Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

The process is not suspended. Beginning at the north with the Eskimos, we find their number steadily diminishing;[205] the Athabascas, according to Petitot, are but a wreck of their former selves; of the tribes of the United States, Miss Alice Fletcher, who has traveled extensively among them, assures me that in a few generations there will be scarcely any of pure descent surviving; and I have noted for myself on the reservations what an increasing proportion of the young people reveal the infusion of European blood.

The same is true all over the Continent. The American Indian, as such, is destined to disappear before European civilization. If he retains his habits he will be exterminated; if he aims to preserve an unmixed descent, he will be crushed out by disease and competition; his only resource is to blend his race with the whites, and this infallibly means his disappearance from the scene.

The Island World, extending from Easter Island to Madagascar, presents the same spectacle. The aboriginal, undersized Negritos have long disappeared from many of the larger islands where they lived in historic times; and on the Philippines and elsewhere the report is that they are slowly but steadily drifting toward annihilation.[206] The Tasmanians have perished to the last man; the Australians are one-fifth what they were estimated by the best authorities at the beginning of the century; the Maoris of New Zealand have lessened one-half; the natives of Easter Island have sunk from twenty-five hundred in 1850 to less than three hundred; and so on for nearly all the Polynesian islands.

This extreme fatality has received the earnest attention of philanthropists and scientific physicians. Its causes are visible. They are the introduction of new epidemics, as measles, small-pox, syphilis and consumption, the last mentioned peculiarly fatal, and now recognized as eminently contagious under certain conditions; an increased infant mortality; drunkenness and its consequences; and diminished fecundity in the women. This last is both one of the most potent and one of the obscurest of the causes of diminished population. Why at some certain period a people should be smitten with sterility is a mysterious fact, for which the explanation must be postponed until we become better acquainted with the many enigmas which surround the process of reproduction.

Add to the death-rate the considerable percentage of children who are born of unions with the White, the Asian or the African races, and are thus no longer representatives of the ancestral stock, and we must acknowledge that these insular peoples are in no better, even a worse case than the American Indians. They, too, are sitting beneath the Damocles sword of extinction.

Such an assertion is doubtfully applicable to the Austafrican race. I have already referred to some statistics showing its heavy mortality in the isles of France and Ceylon, and the German ethnographer Ratzel is inclined to believe that it is diminishing in Central Africa itself.[207] But the census returns of our own country and of the West Indies show a positive and rapid increase particularly if we include the large population of mixed blood.

We have been taught in this country to look with something like terror on the teeming millions of China, only awaiting the chance to overrun the whole earth, underbid all other laborers, profit by the fruits of our more liberal governments and nobler religions, and give nothing in return. A few centuries ago a still more dreadful fear haunted the nations of Europe that some other Timurlane or Genghis Khan would lead his countless hordes of merciless Mongolians from the steppes of Siberia across the cultivated fields of the Danube to wipe out, as with a sponge, the glorious picture of renascent European culture.

The latter fear no longer disturbs any mind. The mightiest of the Tartar powers is but a shadow, maintained by the mutual jealousy of Europeans themselves; the illimitable steppes of Tartary and Mongolia acknowledge the suzerainty of the Slavonian; and the nomadic hordes of the steppes and tundras are steadily diminishing under the same baneful influences of civilization which are blighting the Australian and the American.

Whether this is true also of the Sinitic stocks, especially of the Chinese, we have no positive information. It has been rumored that of late years repeated periods of drought, resulting in disastrous famine, have materially reduced the population of the interior of China, many perishing and others removing nearer the coast. As it is only near the coast that foreigners have the opportunity to observe the people, it is likely that they bring away an exaggerated notion of the density of population in the country at large. It is at any rate doubtful if the Chinese are more than stationary.

Widely different is the vista which appears before us when we contemplate the Eurafrican race. It goes forth conquering and to conquer, extending its empire over all continents and to the remotest islands of the sea. Never has that progress been so rapid as to-day. Two centuries ago the whole of the white race which could lay claim to purity of blood numbered not over one hundred millions, or ten per cent. of the population of the world, and was confined to the limits of Europe and North Africa; now the European branch of it alone counts nearly five hundred millions, or one-third of the whole. In the year 1800, the non-resident whites of European descent were ten millions; now they are over eighty millions. Every navy and every army of any fighting capacity belong to the European whites and their descendants. No nation and no race of other lineage dare withstand an attack or disobey an order from a leading European power. Africa and Asia are dismembered and parceled out at London, Berlin and St. Petersburg, and no one dreams of asking the consent of the inhabitants of those continents.