THE PERILS OF RAPID CIVILIZATION. 233 



law of arrest, exemplified in the early history of the Cherokees, is 

 now in operation in the majority of the Indian tribes, as in all other 

 peoples exposed to the sudden contact of a new culture. A late Com- 

 missioner of Indian affairs * says, " Indian blood, thus far in the his- 

 tory of this country, has tended decidedly toward extinction." And the 

 most recent writer on the Indian question tells us that wherever civ- 

 ilization is attempted among those people " the results are at first dis- 

 couraging, with increased mortality and disease." f 



These three races, the Hawaiian, the Maori, and the American, 

 have been selected as the best instances of the adoption of a civiliza- 

 tion involving complete and radical changes in mental, moral, and 

 physical circumstances, made with some spontaneity, perhaps, in a few 

 cases, but still essentially alien from the natural tendencies of the 

 people, and devoid of that great safeguard of gradualness which 

 Nature, when left to herself, throws about that critical process. In 

 these peoples the exposure to the new leaven has been most sudden 

 and most complete. We may allude, however, in passing, to some of 

 the less perfect illustrations of the same process. The African negro 

 has been in contact with the whites nearly as long as the Indian, but 

 under circumstances widely different. Up to twenty years ago he was 

 sedulously kept from becoming civilized. It was the express aim of 

 his masters to repress his intellectual nature as completely as possible. 

 The effect of his enslavement, then, was not to civilize him in any sense, 

 but merely to change him from a wild animal into a domesticated or 

 " tame " one. Since the war, his condition as a whole, in the South, 

 has not materially changed in this respect. Of course, now and then 

 an individual has emerged into an intellectual consciousness, and has 

 become an intelligent and civilized member of society. But the great 

 multitude, ignorant, improvident, lazy, have undergone no sufficient 

 change in their natural way of living to disturb their physical equi- 

 poise, and with food enough to keep their bodies well nourished, and 

 with scarcely a conscious nervous system, they increase and multiply 

 faster than our white population.^ 



Japan is a country which has undergone a most remarkable and 

 sudden mental awakening. But here we are deterred by two facts 

 from tracing any effect upon the stability of the physical organization 

 of the people. In the first place, the intellectual development has not 

 permeated the whole social structure. Only a small class have as yet 

 felt it. In the second place, the movement is so recent, beginning 

 since the revolution of 1868, that sufficient time has not elapsed for it 



* General Walker, he. eit, p. 54. 



t " The Red Man and the White Man in America," George E. Ellis, p. 624. 



X The census returns of the colored population are in round numbers as follows, 

 for the successive decades of this century: 1810, 1,191,000; 1820, 1,538,000; 1830, 

 2,009,000; 1840,2,487,000; 1850,3,254,313; 1860, 8,954,000; 1870,4,880,000; 1880, 

 6,581,000. 



