p. 11 | The White Man's Vices

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 29, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 22.

The White Man's Vices.

Dr. W. T. Grenfell, the well-known medical missionary and founder of the Labrador Mission, has stirred up the friends of Arctic exploration by the statement that wherever the white man has penetrated in the remote habitable north, the natives have suffered moral and physical deterioration. He even goes further and declares that before the explorers and traders came to Greenland, the people were peaceable and their lives were simple and healthful; but with the white man came the white man's vices, and these, in many localities, have so depraved the natives that the Eskimos are now disappearing more rapidly even than the North American Indians. Missionaries have done and are doing excellent work among them; but drunkenness, immorality, and disease increase at a rate that threatens their early extinction.

Dr. Grenfell's disclosures should not pass unheeded. Missionaries in other lands have told of the evil effects following the introduction among native races of the white man's vices, rum, opium, firearms, and immorality. Wherever these have been allowed to come in the wake of the explorer and trader, they have been a reproach to our own vaunted civilization, and a withering blight to the people we should have helped to save.—Christian Herald.