THE STATUS OF MAN. 271 



tants. We have the case of the Manchus in China, the Hindus 

 in Java, and, although the immigration was a thing of com- 

 pulsion, the case of the black slaves in the United States. 

 In some of these cases an incoming species may absorb certain 

 elements from the older population, which formerly had not 

 the status of a species. Such processes are not only matters of 

 history and historical anthropology, but of everyday occur- 

 rence. (Japanese in California, Javanese in the West-Indies). 

 Sometimes the former occupants will go to the wall. If a vast 

 country is inhabited by a sparsely sown population of hun- 

 ters, and an agricultural peope elect to discover and annex 

 this country, these latter will be able to multiply up to the 

 point, where they will drive the original hunters to agricul- 

 ture and either to extinction or to the status of a lower caste. 



Apart from immigration, castes may be formed by catas- 

 trophes, which force a group of people down to a level from 

 which they can not rise again. In this way the Tan-kai people 

 who live on ships around Shanghai and Hong Kong got differ- 

 entiated. Slavery makes a species of the group of people sub- 

 jected to it. On the other hand immigrants of a peculiar type, 

 conquerors, may take possession of landed property which 

 was formerly vested in the common people, and by the privi- 

 lege of landownership hold their own as a species. 



What are the barriers to specific unity within a people that 

 can still keep species apart, or that can still become effective 

 in differentiating a nation into species? 



Religious opinion and tradition constitute one barrier. It 

 seems probable that such a cause as the Reformation has done 

 more than any other single cause, excepting alienation of com- 

 mon property by a privileged class, to cause specific distinc- 

 tions within nations Religious tradition is a very common 

 barrier to a merging of species that inhabit one country. 

 It keeps Arabs and Chinese from merging into one species even 

 in countries, where they are both immigrants and where they 

 tend to the same occupations, landlord, tradesman, shoemaker, 

 as in Java. Religious tradition keeps a scattered people wit- 



