THE ROOTS OF EMPIRE 45 



in Australia, in New Zealand, and in the islands 

 of the Pacific, as well as in the Andamans, and 

 several other of the Oceanic islands of the Eastern 

 Hemisphere. The sole mystery has lain in the 

 circumstance that the races of the New World 

 are less resistant to diseases of the purely parasitic 

 type than those of the Old World, and to that 

 mystery I trust I have furnished a key. It is 

 no question of freedom, or of domestication per se. 

 The continental savages of the Old World do not 

 perish when brought in contact with civilisation. 

 In India, Ceylon, Japan, and Formosa, are tribes 

 of an exceedingly wild type, that have existed for 

 thousands of years in contact with, and in the 

 midst of most ancient civilisations and very crowded 

 populations. There is no conceivable reason why 

 the Caribs should have been less capable of en- 

 during domestication and slavery, or civilisation, 

 than the equally barbarous, or even more bar- 

 barous negroes. Yet they perished, as other New 

 World races are perishing, because, unlike the 

 negroes, they had not been rendered resistant to 

 the zymotic diseases which the Spaniards intro- 

 duced ; and they would have perished had the 

 Spaniards come among them as slaves, not as 

 masters, and adopted their manners and habits of 

 life, instead of forcing on them a change; for 

 their islands lay in the very highway of the com- 



