Expansion of the Anglo-Saxon
T
THE weaker British and French were shouldered into the seemingly inhospitable north. But the British won the battle of Quebec, and the French immigration soon ceased. That little fight is half forgotten, but it is doubtful if any battle in history had results half so important. It placed all North America in the grasp of the Anglo-Saxon, and gave his race enormous space for expansion. Unchecked by malaria, the new-comers gathered into communities and built towns and cities such as those which across the Atlantic were the homes of tuberculosis. The cold forced them to admit little air and light into their dwellings. The aborigines melted away from the borders of the settlements. Under the conditions there was little intermarriage. In that climate Indian women, and even half-caste children, could not exist within stone walls. The few white men who took native wives preserved them only while living a wild life remote from their kin.
The British conquest of North America and Australasia resembles the Saxon conquest of Great Britain. The natives have been exterminated within the area of settlement. It is in sharp contrast to their conquests in Asia and Africa. Both in the Old World and in the New the subjugation of the natives was accompanied by many wars and much bloodshed, and probably the conflicts in the former were more prolonged and destructive than those in the latter. But in no part of the Old World have the British exterminated the natives. They do not supplant them; they merely govern them. Southern Asia and East and West Africa are defended by malaria. The British cannot colonise them, and the natives have undergone such evolution against tuberculosis that they are capable of resisting the hard conditions imposed by modern civilisation. In South Africa, where there is little malaria, Europeans share the land with the natives, but the latter are likely to remain in an overwhelming majority.
WHERE THE ANGLO-SAXON RACE OBTAINED POSSESSION OF NORTH AMERICA
On the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec, the British and French troops fought in 1759, and the battle placed all North America in the grasp of the Anglo-Saxon, giving his race enormous space for expansion. It is doubtful, says Dr. Archdall Reid, if any battle in history had results half so important as this, although it is half forgotten.
If history teaches any lesson with clearness it is this—that conquest, to be permanent, must be accompanied with extermination, otherwise in the fulness of time the natives expel or absorb the conquerors. The Saxon conquest of England was permanent; of the Norman conquest there remains scarcely a trace. The Huns and the Franks founded permanent empires in Europe; the Roman Empire, and that of the Saracens in Spain, soon tumbled into ruins. It is highly improbable, therefore, that the British will retain their hold on their Old World dependencies. A handful of aliens cannot for ever keep in subjugation large and increasing races that yearly become more intelligent and insistent in their demands for self-government. But no probable conjunction of circumstances can be thought of that will uproot the Anglo-Saxons from their wide possession in the New World. The wars of extermination are ceasing with the spread of civilisation. We have ransacked the world, and now know every important disease. Diseases cannot come to us as they came to our forefathers and to the Red Indians, like visitations from on high. All the diseases that are capable of travelling have very nearly reached their limits; the rest we are able to check. Even in the unlikely event of a new disease arising, it would affect other races equally. Canada and Australasia, like the United States, may separate from the parent stem, but the race will persist. If ever a New Zealander broods over the ruins of London, he will be of British descent.
The Natural History of Mankind
The natural history of man is, in effect, a history of his evolution against disease. The story unfolded by it is of greater proportions than all the mass of trivial gossip about kings and queens and the accounts of futile dynastic wars and stupid religious controversies which fill so large a space in his written political history. In the latter, as told by historians, groping in obscurity and blinded by their own preconceptions, men and events are often distorted out of all proportions. A clever but prejudiced writer may pass base metal into perpetual circulation as gold. Luther and the Reformation are accepted as Divine by many people; they are reviled as diabolical by more. Cromwell was long regarded as accursed; to-day he is half-deified. How many of us are able to decide, on grounds of fact, not of fiction, whether the Roman Empire perished because the Romans, becoming luxurious, sinned against our moral code, as ecclesiastic historians would have us believe, or because a disease of intolerance and stupidity clouded the clear Roman brain and enfeebled the strong Roman hand, as Gibbon would have us think? But the natural history of man deals, without obscurity and without uncertainty, with greater matters. Study it, and the mists clear away from much even of political history. We see clearly how little the conscious efforts of man have influenced his destiny. We see forces unrecognised, enormous, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, working slowly but mightily towards tremendous conclusions—forces so irresistible and unchanging that, watching them, we are able even to forecast something of the future.