280 EPIDEMIC AND ENDEMIC DISEASE 



the aborigines. But except on the distant frontiers the native 

 women perished or were sterile through ill-health, and even the 

 half-caste children could not survive under the conditions that 

 were created. 1 The natives melted away, and now are found almost 

 solely in remote and thinly populated wilds, where a nomadic life 

 affords some protection. The white colonization of Australasia 

 is having similar results. In Polynesia, as soon as the trader 

 brings his clothes and the missionary insists on his converts wear- 

 ing them and attending crowded churches and schools, the work of 

 extermination begins. 



465. In Asia and Africa, where Europeans have made many 

 conquests and native wars have been as many and as bloody 

 as in the West, every European settlement has a flourishing 

 native suburb. But throughout America and Australasia no con- 

 siderable European town has a native quarter. This one fact 

 brings into startling prominence the difference between the in- 

 habitants of the East and West. The latter were able to 

 found settled communities and even cities before the advent of 

 tuberculosis. Since its arrival even nomadic life is hardly possible 

 to them. 



466. Writing of the Spanish occupation of the West Indies, the 

 historian Froude declares, " The Carib races whom the Spaniards 

 found in Cuba and St Domingo had withered before them as if 

 struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish over- 

 seers. Many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which 

 have made the presence of civilization so fatal to the Red Indians, 

 the Australians, and Maoris. It is with man as it is with animals. 

 The races that consent to be domesticated, prosper and multiply ; 

 those that cannot live without freedom, pine like caged eagles, or 

 disappear like the buffaloes of the prairies. Anyway, the natives 

 perished out of the islands of the Caribbean Sea with a rapidity 



1 The fact that half-castes abound in tropical America but are comparatively 

 rare in the North has an interesting bearing on the Mendelian hypothesis. It 

 has been surmised that the inheritance of susceptibility and resisting power to 

 disease is alternative. But if that were true, and if the independent inheritance 

 of characters be also a fact, half-castes should abound in the North as much as 

 in the South, and be as capable of dwelling in tubercle-infested cities as Europeans- 

 A proportion, while displaying a Mendelian mixture of Indian and European 

 characteristics, should inherit fully the powers of resisting consumption possessed 

 by their white ancestors. Obviously, since they persist in the tropics, where 

 selection by tuberculosis is less stringent, but perish in the temperate regions, 

 where it is more severe, the ' inheritance ' of resisting power is blended, not 

 alternative ; wherein it accords with all other human racial traits except eye 

 colour. 



