MR R G. COATES’ LECTURE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2250, 23 July 1908, Page 1

MR R G. COATES’ LECTURE.

[To the Editor.] Sir. —l note that you put words into Mr. Coate’s mouth which lie did not use, in your issue of to-day. Mr. Coates is reported to have said: “Don’t think the missionaries,; try to civiliso the natives.” Mr. Coates said, “Don’t think the missionaries try to Europeanise the natives”; quite a different thing. I have no doubt that Mr. Coates intended to strike at that insane and silly notion that missionaries have made u. Christian as soon as the blackmail has been induced to give up his natural clothing and protection, his own healthy air-breathing skin; and has put on the white mail’s hideous clothing, thereby beginning tlio devastating work of rendering himself and his descendants liable to diseases which in the natural state lie. never fears. Dickens satirised these people when 110 wrote of Mrs. Jellaby and her blankets for the heathen. A savage may ho perfectly civilised; which means, or should mean,. Christianised as its chief principle;and yet remain the grand creature lie is to the sight of man.

Imagine tho man whose portrait Mr. Coates showed us in his magnificent lecture, 7ft 6111 in height; symmetrical and healthy, covering all those grand proportions with cur hideous European garments. It would ho a sin. No, the black races need not kill themselves by coming clothing, whereas white pei.pie who really do look (as ihey are mostly made in these days and for lack of color) indecent when utnovirad, irest submit to the diseases caused by clothing even in hot climates; and in their own countries, tho climates arc such as to make natural protection impossible. Mr. Coate’s lecture was a. great lesson to .all who heard it; he demonstrated that in Australia and N'ew Zealand must fall the obvious duty of removing the superstitions and with them the sufferings and unhappiness of tlio lives of these brethren of ours in the Islands. The lecture did much to remove, or, at loast, to unsettle that hatred of color in a. human face, when the color deepens to black, Which seems to form part 0 f the colonial ideal. It also made some of us feel a little ashamed of ourselves hearing of tlie work done by. those grand white men, whilst we drawl out our flat, comfortable, uneventful, unprofitable “civilised” lives, free from danger -and stress; and the lecture ■also showed the white races who, in the persons of their traders, corrupted by that worst of all modern diseases, tlie lust for money, cari'y to the natives every possible example or wickedness, sensuality, greed, cruelty, commercial immorality, and the rest, which do indeed make it necessary that tho people of Australia and New Zealand should help on the >vprk Begun By the ever-to-be-revered Bishop Selwyii; and do what they can to push on, this particularly sane mission, which does not simply spend money on wholesale sham Baptism ol numbers of natives, without hist making sure that they will remain Christians; but a mission which'makes tl]e Christian ideal grow and take root in the native mind, Before the sio-n and symbol of tlie Cross 111 P recti' on their brow. —I am, etc., GERARD SMITH.