Part 17

It is one which has arisen within the last two or three centuries, and is now so urgent that it will have an instant reply. With increased means of locomotion and augmented love of progress, civilization is now transported, with all its complex forces, to every nation and every tribe, no matter where or of what race, and the question is put point blank, Will you accept this precious gift, or will you have it forced upon you, with such results as may happen? Japan has welcomed the message, inscrutable China hesitates, Persia wavers, the miserable Australians refuse, the savages turn their back--all in vain; the message is importunate, will take no denial, must be accepted. Opposition means destruction. The Bechuana kraal which refuses to have a grand opera house and electric lights, if the European sees fit to put them there, will be wiped out of existence. So will every tribe, every nation, every race, which sets forth to oppose the resistless flow of civilized progress.

Preservation, however, and not destruction, is the maxim of the ripest culture. The Tasmanian is extinct, the Polynesian disappearing, many an American tribe lives only in name, all gone down before the fierce flames of a civilization which did not lighten, but consumed them. Many another people is disappearing in the same way, in spite of the devoted efforts of earnest men and women to save them, to bring them into accord with the thought of the higher race, to teach them the boundless blessings of European enlightenment.

What is the history of these efforts? Failure, and yet again failure. Consider the history of the attempts to bring the American race into accord with the European. There were the noble endeavors of the Jesuits in Paraguay, the untiring zeal of the Franciscans in Yucatan, the admirable devotion of the Moravian brethren in the northern continent, and the long list of missionary societies in Protestant churches. These represent the most sustained, unselfish and enlightened efforts which have ever been made to civilize the Indians. They are of the same nature and on the same plan as those which have been and still are directed toward other savage peoples, the Polynesians and Africans for example.

Have they been successful? Can an instance be adduced where they have achieved a full and permanent introduction of a savage tribe to the real benefits of our civilization?

I cannot answer for the history of missions throughout the world, but I can and do for my special field, America, and I say, not a single instance of success can be named. The Jesuits and the Moravians succeeded, indeed, in reclaiming the natives from their wild life; they transformed them from warring savages into peaceful planters; from drunken, cruel and superstitious, they made them sober, kind and religious. This was a noble, an admirable result. But were their converts any the more able to accept the civilization of Europe? Not a whit. David Zeisberger’s last sermon was a wail that his sixty years’ of missionary work had failed to accomplish this result. Ten years after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, their extensive “reductions,” which at one time included thirty or forty thousand Christianized natives, were a heap of ruins, and the converts dispersed to the four winds--and this after nearly two centuries of training!

Should we conclude from these sad histories that it is impossible to bring the existing savage nations into accord with our own culture? This is not my conclusion. Rather I infer that we have not tried the proper measures. We have relied almost exclusively on missionary religious work, forgetting that our religion is only one part of our civilization, and, so far as it is dogmatic and ceremonial, much the least part. We have been singularly inconsequent. We send our own children six days to a secular school, and only on the seventh to a Sunday-school; but the poor Indian we send to Sunday-school all seven days, and then expect him to have an education like our own! Our missionaries hold up to the savage pictures of Christian brotherhood, of unselfish motive, of universal charity, which he soon finds have no existence in Christian communities or modern civilization. If he is an honest convert, he is absolutely disqualified from contact with civilized peoples! The Jesuits and the Moravians, both practical orders, knew this well, and therefore not only prevented their acolytes learning European tongues, but used every means at their command to banish all relations between the two races in those under their control.

It may seem uncharitable in me to oppose and condemn missionary enterprises in savage communities; but I do so under the full conviction that as usually conducted they fail, and are bound to fail, in the most excellent aim they have in view. To succeed, they should be combined with a broad secular education, with a full recognition of the real impulses of modern life, and an effort to inculcate sound principles rather than respect for ceremonies and dogmas, about which the Christian sects themselves are never in unison. The native religious and moral codes should be studied, and all that is good in them--generally there is a great deal of good--should be retained; right actions should be based on respect for law, on the inherent sense of justice, on natural affection, and not merely on ecclesiastical edicts. Above all, independence of thought should be encouraged, the principles of religious and political freedom should be held up as superior to those of subjection, and the convert should be instructed that attachment to any particular creed is in no wise requisite to enjoy the best results of civilization.

It may be objected that doctrines such as these would leave the missionary as such little to teach. I reply that these doctrines are true, and are those necessary to the reception of civilization, and if they are omitted or obscured, the missionary is not an apostle of light, but of darkness, and that his efforts will prove unsuccessful in the future, as they have in the past.

