THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 295 



cry, state socialism for its gospel, Joseph of Birmingham for its 

 prophet, and the British Empire for its deity. 



The iron age is fitly inaugurated by the most degraded relation- 

 ship that man can bear to man — that of slavery. Only the oldest of 

 modern colonies imitate the mother countries in passing through this 

 stage; in those of later foundation a mere shadow of it remains, or 

 it takes other shapes. Colonists first enslave the natives of the country 

 where they settle. In the South American colonies, where they went 

 to find gold, they would work for no other purpose; they therefore 

 needed the natives to till the soil ; they needed them also as carriers. 

 For these purposes they were used unscrupulously. They were dis- 

 tributed among the Spaniards under a system of repartimientos 

 which repeated the provisions of Greek and Roman slavery, and was 

 itself reduplicated three centuries later in the convict assignment 

 system of New South Wales. With such savage cruelty was it 

 worked that, according to the testimony of Columbus, six sevenths of 

 the population of Hispaniola died under it in a few years. The same 

 form of slavery, but of a very different character, prevailed in Africa 

 down almost to our own times. In the British colonies it was sub- 

 merged in 1834, from causes exterior to itself, by the humanitarian 

 wave that wrecked the West Indies; in the French colonies it was 

 abolished by the revolutionary government of 1848; in the Dutch 

 colonies it possibly subsists to this day. Theoretically abolished or 

 not, the relationship between civilized whites and savage blacks must 

 be everywhere a modified form of slavery; and a white colonization 

 of the African tropics can only take place under conditions indistin- 

 guishable from a limited slavery. In colder or younger colonies, 

 even if a more refined sentiment had permitted it, there could be no 

 question of enslaving the fierce red Indians, the warlike Maoris, 

 or the intractable Australian blacks. The Indians rendered some 

 services to the northern colonists. The Maoris worked for the first 

 immigrants into Canterbury, but as free laborers, and the phase soon 

 passed away as more valuable labor arrived. Blacks were in the 

 early years employed by the Australian settlers, but like nearly all 

 savages they were found incapable of continuous industry. The next 

 step is to import slaves. To lighten the oppression of the Mexicans, 

 negroes were introduced, as they had previously been into Europe. 

 There, and still more in the southern colonies of North America, 

 they were the chief pioneers. They cut down forests, cleared the 

 jungles, drained the swamps, and opened up the country. For the 

 best part of two hundred years the world's sugar, rice, cotton, to- 

 bacco, and indigo were grown by negro labor. The effect on the 

 negro himself has been to raise him one grade in the scale of being. 

 If, as Mr. Galton believes, he is naturally two grades below the Euro- 



