CAUSES OF DEATH 281 



which startled the conquerors. The famous Bishop Las Casas 

 pitied and tried to save the remnant that was left. The Spanish 

 settlers required labourers for the plantations. On the continent 

 of Africa were another race, savage in their natural state, which 

 would domesticate like sheep and oxen, and learnt and improved 

 in the white man's company." 



467. These sentences are typical of much that has been written 

 concerning the decay of the New World races. Almost all writers 

 unite in speaking of it as mysterious, and yet the facts are patent 

 to all observers on the spot. There is no more mystery connected 

 with their decay than with the extinction of the dodo and the 

 bison. It cannot be doubted that the races of the New World 

 have suffered or are suffering extinction in consequence of 

 the introduction amongst them of Old World microbic diseases, 

 and because of one other cause, also an importation, of which 

 more hereafter. 1 



468. Like the imported African slaves that suffered from 

 sleeping sickness, and perhaps also Swiss mountaineers who are 

 said to die of nostalgia, but probably fall victims to microbic 

 disease, they perish of physical, not mental decline. Their in- 

 capacity to achieve European civilization is mainly corporal, not 

 psychical. That much is quite beyond dispute and may be verified 

 by reference to the reports of all the Departments of Public Health 

 in America, Australasia, and Polynesia. These show quite deci- 

 sively that the proportionate mortality of the natives is very high, 

 that they perish on the average at an exceptionally early age, and 

 that the causes of their deaths are our imported diseases. Their 

 families are abnormally small ; but we need not, as so many 

 writers have done, seek a mystical explanation. Presumably, in 

 the New World as in the Old, amongst natives as amongst 

 Europeans, ill-health is one of the causes of sterility. 



469. Anciently the inhabitants of conquered territories were 

 put to the sword, and thus were never again a menace to the 

 invaders. In this manner the Jews established themselves in 

 Palestine, and, apparently, the Saxons in England. Zengis Khan 

 is said to have destroyed eighteen millions of people in China 

 alone. Red Indians and Maoris sought to exterminate their 

 enemies, as do African and Polynesian savages at the present day. 

 Civilized peoples fight to conquer, not to destroy. Rome extended 

 her sway over many lands, the inhabitants of which prospered and 

 multiplied under her rule. Similarly, the Normans in England and 



1 See chapters xv. and xvi. 



