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?©, 1861-1896

"The Social Cancer"

These writers treat the matter lightly,
seeing in it rather a huge joke on the "miserable Indians," and
give the friars great credit for "patriotism," a term which in this
connection they dragged from depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted
Dr. Johnson's famous definition, "the last refuge of a scoundrel."
In their conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and
as individuals, must be estimated according to their own standards--
the application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair. They
undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential
activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them
must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained:
to destroy the freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him
for his conduct is a paradox into which the learned men often fell,
perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored
to shape the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence
but also in the next.


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