still more striking. There has been a continuous decrease of the full-bloods and a steady increase of the half-breeds, so that in the present year the latter have at length overtaken the former. The miscegenation has its picturesque incidents. The regal dignity of Montezuma clothes with barbaric grandeur two noble Spanish houses; the blood of Pocahontas flows proudly in Virginian veins; beauty visibly descends from the valor of Eauparaha, and prestige has not deserted the offspring of Te Heu Heu. It may be looked upon as the undesigned atonement which the immigrant makes to the aboriginal for robbing him of his country; and the amount of mixed blood is at length the aboriginal's sole share in the population of the land he once monopolized.
The agencies accelerating or retarding the inevitable progression toward the two termini have an interest melancholy or cheering, but superficial. The white man's drink, diseases, vices, and crimes are partly offset by the benefits of imperial trusteeship, missionary labor, and the contagion of white settlement. The first is real but distant; the value of the second is chiefly initial, and the action of the last is powerful but unconscious. The home government is beneficent when it protects the natives from the avarice of the settlers, and often maleficent in the guise of beneficence, as in the "insensate negrophilism" of the English at Sierra Leone, or in the sad comedy of conferring French citizenship on the blacks of Senegal and the Antilles. The utility of missionary work is much contested in the colonies, where it can not be denied that the missionaries have done well for themselves and their families. Even clergymen, from Sydney Smith to Canon Isaac Taylor, have exulted over "the great missionary failure." Whatever may be the case in India or Africa, throughout one wide colonizing region—that of the South Seas—this great failure has been an unquestionable success. A whole race, in a variety of families—Hawaiians, Tahitans, Tongans, Samoans, and Maoris—has been raised several degrees in the scale of civilization. Missionaries, and they alone, have done this great thing. Yet, as with the mocking finale to Heine's finest songs, one has to qualify this high eulogy by asking whether they have not smoothed the path of these people to the grave. They have paved the way for colonization by breaking down the resistance of the natives, and they have insured that a warlike race shall die ingloriously in its bed. The influence of the surrounding settlers begins where that of the missionaries leaves off. Governed by imitation, the natives procure seeds, implements, and cattle, and farm like whites. This stage lasts as long as they keep their land; when from misfortune it goes, the tribe is gone. At this stage there may be much mimicry of civilization: the younger members may distinguish themselves at colonial schools and
