264 THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — PHYSICAL 



existed for thousands of years in contact with, and in 

 the midst of, most ancient civilizations and very 

 crowded populations. There is no conceivable reason 

 why the Caribs should have been less capable of 

 enduring domestication or slavery or civilization than 

 the equally barbarous or even more barbarous negroes. 

 But they perished, as other New World races are 

 perishing, because, unlike the negroes, they had not 

 been rendered resistant to the non-malarial zymotic 

 diseases which the Spaniards introduced, 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 commerce that then sprang up, in the very path 

 of infection. 



The above considerations give rise to thoughts as 

 exceedingly grave as they are painful. Are not all our 

 efforts, whether prompted by philanthropic or religious 

 zeal, by which we seek to protect and preserve the 

 aboriginal races of the New World, wholly mistaken ? 

 Are they not in effect absolutely murderous? We 

 gather them into close school-rooms and churches, 

 where teachers and missionaries speak to them from 

 infected lungs. We endeavour to persuade them to 

 abandon their nomadic habits and form settled com- 

 munities. We — and thereby we prove our own bar- 

 barity, the imperfection of our own civilization — force 

 them in climates where clothes are wholly unnecessary, 

 and therefore a species of dirt, to wear clothes, than 

 which a better vehicle for air and earth-borne disease 

 cannot well be conceived. In fact, we strive to bring 

 them at one bound into that state of society which has 

 become possible to us only at the cost of tens of millions 

 of lives during thousands of years. During all that 

 time the conditions favourable to the prevalence of 



