THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 627 



settlers accustom themselves to Lower Canada and to Algeria, Ameri- 

 can to Alaska and Texas, English to Nova Scotia and Guiana. Aus- 

 tralian farmers are not deterred by 120° in jSTew South Wales. 

 Queensland sugar planters are multiplying in the tropics. Gold 

 diggers rush equally to torrid Coolgardie and frozen Klondike. 

 Within these v.ide limits the indigenous races are everywhere melting 

 away. They are merely the last of the vanquished. The softer 

 native grasses have been eaten out by the sturdy European gTasses. 

 Native plants have been exterminated by imported plants or driven to 

 the hills. The Norway rat has expelled the native rat. The moa 

 is to be found only in museums; the emu, the kangaroo, and the 

 wallaby are in full retreat. None of them can make a living in com- 

 petition with stronger species. It is not otherwise with man. The 

 white man destroys the black man's game or cultivates the red man's 

 land, and both are driven into the sterile interior. By some undis- 

 covered correlation the birth rate adjusts itself to the food supply, 

 and few children are born. Other causes are assigned, but they 

 might be shown to be a continuation of causes in operation before the 

 white immigration. The chief cause is the effect on the reproductive 

 system. To it mainly is due the decline of the Hawaiians, Maoris, 

 and Australian blacks during the present century, of which statistics 

 have been kept. Even where food is supplied, the decline continues. 

 Like the ancient Hebrews and other Eastern nationalities, like the 

 inhabitants of mediseval villages, like Circassians and Cherokees — 

 forcible dislocations which but continued their own involuntary mi- 

 grations — the surviving Tasmanian aboriginals were transported to 

 an island in Bass's Strait, the change apparently precipitating the 

 decline, for children ceased to be born; the remnant was brought 

 back to their native island, which, twelve years ago, witnessed the 

 total extinction of a once vigorous race. 



A people may disappear by absorption, aiding extinction. There 

 was a time in the history of French Canada when it was on the point 

 of realizing the Jesuit ideal of a continent inhabited by a mixed race 

 of reds and whites. The missionaries Samuel Marsden and Lawry, 

 the eminent governor, Sir George Grey, and a well-informed writer 

 in the Edinburgh Review, believed that a blended race of Maoris 

 and English would dwell in the islands of the Southern Cross. How 

 far the colony is now from so undesirable a consummation will appear 

 frOm the fact that fewer than five thousand half-castes are sown 

 through a population of seven hundred and twenty thousand. There 

 is, however, a steady advance in their numbers. While the pure- 

 blooded Maoris have in five years declined by one eleventh, the 

 number of half-castes has in the same period increased by nearly one 

 sixth. The figures relating to the blacks of New South Wales are 



