incompetent³⁷ to throw any fresh[14] light, I might venture to make some observations of a general nature that depend on a principle already mentioned. This principle was, that to understand a people is to envisage³⁸ its ideal. The practical corollary, I suggest, is that, to preserve a people, one must preserve its ideal so far as to leave its vital and vitalizing elements intact. In other words, in purging³⁹ that ideal, as may be done and ought to be done when it is sought to lift a backward people out of savagery⁴⁰, great care should be taken not to wreck⁴¹ their whole scheme of values, to cause all that has hitherto made life worth living for them to seem cheap and futile⁴². Given sympathetic insight into their dream of the good life—one that is, probably, not unlike ours in its main essentials—it ought to prove feasible to curtail⁴³ noxious⁴⁴ practices by substituting better ways of satisfying the same needs. Contact with civilization is apt to produce among savages a paralysis⁴⁵ of the will to live. More die of depression than of disease or drink. They lose their interest in existence. Their spirit is broken. When the policy is to preserve them, the mere⁷ man of science can lend a hand by pointing out what indeed every experienced administrator⁴⁶ knows by the time he has bought his experience at other people’s expense. Given, then, the insider’s point of view, a sense of what the savage people itself wants and is trying for, and given also patience in abundance, civilization may effectively undertake to fulfil, instead of destroying.

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