The Indians around the fur posts in northern Canada were formerly the virtual bond slaves of the Hudson Bay Company, each Indian and his squaw and pappoose being adequately supplied with simple food and equipment. He was protected as well against the white man’s rum as the red man’s scalping parties and in return gave the Company all his peltries—the whole product of his year’s work. From an Indian’s point of view this was nearly an ideal condition but was to all intents serfdom or slavery. When through the opening up of the country the continuance of such an archaic system became an impossibility, the Indian sold his furs to the highest bidder, received a large price in cash and then wasted the proceeds in trinkets instead of blankets and in rum instead of flour, with the result that he is now gloriously free but is on the highroad to becoming a diseased outcast. In this case of the Hudson Bay Indian the advantages of the upward step from serfdom to freedom are not altogether clear. A very similar condition of vassalage existed until recently among the peons of Mexico, but without the compensation of the control of an intelligent and provident ruling class.
In the same way serfdom in mediæval Europe apparently was a device through which the landowners repressed the nomadic instinct in their tenantry which became marked when the fertility of the land declined after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Years are required to bring land to its highest productivity and agriculture cannot be successfully practised even in well-watered and fertile districts by farmers who continually drift from one locality to another. The serf or villein was, therefore, tied by law to the land and could not leave except with his master’s consent. As soon as the nomadic instinct was eliminated serfdom vanished. One has but to read the severe laws against vagrancy in England just before the Reformation to realize how widespread and serious was this nomadic instinct. Here in America we have not yet forgotten the wandering instincts of our Western pioneers, which in that case proved beneficial to every one except the migrants.
While democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side, an aristocracy may be equally injurious whenever, in order to purchase a few generations of ease and luxury, slaves or immigrants are imported to do the heavy work. It was a form of aristocracy that brought slaves to the American colonies and the West Indies and if there had been an aristocratic form of governmental control in California, Chinese coolies and Japanese laborers would now form the controlling element, so far as numbers are concerned, on the Pacific coast.
It was the upper classes who encouraged the introduction of immigrant labor to work American factories and mines and it is the native American gentleman who builds a palace on the country side and who introduces as servants all manner of foreigners into purely American districts. The farming and artisan classes of America did not take alarm until it was too late and they are now seriously threatened with extermination in many parts of the country. In Rome, also, it was the plebeian, who first went under in the competition with slaves but the patrician followed in his turn a few generations later.
The West Indian sugar planters flourished in the eighteenth century and produced some strong men; to-day from the same causes they have vanished from the scene.
During the last century the New England manufacturer imported the Irish and French Canadians and the resultant fall in the New England birth rate at once became ominous. The refusal of the native American to work with his hands when he can hire or import serfs to do manual labor for him is the prelude to his extinction and the immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.
Thus the American sold his birthright in a continent to solve a labor problem. Instead of retaining political control and making citizenship an honorable and valued privilege, he intrusted the government of his country and the maintenance of his ideals to races who have never yet succeeded in governing themselves, much less any one else.
Associated with this advance of democracy and the transfer of power from the higher to the lower races, from the intellectual to the plebeian class, we find the spread of socialism and the recrudescence of obsolete religious forms. Although these phenomena appear to be contradictory, they are in reality closely related since both represent reactions from the intense individualism which a century ago was eminently characteristic of Americans.
II
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF RACE
In the modern and scientific study of race we have long since discarded the Adamic theory that man is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden somewhere in Asia, to spread later over the earth in successive waves.