In the West Indies and generally in tropical and sub-tropical America they seem to flourish. In the United States the “colored people” increase by birth more rapidly in proportion than the whites, though this calculation includes the mulattoes and others of mixed blood.
Whether the Asian race has greater or less powers of acclimation than others is a question of much significance at present, when the teeming millions of the Celestial empire seem ready to pour forth in resistless floods over the whole earth. We are not prepared to reply. The subjection of this race to foreign climatic influences has been too recent and under conditions too exceptional to furnish the requisite data; and in their own land, the Chinese, from whom we look for the most portentous migrations, have lived in a country which does not present contrasts equal to those of the various zones.
The American race may be regarded as an exception to the others. The area it always occupied extended from one polar circle to the other, including every degree of altitude, and every extreme of temperature to which man is exposed. No difference in the viability or the energy of its members in various parts of the continent can be noted. The most remarkable monuments of its toilsome industry were completed under the tropical sun of Yucatan; while one of the most ingenious of its tribes lived the farthest north of any human beings. The physical energy of the stalwart Patagonian is not superior to that of the active Carib or the northern Algonkin. We may possibly find the explanation of this in the trend of the chief mountains and rivers of the continent, which facilitated easy progress from north to south, while in the eastern hemisphere the trend running parallel with the latitude, separated the early peoples into smaller climatic areas.
While the facts so far as ascertained seem to point to the decision that each race is confined to climatic conditions similar to that of its original area of characterization, the theory has been advanced that this is but for a time, that by persistence and repeated sacrifices of the unfit, finally a remnant will survive fully able to face the novel trials of the climatic change.[198]
This, however, is a theory only. It may be allowed credence to the extent that the survival of a remnant is possible; but it would be at the sacrifice of the distinctive qualities of the higher races; those can flourish only under the physical conditions which gave them birth.
It has also been urged that the improved sanitary hygienic science of modern times will do efficient battle against the lethal influences of strange climes. Doubtless in individual cases such precautions are of the highest value; they aid the system in withstanding malarial and zymotic poisons; but the best of them, employed on the widest scale, will prove sadly inadequate, as is shown by their failure in many a tract in the temperate zone. If we cannot restore salubrity to the Roman Campagna, or to Staten Island in New York Harbor, it is more than wild to talk of rendering healthful the Congo Basin.
I am tempted, therefore, to consider this problem of acclimation insoluble, and to express myself in the words of the learned physician I have already quoted, “There is no such thing as acclimation. A race never was acclimated, and in the present condition of the world, a race never can become acclimated.”[199]
The second of our inquiries relates to
The Problem of Amalgamation
—that which the French call métissage and the Americans miscegenation. The fact that we have manufactured this “recent and ill-formed word,” as Webster’s Unabridged calls it, is evidence that the questions involved in this problem touch us nearly. They touch the whole world, and very closely. I know of nothing within the range of human power to control, more decisive of the future prosperity or failure of the human species than this of the effect of race-intermarriage.