These are the statistical results of this inquiry. To the extent to which the data are imperfect, the results are of course unreliable. The numbers are often much smaller than are required for such purposes. I have used them because the best obtainable, even with the assistance of the colonial governments; and the first lesson they teach is the necessity for assimilating the colonial registration and vital statistics to those at home. But, with all their defects, when these statistics are examined, they bring clearly into light certain great general facts.
As regards the schools, they show us that the educational idea in the colonies is just as deficient as it is at home, and that it is attended with worse physical consequences.
No account appears to be taken of the past history of the races on whom it is desired to confer the inestimable blessings of Christian civilization. Our teachers go among them just as they would into English villages. They collect the children who, together with their ancestors, have spent most of their existence in active out-door habits, into all classes of structures, good, bad, and indifferent, apparently without regard to the effect of local conditions on their health. In all probability the children are set together as close as they are placed in one of our Home “Model Schools,” without any reference to children’s epidemics or other fevers. This is not done without great risk, even with children of English birth. But to do this with children taken from their open air habits in uncivilized or semi-civilized communities is to incur the immediate danger of losing the most hopeful pupils by diseases, which, under a more rational system, might in all probability be avoided.
The education appears to be confined simply to head-work, and no provision is made for sustaining the health by physical training, while it is in danger of exhaustion by a cerebral stimulus, perhaps applied for the first time in the history of the family from which the child has sprung. It is true that cerebral disease forms only a small part of the school mortality; but the diseases from which the mortality proceeds in the tropical schools are {14} the result of overcrowding, defective ventilation, and other local sanitary evils, all of which are augmented by sedentary occupation.
The remedy for this is obviously to improve the school-houses, to give more attention to space, to ventilation, and to the locality where the school is placed, and above all to make physical training an essential and important part of the school system, never forgetting that the habits of generations cannot be suddenly broken through without danger to health and life.
In as far as concerns the effect of the schools on the disappearance of native races, the returns contain no appreciable evidence. Education, if properly conducted, together with the improved personal, physical, and moral habits consequent on it, ought everywhere to be conservative and not destructive; but to be so it should be conducted, as already stated, with a full knowledge of the physiological effects of altered habits and the influence of these on health.
The hospital returns, so far as they can be relied on, show in the tropical colonies a large mortality from diseases arising from bad drainage, bad water, imperfect agriculture, want of cleanliness, and from other bad habits. Bad, overcrowded, unventilated dwellings must also in these colonies, as at home, bear their proportion of the blame. Thus mortality arising from mitigable or preventible causes of an external nature occasions in all the colonies by far the greatest part of the death rate in hospitals. Incivilization with its inherent diseases, when brought into contact with civilization without adopting specific precautions for preserving health, will always carry with it a large increase of mortality on account of the greater susceptibility of its subjects to those causes of disease which can to a certain extent be endured without as great a risk by civilized communities born among them.
The hospital returns throw little light on the causes of the disappearance of native races, unless these are to be found in the great prevalence of tubercular and chest diseases in certain of the colonies. This is especially remarkable in the returns from Australia, Kaffraria, and Canada. But why this class of affections should be so much more prevalent in the temperate than in the tropical colonies could only be ascertained by careful local inquiry. One thing is certain that, in those colonies from which complaints of the disappearance of native races have come, {15} tubercular and chest diseases appear to occasion the largest amount of hospital mortality.
The discovery of the causes of this must be referred back to the colonies. Anything which exhausts the constitution; above all things, foul air during sleep, will engender these diseases. Open locality, healthy winds, active daily occupation, are by themselves no safeguards, if the nights be spent in unventilated cabins. The Alpine climates of Europe are known to be the most free of any climates from this tribe of diseases. But even on their healthy mountain slopes scrofula in all its forms prevails among the peasants, engaged during summer on the high pastures, when they pass their nights in the close unhealthy chalets there.
It is possible that a tubercular taint so engendered may be the cause of the whole evil, and it is to this point that the inquiry has brought us.