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THE LAPPS AND NORWEGIANS.
137
undisturbed existence, their freedom at all periods from
persecution or oppression, is a grand evidence of the high
moral character of the Norwegians. I am not aware of
any other instance in the world’s history of a people
so wTeak, so helpless for self-defence, remaining for
centuries in contact with an energetic, civilized, and
altogether stronger people, and never attacked, pillaged,
enslaved, or interfered with, except for the
benevolent purposes of education and moral and religious
improvement.
The Norwegians have recently converted them from
their strange old paganism, the worship of Tlior, with
its conjurations, magical drums, and sacrifices to the
stone effigy of the hammer-bearing god; have taught
them to read and write, and when they fell into habits
of drunkenness sent apostles of temperance among
them. The efforts of these temperance missionaries
have been highly successful, and the drunkenness so
common among the Laplanders when Mr. Laing resided
in Norway in 1834-5-6, is now very rare.
Those who talk about a law of Nature enforcing with
unrelenting fatalism the subjugation and destruction of
an inferior race when a superior and more highly
civilized people come in contact with it, should vjsit this
part of Norway, and study the present relations of the
Norwegians to the Laplanders. They would then, I
think, modify their expression of this law, and rather
say that when a strong, brutal, selfish, and unscrupulous
people come in contact with another people weaker than
themselves, the self-styled civilized men endeavour to
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