BACTERIA AS EMPIRE BUILDERS 183 



West. It is a highly significant fact that throughout the 

 New World no city or town has its native quarter, whereas 

 every European settlement in Asia and Africa has its native 

 suburbs. The aborigines of the New World are now found 

 only in remote or more or less inaccessible parts. The 

 following is an example of the manner in which tuberculosis 

 went to work : " The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered 

 some four hundred when the small-pox came and reduced 

 them by one fourth. Six months later a woman developed 

 tubercular consumption ; the disease spread like fire about 

 the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a 

 woman, fled from the newly-created solitude. . . . Early in 

 the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a 

 first case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen 

 persons, and by the end of August, when the tale was told 

 me, one soul survived, a boy who had been absent at his 

 schooling." x 



305. The Caribs of the West Indies are almost extinct. 

 The Red Indians are going fast, as are the aborigines of cold 

 and temperate South America. The Tasmanians have gone. 

 The Australians and the Maoris are but a dwindling remnant. 

 As surely as the trader with his clothes or the missionary 

 with his church and school-room appears the work of extermin- 

 ation begins on Polynesian islands. Throughout the whole 

 vast extent of the New World the only pure aborigines who 

 seem destined to persist are those which live remote in 

 mountains or in the depths of fever-haunted forests, where 

 the white man is unable to build the towns and cities with 

 which he has studded the cooler and more " healthy " regions 

 of the North and South. Many explanations, or pseudo- 

 explanations, have been offered to account for the dis- 

 appearance of the natives. We are told that they cannot 

 endure " domestication/' that they " pine like caged eagles " 

 in confinement, that the change produced by civilization 

 makes them infertile as the change produced by captivity 

 makes some wild animals infertile, and so forth. But the 

 only peoples who are disappearing are those of the New 

 World, some of whom were by no means savage. In Asia 

 and Africa are many tribes far lower in the scale of civiliza- 

 tion who have persisted in constant communication with 

 dense and settled communities from time immemorial. 

 Notwithstanding all that has been written the people of the 

 New World do not wither away mysteriously when brought 

 into contact with the white man. They die as other men do 

 1 In the South Seas, p. 27 (R. L. Stevenson). 