The consideration of this problem of civilization leads us to cast a glance at the future and to ponder on

_The Destiny of Races._

We are well aware that many a family, many a tribe, many a linguistic stock, has perished off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of its existence. Of others we know but the “naked nominations.” May not whole races have followed the same fatal course? Nay, more, may not some of the existing races be likewise doomed, as the mature tree, to fall and disappear?

It was the opinion of the learned Broca that certain osseous remains in Europe point to a race once there entirely unlike any other, modern or ancient.[203] The gloomy precedent is established, therefore, and we have to reflect if it applies to any now living varieties of our species.

Beginning at home, we may first inquire concerning the American race. The question, Are the Indians dying out? was investigated some years ago by learned authorities at Washington, who announced the cheerful result that, contrary to the universal opinion, the red man is not decreasing at all, but increasing in numbers![204]

I have studied these pleasing statements with care, and regret that I do not reach the same satisfactory conclusions. The writers in question take no account of the signs of a dense ancient population in the Ohio valley, in Michigan, in Florida, in the Pueblo region; they take for granted that the estimates of all the early voyagers and travelers were gross exaggerations; they pay no attention to the historic fact that the natives of the Atlantic coast suffered severely from epidemic diseases before the English established their first settlements, diseases probably disseminated from the Spanish colonies in Florida or Mexico; finally, they commit the fatal ethnographic error of confounding under the name “Indians” both the pure and the mixed members of the race.

This last oversight vitiates all the argument. No one is prepared to say that some faint strain of native American blood may not be perpetuated indefinitely. But this is not the survival of the race or of the “Indians,” any more than the Normans survive to-day in England.

My own studies convince me that the American race is and has long been disappearing, both actually, tribe by tribe, and relatively, by admixture with the whites. In our own area there were many tribes once of considerable numbers, who have become wholly extinct. The Timucuas of Florida, the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Monacans of Virginia, the Mohegans of New York, the Boethucs of Newfoundland, have no living representatives. The whole of the inhabitants of the Bahamas and Greater Antilles were hurried to destruction in a couple of generations after the discovery by Columbus. The list would be long were I to recapitulate the dead languages known by name or by a few sentences in some old missionary book, to the student of American linguistics.

The process is not suspended. Beginning at the north with the Eskimos, we find their number steadily diminishing;[205] the Athabascas, according to Petitot, are but a wreck of their former selves; of the tribes of the United States, Miss Alice Fletcher, who has traveled extensively among them, assures me that in a few generations there will be scarcely any of pure descent surviving; and I have noted for myself on the reservations what an increasing proportion of the young people reveal the infusion of European blood.

The same is true all over the Continent. The American Indian, as such, is destined to disappear before European civilization. If he retains his habits he will be exterminated; if he aims to preserve an unmixed descent, he will be crushed out by disease and competition; his only resource is to blend his race with the whites, and this infallibly means his disappearance from the scene.

The Island World, extending from Easter Island to Madagascar, presents the same spectacle. The aboriginal, undersized Negritos have long disappeared from many of the larger islands where they lived in historic times; and on the Philippines and elsewhere the report is that they are slowly but steadily drifting toward annihilation.[206] The Tasmanians have perished to the last man; the Australians are one-fifth what they were estimated by the best authorities at the beginning of the century; the Maoris of New Zealand have lessened one-half; the natives of Easter Island have sunk from twenty-five hundred in 1850 to less than three hundred; and so on for nearly all the Polynesian islands.

This extreme fatality has received the earnest attention of philanthropists and scientific physicians. Its causes are visible. They are the introduction of new epidemics, as measles, small-pox, syphilis and consumption, the last mentioned peculiarly fatal, and now recognized as eminently contagious under certain conditions; an increased infant mortality; drunkenness and its consequences; and diminished fecundity in the women. This last is both one of the most potent and one of the obscurest of the causes of diminished population. Why at some certain period a people should be smitten with sterility is a mysterious fact, for which the explanation must be postponed until we become better acquainted with the many enigmas which surround the process of reproduction.

Add to the death-rate the considerable percentage of children who are born of unions with the White, the Asian or the African races, and are thus no longer representatives of the ancestral stock, and we must acknowledge that these insular peoples are in no better, even a worse case than the American Indians. They, too, are sitting beneath the Damocles sword of extinction.

