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WHAT ARE “CHRISTIAN NATIONS?”

“Anything to make money,” seems to be the motto of the nations. Christian countries have no hesitation in doing things that must, if continued, inevitably utterly wipe out of existence the aboriginal inhabitants of the sea islands if they can only make a little money thereby. “Take,” says the Independent, “the case of Madagascar, where rum merchants, aided by the English and American Governments, are trying to undo the work of our missionaries. Both the English and American Government levy a tax of some two dollars a gallon on distilled liquors; but the English Government forced on Madagascar a treaty which made that people receive rum at an import of only thirty-three per cent, which was in 1867, reduced to ten per cent, or about two cents a gallon. There are imported annually from Mauritius over 400,000 gallons of rum, which sells at about eighteen cents a gallon, and which, with native liquors made from stills imported from Mauritius, is inflicting an injury which the missionaries find hard to resist.”

A correspondent of a Mauritius paper, says the Commercial Gazette, says that “the whole population have become inveterate drunkards, women and children as well as men;” that the women are becoming sterile throughout the country; and “if something is not done to stop this unlimited consumption of spirits, the bulk of the race will have disappeared from the face of the earth before the beginning of the next century, and those who remain will have just cause to curse the day upon which the white man invaded their country, under the pretext of showing them the way to Heaven.” In a little while we shall be hearing that “civilization” has destroyed the Hova race. It is the civilization of rum and gunpowder, not of Christianity.

In the month of August, 1879, Messrs. Dunville and Co., distillers, of Belfast, shipped about a thousand cases of whisky, via Larne and Liverpool, to Cyprus. This island has just escaped from Mohammedan misrule, impoverished and almost depopulated; and now Irish whisky, sent by “Christian distillers,” comes to the front, under the British flag, to complete the desolation.

Yet with these facts in view, with India, where English example has made a thousand drunkards where it has made one Christian, with China, where each day more than a thousand natives die the most horrible deaths, murdered by British opium forced on them at the cannon’s mouth; with the South Sea island races rotting out from immoral diseases, which the sailors of Christendom have left behind;—the only exceptions being islands that have no harbors where ships can lie;—with the liquor traffic driving the ploughshare of destruction not only through Christendom, but through the virgin soil just opened in Asia and Africa for the reception of the good seed of the kingdom;—with all these horrible exhibitions of Satanic craft, backed up by the force of evil habit and the covetous greed of gain which rules the so-called Christian world;—with all these facts before them, dainty divines, dealing in a gospel of lavender and rose water, draw glowing pictures of a good time coming, and tell us that the world’s conversion is just at hand! Do such men know much about the world, or much about conversion? Or are they saying peace and safety when sudden destruction cometh upon them?—The Christian.

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— April, 1886 —