This momentous question depends directly on the solution of certain problems with which the ethnographer especially has to deal. On the right reading of these problems rests the destiny of races, and on the destiny of races hangs the fate of Man. We shall do well therefore to take home from the study of this science the horoscope it forecasts.
The first of these inquiries is
The Problem of Acclimation.
How far can the various races not merely support and live through, but do good work in the varied climates of the world?
Never was this question so urgent as to-day. With fleets of steamships ploughing every ocean, and the iron horse racing on its steel track over every continent, the movement of men is conducted in such masses and with such rapidity that the most extensive migrations of nations of other ages seem insignificant in comparison.
Like many other questions in ethnography, this one has been answered very variously, too often, evidently, by writers influenced by other motives than a single desire to reach the truth. It has been in close proximity to political and social movements, and facts have been twisted to serve the purposes of advocates.
The facts, indeed, are easily liable to misinterpretation. Take the white race, for instance. It has for centuries possessed flourishing colonies not only in the southern temperate zone, which would not surprise us, but under the torrid suns of India, Mexico and Brazil, in Java and the Isle of France, in the West and East Indies, not to speak of the Hamitic tribes, who thousands of years ago established themselves on the borders of the Sudan (see above, p. 116). Long before that, the Indo-Aryans had crossed the Hindu Kush and extended their sway over the Dravidian peoples of Hindostan.
But in these tropical regions have they not merely existed, but also prospered? Have they retained, along with the purity of their blood, also their fecundity, their viability and their energy? I must reply emphatically, No. In the words of a medical observer of ample experience in the tropics—“The changes which a torrid climate impresses upon the constitution of Europeans and upon their descendants are pathological, and tend with fatal certainty to the extinction of the race.”[196] In India the children of English parents must be sent back to Great Britain or they will perish. It is said that in the history of the civil service there has not been a single family which survived three generations. Even the first generation loses the energy which characterizes the parental stock. The whites nowhere in the tropics can undergo continuous physical toil exposed to the sun. They are always found subsisting on the labor of the native races.
The Spanish and Portuguese population of tropical America have survived in their new home for nearly four hundred years. But when have they displayed the astonishing energy of the early Conquistadores? Many of the so-called Spanish creoles are really of mixed blood. In Peru and Mexico it is hard to find a family without the strain of another race in its pedigree. In Cuba, where there has been the least exposure to this result, owing to the prompt extinction of the natives, the descendants of the early European immigrants are enfeebled and infertile. While in Mexico, in Guatemala, and in Yucatan, the men of prominent energy are either of mixed blood or, like the late Governor Barrios, are of the once conquered, the pure American race. I do not call a race acclimated which merely manages to exist, at the sacrifice of those qualities which are its highest claim to distinction.
On the other hand, the black race finds it hopeless to struggle with the climate above the fortieth parallel of latitude. In no portion of Southern Europe did it ever maintain itself, and when its members were carried in numbers as slaves to Mauritius and Ceylon, they succumbed to the change.[197] Even in Africa it is doubtful if it ever effected a permanent settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean. Pulmonary diseases and scrofula are the chief morbid changes which destroy its emigrants.