Such an assertion is doubtfully applicable to the Austafrican race. I have already referred to some statistics showing its heavy mortality in the isles of France and Ceylon, and the German ethnographer Ratzel is inclined to believe that it is diminishing in Central Africa itself.[207] But the census returns of our own country and of the West Indies show a positive and rapid increase particularly if we include the large population of mixed blood.

We have been taught in this country to look with something like terror on the teeming millions of China, only awaiting the chance to overrun the whole earth, underbid all other laborers, profit by the fruits of our more liberal governments and nobler religions, and give nothing in return. A few centuries ago a still more dreadful fear haunted the nations of Europe that some other Timurlane or Genghis Khan would lead his countless hordes of merciless Mongolians from the steppes of Siberia across the cultivated fields of the Danube to wipe out, as with a sponge, the glorious picture of renascent European culture.

The latter fear no longer disturbs any mind. The mightiest of the Tartar powers is but a shadow, maintained by the mutual jealousy of Europeans themselves; the illimitable steppes of Tartary and Mongolia acknowledge the suzerainty of the Slavonian; and the nomadic hordes of the steppes and tundras are steadily diminishing under the same baneful influences of civilization which are blighting the Australian and the American.

Whether this is true also of the Sinitic stocks, especially of the Chinese, we have no positive information. It has been rumored that of late years repeated periods of drought, resulting in disastrous famine, have materially reduced the population of the interior of China, many perishing and others removing nearer the coast. As it is only near the coast that foreigners have the opportunity to observe the people, it is likely that they bring away an exaggerated notion of the density of population in the country at large. It is at any rate doubtful if the Chinese are more than stationary.

Widely different is the vista which appears before us when we contemplate the Eurafrican race. It goes forth conquering and to conquer, extending its empire over all continents and to the remotest islands of the sea. Never has that progress been so rapid as to-day. Two centuries ago the whole of the white race which could lay claim to purity of blood numbered not over one hundred millions, or ten per cent. of the population of the world, and was confined to the limits of Europe and North Africa; now the European branch of it alone counts nearly five hundred millions, or one-third of the whole. In the year 1800, the non-resident whites of European descent were ten millions; now they are over eighty millions. Every navy and every army of any fighting capacity belong to the European whites and their descendants. No nation and no race of other lineage dare withstand an attack or disobey an order from a leading European power. Africa and Asia are dismembered and parceled out at London, Berlin and St. Petersburg, and no one dreams of asking the consent of the inhabitants of those continents.

This astonishing progress is not due alone to the North Mediterranean branch of the Eurafrican race. The representatives of the South Mediterranean branch are for a large part in it. In the forefront of it, whether in the great capitals of Europe or in the pioneer towns of the frontiers, we find the acute and versatile Semite, full of energy and knowledge, guiding in councils, his master hand on the levers of the vastest financial schemes, his subtle policy governing the diplomacy of statesmen and the decisions of directors. As Prof. Gerland has well said, there is something in the Semitic character which is complementary to that of the Aryan,[208] and it is not without significance that the surprising development of the latter began when the religious prejudices against the Jews commenced to yield to more enlightened sentiments. They are now the growing people. Statistics show that in Europe, while the Aryac population doubles in number in thirty-four years, the Semites double in twenty-five years, having more children to a marriage and less infantile mortality.[209] When bigotry ceases on both sides, and free inter-marriage restores the Aryo-Semitic stock to its original unity, we may look for a race of nobler capacities than any now existing.

Still more rapid would that progress be, still more beneficent would be the sway of European civilization, could the great powers of that continent lay aside unworthy jealousies, and agree to extend in harmony the blessings of just government and sound education over other races. An unreasoning distrust has prevented the removal of the barbaric Sibiric power which centers at Constantinople; and the excellent results of the extension of the Slavonian supremacy in Central Asia have been studiously ignored by British writers.

Reflections such as these teach us how closely the study of ethnographic science is related to practical politics. Ethnography, indeed, is the necessary basis of correct history and sound statesmanship. It offers to history a foundation on natural law; it explains events by showing their dependence on the physical structure, the mental pecularities, and the geographic surroundings of the peoples engaged in them; it presents, in its present pictures of savage life, the condition of the highest nations in the earlier stages of their culture.

To the statesman it offers those facts about the capacities and limitations of peoples which should guide his dealings with them; it comes with no vague theory of optimism or pessimism, such as doctrinaire philosophers love to air, but with the admonition that each people, each race, must be studied by itself, free from bias, free from bigotry, and with the conviction that no matter what metaphysics say, any nation, as any man, may lift itself by the recognition of those indefeasible and universal elements of the mind, the “I,” the “ought,” and the “can”--the reverence of self, the respect for duty, and the devotion to freedom.

“Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.”

INDEX OF AUTHORS.

Abel, C., 150.

Achelis, T., 95.

Allen, H., 27.

Andree, R., 45.

Avienus, R. F., 122.

Barth, R., 116, 119, 122.

Bartels, M., 40.

Bastian, A., 95, 237, 243, 266.

Beddoe, J., 31, 146.

Beauregard, O., 231.

Berendt, C. H., 267.

Bergaigne, A., 170.

Berthelot, S., 116, 117.

Bertin, G., 132.

Bissuell, H., 126.

Bleicher, Dr., 90.

Blumentritt, F., 225, 226, 295.

Boas, F., 258.

Bonaparte, R., 213.

Borsari, F., 117.

Brinton, D. G., 54, 61, 71, 75, 122, 124, 255, 262, 266.

Broca, P., 30, 117, 120, 143, 292.

Brugmann, K., 151.

Brühl, G., 273.

Bunsen, 123.

Brugsch, 124.

Callimachus, 117.

Candolle, A. de, 39, 109, 147.

Cartailhac, E., 90.

Castelnau, F. de, 224.

Chantre, E., 172.

Chudzinski, 30.

Clark, S. N., 293.

Collignon, R., 90, 118.

Cope, E. D., 27.

Curr, E. N., 241.

Curtius, 159.

Dall, W. H., 215.

Dallas, J., 226.

Dally, 284.

Darwin, C., 20, 43, 85, 86, 95, 219, 284, 293.

Delattre, A. L., 130.

Delisle, F., 192.

Delitzsch, 126.

Deniker, J., 215.

Doughty, 134.

Du Chaillu, 178, 296.

Duncker, Max, 159, 160.

Duveyrier, 126.

Earl, G. W., 237, 240.

Ella, L., 228.

Emin Bey, 178.

D’Escayrac de Lauture, 201, 203, 216.

Faidherbe, 117, 120.

Faurot, L., 132.

Finsch, O., 221, 227, 228, 234, 238.

Fletcher, A., 294.

Fligier, Dr., 123, 139, 148, 159.

Flower, W. H., 27, 226.

Fornander, 236.

Fritsch, N., 179.

Gaudry, A., 85.

Geiger, L., 148.

Gerland, G., 191, 299.

Glaser, E., 133.

Gooch, W. D., 91.

Habel, S., 266.

Haeckel, E., 32, 223.

Hahn, T., 180.

Hale, H., 61, 229, 237, 240.

Halevy, 125, 126.

Haliburton, R. G., 132.

Hamy, 233, 240.

Harris, W. B., 117.

Haughton, S., 94.

Haynes, W. W., 129.

Herodotus, 121, 166.

Hervé, G., 160, 165, 217, 232, 280, 284.

Hobbes, 76.

Holden, L., 20, 29.

Hooker, J., 126.

Hopkins, S. W., 256.

Hovelacque, A., 160, 217, 232.

Humboldt, W., 122, 150.

Huxley, 89.

Kant, E., 59.

Keane, A. H., 213, 233.

Kölliker, A., 29.

Kollman, J., 108.

Krause, A., 258.

Kulischer, M., 59.

Kuun, G., 166.

Lang, R. H., 160.

Lapouge, G. de, 129, 147.

Latham, R. G., 146.

Leclerc, 179.

Lenormant, 122.

Lesson, 236.

Lubbock, J., 67, 90.

Lumholtz, C., 55, 240, 241.

Lyman, B. S., 217.

Mackenzie, J., 192.

Mallery, G., 293.

Man, E. H., 225.

Mantegazza, 197.

Martinet, 236.

Martins, von, 270.

Matthews, W., 23.

Maury, 239.

Meyer, A. B., 227.

Meyer, K., 42.

Michel, F., 252.

Montaigne, 58.

Montano, J., 226.

Morgan, L. H., 58, 101.

Morse, E. S., 34, 94.

Mortillet, G., 85, 89.

Müller, Fr., 115, 122, 188, 210, 214, 230, 232, 239.

Müller, M., 83, 144.

Müller, Dr. M., 124.

Nansen, F., 294.

Newman, 122.

Nordenskiold, N. A. E., 214.

D’Omalius, d’Halloy, 93, 146, 148, 166.

Orgeas, J., 279, 283.

Packard, A. T., 249.

Palgrave, G., 132.

Penka, C., 147, 162.

Peschel, O., 20, 223.

