With the rise of towns, and ultimately of great cities, the stringency of selection continually increased; and with it, step by step, the resisting power of the race. To-day Englishmen dwell under conditions as impossible to their remote ancestors as to the modern Red Indians. In fact, no race, especially in cold and temperate climates, is now able to achieve civilisation, to dwell in dense communities, unless it has previously undergone evolution against tuberculosis. But of this more anon.
So during the long sweep of the ages microbic diseases strengthened their hold on the inhabitants of the Eastern Hemisphere, who in turn slowly evolved powers of resistance. In like manner antelopes grew swift and wild sheep active when persecuted by beasts of prey. Then, when the germs of disease were rife in every home and thick on the garments of every man, there occurred the greatest event in human history, the vastest tragedy. Columbus, sailing across an untracked ocean, discovered the Western Hemisphere. The long separation between the inhabitants of the East and West ended. The diseases of the Old World burst with cataclysmal results on the New.
3,500,000 Destroyed by Small-pox
The ancient condition of the Eastern Hemisphere was reproduced in the West. Again we read of plague and pestilence, of water-borne and air-borne diseases coming and going in great epidemics, and of the famines that followed. Measles and cholera piled the earth with the dead. The part played by small-pox was even greater. When taken to the West Indies in 1507 whole tribes were exterminated. A few years later it quite depopulated San Domingo. In Mexico it destroyed three and a half millions of people. Prescott describes this first fearful epidemic as “sweeping over the land like fire over the prairies, smiting down prince and peasant, and leaving its path strewn with the dead bodies of the natives, who—in the strong language of a contemporary—perished in heaps like cattle stricken with murrain.” In 1841 Catlin wrote of the United States: “Thirty millions of white men are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life over the bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of whom have fallen victims to small-pox.”
But the principal part was played by tuberculosis. Air-borne and water-borne diseases generally left an immune remnant, but against tuberculosis no immunity could be acquired. Red Indians and Caribs could not in a few generations achieve an evolution which the inhabitants of the Old World had accomplished only after thousands of years, and at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. Civilisation, which implies a dense and settled community with cities and towns, had suddenly become a necessity, but remained an impossibility to all the inhabitants of the temperate parts of the West. It is a highly significant fact that throughout the New World no city or town has its native quarter, whereas every European settlement in Asia and Africa has its native suburbs. The aborigines of the New World are found only in remote or inaccessible parts.
A Plague that Spread like Fire
The following is an example of the manner in which tuberculosis went to work: “The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred when the smallpox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months later, a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread like fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from the newly-created solitude.... Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late in the year before, a first case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by the end of August, when the tale was told to me, one soul survived, a boy who had been absent on his schooling.”
The Caribs of the West Indies are almost extinct. The Red Indians are going fast, as are the aborigines of cold and temperate South America. The Tasmanians have gone. The Australians and the Maoris are but a dwindling remnant. As surely as the trader with his clothes, or the missionary with his church and schoolroom appears, the work of extermination begins on Polynesian islands. Throughout the whole vast extent of the New World the only pure aborigines who seem destined to persist are those which live remote in mountains or in the depths of fever-haunted forests, where the white man is unable to build the towns and cities with which he has studded the cooler and more “healthy” regions of the north and south.
Races that Decline before the Whites
Many explanations, or pseudo-explanations, have been offered to account for the disappearance of the natives. We are told that they cannot endure “domestication,” that they “pine like caged eagles” in confinement, that the change produced by civilisation makes them infertile, as the change produced by captivity makes some wild animals infertile, and so forth. But the only peoples who are disappearing are those of the New World, some of whom were by no means savage. In Asia and Africa are many tribes far lower in the scale of civilisation who have persisted in constant communication with dense and settled communities from time immemorial. Notwithstanding all that has been written, the people of the New World do not wither away mysteriously when brought into contact with the white man. They die as other men do of violence, or famine, or old age, or disease. But deaths from all these causes, except the last, are now comparatively rare amongst them—much rarer than formerly during the time of their perpetual wars. The vast majority die of imported diseases—exactly the same diseases as white men die of. But their mortality is invariably much higher than that of white men, and they perish on an average at a younger age.