THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 621 



commensalism, and mutualism — exhaust the possible forms of rela- 

 tionship between the immigrants who land in a new country and the 

 indigenes whom they find there. 



I. Desert islands or other unoccupied portions of the earth's 

 surface having been at all times scarce, outside the books of Rous- 

 seau and Defoe, the would-be settlers in a promised or desired land 

 have usually found themselves face to face with a native people in 

 prior occupation of the soil. Like the penguins on the Auckland 

 Islands, or the birds in the Australian forest, these peoples have no 

 instinctive fear of the white man. They are not shy nor without 

 provocation hostile. They are eager to trade, willing to sell their 

 land, glad to have the foreigner in their midst. Things do not run 

 smoothly very long. The natives, being still imperfectly initiated in 

 the distinction between meum and tuum, " convey " the white man's 

 coveted possessions. Harsh reprisals convert the black or the red 

 man's passions into mere powder magazines. Or the rape of some 

 red or black Helen fires another Troy. Realizing at last that it is pro 

 focis they have to fight, they unite against the Ycnghese or the 

 Pakeha as they have never united against one another. The war- 

 fare has different fortunes in different ages. It was impossible before 

 the invention of arms of precision, so that America could not have 

 been colonized had there been an earlier Columbus. It was at its 

 hardest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the weapons 

 of civilization were but little superior to those of barbarism. It is at 

 its easiest now, when the breechloader has first made man the undis- 

 puted lord of creation, alike over wild beasts and wilder men. The 

 issue grows daily more assured with every new invention, and 

 Marconi's discovery hastens the advent of the era of omnipotent sci- 

 ence imagined by Renan, when, like the mere gaze of the Brah- 

 man, the very approach or the most distant action of a scien- 

 tifically equipped community will insure its victory over a barbaric 

 race. 



The resulting peace is sometimes enduring. The Massachusetts 

 treaty with Massasoit was loyally observed for over half a century; 

 the pacification of the Maoris lasted for twelve or fourteen years — 

 an almost equal space of time in our swifter age. But it gets always 

 broken sooner or later, and usually by one grand peace-breaker. 

 When Chief-Justice Marshall ruled that the declaration of sover- 

 eignty over a territory carried with it, subject to the rights of prior 

 occupancy, the paramount ownership of all land within tliat territory, 

 he laid down a principle that has proved the fruitful mother of native 

 wars in every quarter of the globe. ISTot that it has ever been univer- 

 sally accepted. Roger Williams disavowed it beforehand. The British 

 Government has ostensibly acted on a very different canon. And 