Petitot, E., 251.

Pitt-Rivers, 129.

Ploix, M., 181.

Pösche, T., 147.

Potocki, 167.

Pruner Bey, 118.

Quatrefages, A. de, 95, 143, 172, 177, 191, 239, 282.

Quedlinfeldt, 118.

Radde, Dr., 30.

Ratzel, F., 233, 239, 296.

Rawlinson, 118, 126.

Reclus, E., 44, 243.

Reiss, W., 129.

Ribbe, F. C., 22.

Riccardi, P., 35.

Ritter, 116.

Rittich, A. F., 171, 208, 214, 215.

Roskof, G., 67.

Rousselet, L., 168.

St. Vincent, B. de, 122.

Sayce, A. H., 115, 126, 147.

Schliemann, H., 160.

Schmidt, E., 22.

Schneider, W., 53, 55, 67.

Schrader, O., 147, 162.

Schweinfurth, K., 179.

Scylax, 117.

Seeland, N., 211.

Spencer, H., 56, 67.

Steinen, K. von den., 268, 270.

Stone, J. H., 116.

Strabo, 117.

Suess, E., 88, 89, 222.

Tautain, L., 184, 193.

Taylor, I., 110, 112, 143, 146, 149, 159, 162.

Ten Kate, Dr., 256.

Testut, L., 33.

Thompson, A., 235.

Tiele, C. P., 42.

Topinard, P., 31, 36.

Tubino, Dr., 144.

Verneau, Dr., 116.

Virchow, R., 27, 31, 80, 109, 128, 129, 145, 148, 163, 172, 229.

Wagner, M., 20, 44, 221.

Waitz, Th., 20, 40, 186, 286.

Wake, C. S., 239.

Wallace, A. R., 89, 196, 227.

Wharton, 151.

Whitman, W., 177.

Whitney, W. D., 162.

Wilson, D., 75.

Winkler, H., 144, 212, 215.

Woldrich, J. N., 84.

Zampa, R., 159.

Zeisberger, D., 290.

Zittel, C., 90.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

Abyssinians, 135.

Acclimation, 278.

Adals, 131.

Aetas, 35, 224.

Afars, 131.

Affection, 55.

Africa, derivation, 122.

Agaonas, 131.

Agathyrsi, 166.

Agriculture, 72.

Ainos, 33, 216.

Afghans, 168.

Akka, 178, 179.

Albanians, 152, 158.

Albinism, 45.

Aleutians, 216, 250.

Alfurese, 233, 234.

Alemanni, 163.

Algonkins, 252.

Allophyllic stocks, 114.

Amalgamation, 283.

Amhara, 135.

American Indians, 71, 247, 293.

American religions, 71.

American race, 247, 281, 293.

Amorites, 126.

Amoshagh, 122.

Ancestral worship, 56, 68.

Andaman islands, 224.

Angles, 163.

Anglo-American, 164.

Animals, domestic, 72.

Animism, 68.

Annamese, 206.

Apaches, 251.

Apes, extinct, 84.

Aquitanians, 143.

Arabia Felix, 134.

Arabians, 125, 133.

Arameans, 137.

Araucarians, 275.

Arawaks, 268.

Architecture, 72.

Areas of characterization, 94.

Armenians, 167.

Armorican, 154.

Arms, length of, 28.

Arnauts, 158.

Arrow releases, 34.

Aryac stock, 144.

Aryac migration, 153.

Aryans, origin of, 144.

Aryo-Semitic stock, 150, 299.

Ashanti, 185.

Asia, 89.

Asian race, the, 195, 281.

Assyrians, 126, 130, 150.

Athapascans, 251.

Atlas mountains, 89, 112.

Attila, 210.

Austafrica, 89.

Austafrican race, 98, 173, 296.

Australians, 33, 35, 43, 46, 53, 55, 239, 240.

Auvergnats, 107.

Avars, 171, 210.

Avesta, the, 145, 167.

Aymaras, 272.

Aztecs, 259.

Baber, 209.

Bactrians, 167.

Bambaras, 184.

Baniuns, 183.

Bantu group, 189.

Barabras, 187.

Barbari, 121.

Baris, 181.

Basques, 107, 111, 112, 142, 143.

Battaks, 233, 234.

Batuas, 178.

Bedawins, 133.

Bechuanas, 189, 192.

Bedjas, 131.

Berbers, 112, 116, 118, 121, 157, 183.

Beluchis, 168.

Bertas, 187.

Bhillas, 244.

Bhotan, 205.