The mere political results of man’s evolution against disease are of almost incalculable magnitude. The human races of one half of the world are dying, and are being replaced by races from the other half. Not all the wars of all time taken together constitute so great a tragedy. A quite disproportionate part in this great movement has been borne by our own race. It has seized on the larger part of those regions in which the aborigines were incapable of civilisation, because incapable of resisting consumption, and were undefended by malaria. In the void created by disease it has more room to spread and multiply than any other race.
Disease Mightier than the Sword
Other races may dream of foreign conquests, but the time for founding permanent empires is past. There remains for them only temporary conquest, in a few malarious parts of the world in which Europeans cannot flourish and supplant the natives. Spain and Portugal lost their opportunity when they turned from the temperate regions and chose the tropics. France lost her opportunity on the Heights of Abraham. Germany is more than a century too late in the start. Russia can conquer only hardy aliens who will multiply under her rule and ultimately assert their supremacy. In times now far remote in the history of civilised peoples, the sword was the principal means for digging deep the foundations of permanent empires. Its place was taken by a more efficient instrument. A migrating race, armed with a new and deadly disease, and with high powers of resisting it, possesses a terrible weapon of offence. But now disease has spread over the whole world and so is losing its power of building empires. The long era of the great migrations of the human race, of the great conquests, is closing fast.
Possibilities of the Black Races
It is generally supposed by historians and others that races that disappear before the march of civilisation are mentally unfitted for it. The assumption is not supported by an iota of real evidence. To be mentally incapable a race must be of very defective memory. Recently a school of Australian natives, who belong to one of the “lowest” of races, took the first place in the colony. Negroes occupy a very inferior position in America, especially in Anglo-Saxon territories. But they are stamped by glaring physical differences, are treated with great contempt and jealousy by the whites, and their acquired mental attitudes, therefore, do not develop under good conditions. It is very possible that they are mentally inferior to the whites; but not so inferior as is commonly believed.
Russian peasants, though not sharply differentiated by physical peculiarities from the governing classes, are equally scorned by them, and show a mental development hardly, if at all, superior to the negroes of United States. The Latins of South America seem very incapable of orderly government, but they are the heirs of a civilisation older than our own. At any rate, while it is conceivable the American negroes and some other races are incapable of building up a highly-enlightened society by their own efforts, it is manifest that they are able to persist and multiply when civilised conditions are imposed on them. Not so the aborigines of the New World, some of whom—for example, the Maoris and the Polynesians—are admittedly of good mental type. They perish swiftly and helplessly of bodily ailments.
Very clearly, then, human races are capable or incapable of civilisation, not because they are mentally, but because they are physically, fit or unfit.
G. ARCHDALL REID
