“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 &ldquo............