1 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
disease and injury published by Brown-Sequard, Cossar Ewart, and many medical men are capable of an interpretation different to that which they have given.
Mr. Galton speaks as if the causes which have brought about the dis- appearance of most savage races when brought in contact with high civilization were obscure. I can assure him, however, that they have been worked out precisely and statistically by many medical observers on the spot. Apart from extermination by war, the only savage races which are disappearing are those of the New World, and in every instance they are perishing from the enormous mortality caused among them by introduced diseases against which their races have undergone no evolution. He will find these precise statistics in the tables of mortality issued by all the public health departments that exist in America, Polynesia, and Australasia. He will find also many accounts in the journals of travelers. If he will read the records of visits of parties of aborigines from the New World to the cities of Europe, he will find that their mortality, especially from consumption, was invariably high. There is nothing more mysterious about the disappearance of these races than there is about the disappearance of the dodo and the bison. They are perishing, not because, as Froude poetically puts it, they are like " caged eagles," incapable of domestication, but simply and solely because they are weak against certain diseases. If malaria instead of consump- tion were prevalent in cities, the English would be incapable of civilization, whereas the negroes and the wild tribes about the Amazon, and in New Guinea and Borneo, would be particularly capable of it. Indeed, it may be taken as a general rule, to which there is no exception, that every race throughout the world is resistant to every disease precisely in proportion to its past experience of it, and that only those races are capable of civilization which are resistant to the diseases of dense populations.
Before the voyage of Columbus, hardly a zymotic disease, with the exception of malaria, was known in the New World. The inhabitants of the Old World had slowly evolved against the diseases of civilized life under gradually worsening conditions, caused by the gradual increase of population, and therefore of disease. They introduced these maladies to the natives of the New World under the worst conditions then known. They built cities and towns, the natural breeding-places of all zymotic diseases, except those of the malarial type. They gave the natives clothes, which are the best vehicle for the transport of microbes. They endeavored to Christianize and civilize the natives, and so drew them into buildings where they were infected. They forced them to labor on plantations and in mines. In fact, they forced on them every facility for " catching " disease. As a result, they exterminated or almost exterminated them. The natives of the Gilbert Islands lately petitioned our government not to permit missionaries to settle among them, as they feared destruction. They were per- fectly right. Clothes and churches and schoolrooms are fatal to such people. The Tasmanians, before they were quite exterminated, had a saying that good people that is, people who went frequently to church died young. They also were perfectly right that is, as regards their own race.
It is a highly significant fact that, whereas every white man's city in Asia or Africa has its native quarter, no white man's city in the New World has a native quarter. To find the pure aborigines of the New World we must go to parts remote from cities and towns. They cannot accomplish in a few genera- tions an evolution which the natives of the Old World accomplished only after hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations, and at the cost of millions of lives. The negroes, who were introduced into America to fill the void created by the disappearing aborigines, have perhaps persisted, but they had already undergone some evolution against consumption the chief disease of civilization and much evolution against measles and other diseases. Yet even the negroes would not have persisted had they not been introduced under special conditions. They were taken to the warmer parts of America at a time when consumption was little rife as compared to its prevalence in the cities of Europe, and they were employed mainly in agricultural occupations. They had a special start, and were placed under conditions that worsened only slowly. As a result they under- went evolution, and are now able to persist in America. But African negroes,
