CHAPTER XIV 



BACTERIA AS EMPIRE BUILDERS 



Air- and water-borne diseases in the Western Hemisphere Tuber- 

 culosis The extinction of the natives The colonization of the New 

 World by European nations The causes of success or failure The 

 foundations of empire The cessation of the great migrations. 



303. THE ancient condition of the Old World was repro- 

 duced in the New. Again we read of plague and pestilence, 

 of water- and air-borne diseases coming and going in great 

 epidemics, and of the famines that followed. Measles and, 

 in later times, cholera piled the earth with the dead. The 

 part played by small-pox was even greater. When taken to 

 the West Indies in 1507 whole tribes were exterminated. 1 

 A few years later it quite depopulated San Domingo. In 

 Mexico it destroyed three and a half millions of people. 2 

 Prescott describes this first great epidemic as " sweeping over 

 the land like fire over the prairies, smiting down prince and 

 peasant ; and leaving its path strewn with the dead bodies of 

 the natives, who (in the strong language of a contemporary) 

 perished in heaps like cattle stricken with murrain." In 

 1841 Catlin wrote of the United States, " Thirty millions of 

 white men are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life 

 over the bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of 

 whom have fallen victims to small-pox." 



304. But the principal part was played by tuberculosis. 

 Air- and water-borne diseases generally left an immune 

 remnant, but against tuberculosis no immunity could be 

 acquired. Red Indians and Caribs could not in a few genera- 

 tions achieve an evolution which the inhabitants of the Old 

 World had accomplished only after thousands of years and at 

 the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. Civilization, which 

 implies a dense and settled community with cities and towns, 

 had suddenly become a necessity, but remained an impossi- 

 bility to all the inhabitants of the temperate parts of the 

 1 Hirsch, vol. i., p. 136. 2 Ibid., vol. L, p. 137. 



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