Paton's resistance to theoretical racial hierarchy, based on personal experience particularly in Melanesia, was not new — Codrington and many other humanitarians had written in a similar vein. Where Paton marked new ground was in the degree of his conviction about metropolitan responsibility for the welfare of Pacific Islanders, not just in converting them to Christianity but in ensuring justice, education, and a place for them in a rapidly changing world. Paton (1913:142-3) consciously introduced a new international discourse of Christian humanism into the Pacific missionary world: he cited the discussions of the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, a worldwide ecumenical gathering incorporating most of the mainline English-speaking Protestant missions, as the authority for his opinions.^[8] This gathering, attended by metropolitan mission administrators, serving (white) missionaries, and also by some indigenous African and Asian church leaders, was seen by many missionaries as their first opportunity to consider their own work in an international context. As Charles Fry Rich (1872-1949), an LMS missionary from Papua, put it (Anon. 1910:148): 'We climbed high enough to behold the need of a whole world for a whole gospel of redemption, carried to it by a whole Church'. The conference discussed, amongst other things, the role of the churches in education, the growth of the indigenous priesthood and independent churches, and 'the growing desire of Eastern peoples to realize themselves, to work out their particular national life, and not to be cast into Western moulds', an aspiration which was regarded with 'strong sympathy' (Anon. 1910:146).

Influenced by such internationalist rhetoric, Paton's appeal to European obligation was couched in wide terms. To an unusual degree, the prime villain was European influence in general. While his father John G. Paton, a veteran missionary in the New Hebrides, had denounced labour traders and beachcombers at length and with vigour (Weir 2003:95-142), Frank Paton cast doubt on the whole colonial enterprise. After enumerating the evils of alcohol, guns, and labour-recruitment, he concluded that they were not outweighed by the benefits of settled government or new opportunities. He asked:

This passage includes allusions to two texts which became particularly popular in internationalist missionary discourse through the 1920s: 'we who are strong ought to bear the burden of the weak' comes from Paul's letter to the Romans 15:1; 'the white man's burden' derives, of course, from Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same title (1899).^[9] Thus the secular and religious responsibilities of strong and powerful nations were linked, as educators and protectors of native peoples, as beneficent colonial administrators, and also as evangelists.

Ideas such as Paton's gained new urgency in response to the stridently determinist racist rhetoric emanating immediately after World War I from American secular writers such as Madison Grant (1865-1937) and Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950). Grant (1921, 1920) and Stoddard (1920, 1922) began writing during the War but their works had greatest impact in the 1920s when they were reprinted, translated, and widely disseminated. They warned of an impending global race war as the 'natural' superiority of the European races was challenged by recent internal civil war (which was how they represented World War I) and by resistance from other races. Colonized people would fight to be free of domination, claimed Stoddard. Africa, important as 'the natural source of Europe's tropical raw materials and foodstuffs', and Latin America could not possibly 'stand alone'; strong European rule was essential (Stoddard 1920:89, 103).

The basis of their arguments lay in biological determinism. Grant (1920:xix) claimed that the 'great lesson of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characteristics, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychic disposition and impulses'. He invoked Weismann's work on cellular structure and his theory of 'germ plasm' to decry the 'fatuous belief in the power of environment' which he saw as an idea stemming from 'loose thinkers and sentimentalists' (Grant 1921:15-16). Several other scientific tendencies around the turn of the century also reinvigorated a popular view of heredity based on biological determinism. Galton's statistical modelling and the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics provided a mechanism for Darwinian natural selection (Shipman 1994:113-16).^[10] These developments, along with the 1904 foundation of the Eugenics Record Office in the US and Charles Davenport's studies of eugenics conducted at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, gave a certain credibility to the demands of Grant and Stoddard for 'world-eugenics' to avoid the mixing of races and to encourage the 'highest' to reproduce.^[11] Since the laws of nature determined that biology and heredity were everything, Grant and Stoddard claimed, then direct rule by those of 'worth and merit' should be the norm, thus undermining democracy. Only amongst the most advanced of the Europeans, the 'Nordics',^[12] should it even be considered. Biological determinists could attack democracy and socialism on racial grounds and discount them as sentimental.

In Australia, Christian writers concerned with inter-racial issues believed that such doctrines had to be confronted. John Burton's acceptance of something approaching a biologically-determined evolutionism and his use of evolutionist language in describing Fijians, evident in The Call of the Pacific, must be seen alongside the campaign he waged from around 1909 against the indenture of Indians in the Fiji sugar-fields (Weir 2003:163-83). Burton (1909:15-16) raised the ire of colonial officials by describing plantation accommodation where 'coolies are herded together like so many penned cattle amid the most insanitary conditions and indescribable filth' and in concluding that 'the difference between this state and slavery is merely in the name and the term of years'. This humanitarian concern was coupled with respect for the Hindu religious and philosophic system, especially as expressed by the more learned members of the community. Accounts of his dialogues with Hindu leader Totaram Sanadhya present two intelligent men, each determined not to be converted by the other, enjoying a stimulating debate about life, death and everything in between.^[13] Burton (1903:8) also described encounters with other Hindu religious leaders. He was prepared to pray and worship with Hindus, even if he found the music 'weird'. But this respect for Indian culture and religion was contrasted with his ambivalence about Fijian customs which he essentialized and framed with evolutionist assumptions. Fijians had practical skills, Indians intellectual ones.

John Burton's position moved closer to that of Paton after the First World War — during which he served as a YMCA chaplain in London — and the peace settlement. His writing developed greater emphasis on obligation and showed less use of evolutionist language. Influencing this shift was Burton's increased involvement in the International Missionary Council, growing friendship with Frank Paton, and further academic studies in philosophy at the University of Melbourne.^[14] His increasing personal knowledge and appreciation of individual Fijian missionaries and other Islanders through his visits to Papua and New Britain as General Secretary of the Australian Methodist Missionary Society in the 1920s appear to have changed his thinking further. On these visits he saw Fijian teachers and ministers working effectively: the earlier disdain bred mostly of ignorance was replaced by respect for individuals (Burton 1926).

The degree to which the discourse of humanitarian obligation complemented Burton's earlier evolutionist assumptions becomes clear in his reactions to the vociferous biological evolutionism emanating from the United States. In his review of Stoddard's pro-eugenics tract The Revolt against Civilization, Burton (1922:11) advanced ethical and spiritual claims to counter the determinism of biology, notwithstanding his own earlier recourse to biological images: 'Biology deals only with a fraction of life; its fingers are too clumsy and its methods too coarse to deal with the soul of man'. The individual could be changed purposefully by wise men under the guidance of God. Christian commentators saw the violence and appeal to force implicit in the writings of Stoddard and Grant as dangerous and immoral. The very stridency of the new recourse to biological determinism forced critics to modify, if not entirely reject, their own much milder use of such arguments. In another review, Burton (1924:1) described Stoddard's later book The Rising Tide of Color as 'striking but shallow'; it tried 'to foment feeling against other races' and in doing so was 'unchristian'.