Excerpt from Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia I Gladly accepted an invitation to contribute a preface to this collection of essays dealing with a specific case of the inter-relations of white men and "natives," a subject which for fifty years has been of the greatest interest to me, and one which, if till recently it attached less general interest, has now now become of very great and ever increasing imperial importance. The British nation has, almost unintentionally, assumed more or less control over a very great part of the tropical lands, the former occupants of which were folk who, at the time when their home-lands were first entered by people from the West, were in a state of culture, primitive indeed but often very complex, and so entirely different from that under which our own social system has developed as to be, at first sight, almost unintelligible to us. In the past a few of us have partly understood the oblgation, but as a nation, we are only now fully realising that, in assuming control of these lands, we have saddled ourselves with the duty of providing as well as may be for the welfare and comfort of the earlier occupants; and still more are we only now realising that, in order adequately to fulfil this duty, it is necessary, as a preliminary, to get understanding not merely of the physical requirements but, at least as much, of the ideas and feelings of these folk of culture quite different from ours. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.