452 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
tion, the method of procedure would still remain to be settled. Either of the two leading methods proposed, that of blood infu- sion through amalgamation and that of paternalistic government without physical assimilation, would proceed on the impossible idea that uniform methods of progress are adapted to widely different groups. Now the culture forms of one ethnic unit may not only be unsuited to promote the progress of another but may actually be inimical to such progress. Nansen probably does not exaggerate when he asserts that the only change which can be wrought with any sort of rapidity in a primitive race is a change toward degeneration and ruin. He is convinced that the Eskimo of Greenland have suffered as much from adopting European modes of living as from the new vices and diseases that have come in with the whites.*'^ It is claimed in Hawaii that the fall- ing-off of the native population from 300,000 in Captain Cook's time to 30,000 at present has been largely due to the substitution of wooden houses for the old grass wigwams and to the use of clothing unadapted to the climate.^^
These disastrous experiences are not exceptional. It has become a truism that the attempt to rapidly adjust primitive groups to the highly complex mode of life of the advanced peoples either by amalgamation or by discipline is destructive to the former. It is not that the primitive races come into contact only with the less moral elements of the advanced culture. Where they have been carefully shielded from these elements and have had access only to the best fruits of culture the outcome has often been almost equally discouraging, although the disintegra- tion may not have been so rapid.*® It is not only possible but desirable that peoples which have attained the most perfect fonns of social co-operation and technical achievement should so far as practicable share these with less developed groups. Progress in most lines of material civilization need be worked out but
- Eskimo Life, 335.
- Bryce, Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races, 11.
- The case of Pitcairn Island, often cited as an example of successful amal-
gamation, is hardly to the point, since the little colony grew up and has largely remained isolated from both English and Polynesian influences. See Young, Mutiny of the "Bounty" and Story of Pitcairn Island.
