellow tribesmen as men of the. world." Their world is not like that!
much nicer than Mr. Hore-Belisha's This is Ц monstrous price for brutal "ass murder," for example. civilisation to pay for miracle of the internal combustion engine, even abilities and 1,150,000 temporary dis-AMERICA Worst
without reckoning any flying casual- abilitles. The total economic loss to
ties in the butcher's bill. Humanity the nation from these deaths and In-
dearly for its mechanical juries, together with the property Here the figures cover twelve months, triumphs. The question arises whe- damage loss, amounted to 1,580,000, one quarter of which was in 1935 and ther, apart from actual physical and 000 dollars. So, apart from loss of the three other quarters in 1930. material hurt, we may not be sus- life and injuries, road casualties cost Our own figures are, of course, tauning other even more serious in- America three years ago about £300,- easily ascertainable. In 1935, since jury. 000,000 sterling. That information when the totala huve appreciably in- comes from the extremely prompt creased, we had 6.502 deaths on our DULLED CONSCIENCES „--- and obliging U.S.A. Embassy in Lon-roads and 221,720 injury don, and may therefore be accepted. may mention
in incidentally that as strictly accurate.
A CAREFUL ANALYSIS
with
In the case of France, the figures are much less startling, as one would expect, despite the ferocity which Paris taximen career around on what to us seems the wrong side of the street.
Jury.
cases. I
When
1935 Just as Polonius said that borrow. in London 1,113 people were killed in ing dulled the edge of, husbondary, street accidents. The latest year may not automobilism bo dulling the available in the case of Paris is 1930, edge of Christian conscience? when there were 303 deaths in the one reflects what a tremendous ado streets due to traffic accidents. In the civilised nations have made about its efforta Berlin in 1933 the street deaths total- the League of Nations, and led 087, and injury cases over 10,000. to avert war, and how utterly indif- ferent the world in general shows it- The returns show a steady upward self on the subject of the road holo- tendency in Germany, as generally clsewhere, and deaths numbered caust, there is certainly a strong in- For the latest year in which official
not responsive to anything but the statistics are available, which is 3,058, as against 171,010 enses of inference that the public conscience is more spectacular forms of human 1930, the deaths numbered 3,010, and
The French re- It will be seen, therefore, that, takk-slaughter, the injured 20,230.
But it is fullle to kick against the turn makes no bones about it, but ing population into account, the worst frankly attributes the deaths in 2,425 statistics by far are those from Ame-carburetters. One of the truisms of believe there has been a marked cases to the drivers concerned. Ex-rice, and the best those returned by mortal existence is that there is no upward move in the ensunitles in ceeding the speed limit accounts for France. But there is, on the latest setting back the clock except for U.S.A. since 1935, but I prefer to 886 deaths, non-observance of the average, probably not much in it as Summer Time. We shall go on with stick to official figures. All I have to law for 679, careless driving for 468, between France, Germany, and aur-this massacre of the innocents upon
selves but drunkenness for only 45. It will especially if we take into con- the public highways until
occurs to go upon for the more recent years is shed, and that may not be qulic so
be seen that apparently the French alderation the fact that we are, next somebody to discover some scientific what the American papers have pub-
to America, the most car-minded remedy for the grievous ill to which authorities make a much more care- reliable. The last year's return, ne-
mankind was certainly not heir, ful analysis of their rond casualties country.
But what a tragle waste of life and The ancients said that the price of cording to that source, was actually than we do here. cessions to Japan. Popular 90,000 dead. That seems on almost The Italian figures are peculiar in destruction of limb these united re- liberty was eternal vigilance. For
incredible Increase in two years." one respect. They reveal a con- turns show as the result of modern the moderns the pri
Hia is be price of In addition to the 30,000 deaths in
#iderable decline, both in fatal re-transport developments. On P.. GO. Building, sentiment is all in favour of re-
the coming increasingly eternal circum- sistance to any further encroach- U.S.A. In 1934-the additional incidents and injuries on the roads, for most conservative estimate at least spection. A whole generation has
is under which formation for 1835 is not available 1030 as compared with 1936. Deaths 60,000 or 70,000 people are being done arisen
the p ment on China's sovereignty.
necessity there were 105,000 permanent dis- In the latter year totalled 3,048 Italy, Germany, and Britain alone.
every year in and to death
in U.S.A., France, of walking delleately as Agog. Much has been made in recent
injuries 45,309, as compared with
To adapt a familiar old war-time times, by Japanese spokesmen,
2,320 and 91,354 respectively in 1936. What the
harvest muy be for slogan of the training camps, there of Japan's peaceful intentions hands and then relying on I observe, by the way, that the the whole one can only hazard are only two catégories of people towards China. Unfortunately, Government recognition of the victims under the diplomatie category in the actual facts. Added to this not quite quick enough, or just not
official returns describe road, rough guess. If we Italian officia
Fut it at 150,- the quick and the dead, plus, of Kory 000 we should probably be well with course, those who were either just the latest developments would fait accompli. In any event, it of "parsone infortunate, s which appear to belle the sincerity of is obvious that the Government seems # useful hint for our own there are the immensely larger re- quite dead, but have landed all the those declarations; unless it is,
Transport Ministry officials. There turns of road casunliles which are not same in hospital casualty words. once again, a case of the military that matters have come to is nothing like tactful handling of fatal, but in a proportion of cases of When one dispassionately counts the taking the law into their own
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is at one with the military now
hoad.
31
such a controversial business as road all events may in human suffering cost, one must needs wonder whether casualties. "Persone infortunate" is and waste be even worse.
the game is worth the sparking plug.