Herman Melville on Colonization

From Louis Proyect, the Unrepentant Marxist, a post on Herman Melville and Indigenous Peoples. Proyect quotes a public lecture Melville gave on the South Seas (as reported in the Baltimore American newspaper on February 8, 1859); according to Proyect "the final paragraphs are the phonographist’s own words and it is too bad that we don’t have Melville’s":

“The lecturer closed with an earnest wish that adventurers from our soil and from the lands of Europe would abstain from those brutal and cruel vices which disgust even savages with our manners, while they turn an earthly paradise into a pandemonium. And as for annexations he begged, as a general philanthropist, to offer up an earnest prayer, and he entreated all present to join him in it, that the banns [public announcements] of that union should be forbidden until we had found for ourselves a civilization moral, mental, and physical, higher than the one which has culminated in almshouses, prisons, and hospitals.”