282 EPIDEMIC AND ENDEMIC DISEASE 



the English in Wales merely administered the conquered territory. 

 England and Russia govern empires vaster than the Roman, 

 and, so far from making any conscious effort to root out 

 the subject races, endeavour to render them peaceful and 

 prosperous. 



470. But if history teaches anything with plainness, it is the 

 lesson that conquest, to be permanent, must be accompanied by 

 the extermination of the natives ; otherwise, in the fullness of 

 time, the conquered expel or absorb the conquerors. The Greeks 

 and Romans were expelled from their acquisitions. The Normans 

 were absorbed. The Moors have left scarcely a trace in Spain. 

 The Irish continually threaten the expulsion of the English, to 

 whom the Welsh are united on equal terms. In parts of South 

 America pure Spaniards have nearly disappeared. It is folly to 

 suppose the European possessions in Asia and tropical Africa 

 have any element of permanency. The local endemic diseases 

 fight for the natives, who yearly grow more numerous, intelligent, 

 and insistent in their demands for self-government. Presently the 

 Europeans, like the Romans, will be expelled. South Africa is 

 not effectually defended by diseases strange to Europeans ; but 

 they have imported none which the natives are unable to resist. 

 Therefore at the Cape and in the north of the Continent, 

 Europeans are threatened with absorption ; or if, as is very 

 unlikely, the two races remain for ever distinct, with subjuga- 

 tion. History affords no example of a race maintaining perpetual 

 supremacy over a more numerous subject people. 



471. But in the Western Hemisphere conquest has usually 

 been followed by extermination. Disease has wrought more 

 widely and not less fatally than the sword. The races of nearly 

 half the world are becoming extinct, and are being replaced by 

 races from the other half, and in this great cataclysm our own 

 people has played a predominant part. The Spaniards and the 

 Portuguese, powerful maritime nations in the fifteenth and six- 

 teenth centuries, had the first start in the race and chose the 

 seemingly richer tropics. But, checked by malaria, European 

 emigration soon dwindled. Possibly there are now fewer individuals 

 of pure European descent in tropical America than there were 

 three hundred years ago. But the Britons, who colonized North 

 America and at a later date Australasia, multiplied enormously, 

 and the stream of new colonists, so far from dwindling, ultimately 

 gathered volume, till now by far the larger part of our race resides 

 abroad. Owing solely to the vast void created by disease, a people 



