between Great Britain and Brazil; Colombia and Mexico were acknowledged in December of the same year; and the recognition of the other states followed, as each was able to give guarantees of stable government. Meanwhile the United States, acting in harmony, but not in formal co-operation, with England, had taken decisive action. President Monroe, in his message to Congress on the 2nd of December 1823, laid down the rule that no part of America was any longer res nullius, or open to colonial settlement. Though the vast ultimate consequences of this sudden appearance of the great western republic in the arena of international politics were not realized even by those in sympathy with Monroe’s action, the weight of the United States thrown into the scale on the side of Great Britain made any effective protest by the European powers impossible; Russia, Austria and Prussia contented themselves with joining in a mild expression of regret that the action of Great Britain “tended to encourage that revolutionary spirit it had been found so difficult to control in Europe.” Great Britain and the United States were, indeed, not in complete agreement as to the legitimacy of fresh colonial settlements in the New World, but they were practically resolved that nobody should make any new settlements except themselves. From President Monroe’s declaration has grown up what is now known as the Monroe Doctrine (q.v.), which, in substance, insists that America forms a separate system apart from Europe, wherein still existing European possessions may be tolerated, but on the understanding that no extension of them, and no establishment of European control over a nominally independent American state, will be allowed. The Monroe Doctrine is indeed the recognition, rather than the cause, of undeniable fact. Europe is still possessed of some measure of sovereign power in the New World, in Canada, in Guiana and in the West Indian islands. But Canada is bound only by a voluntary allegiance, Guiana is unimportant, and in the West Indian islands, where the independence of Hayti and the loss of Cuba and Porto Rico by Spain have diminished the European sphere, European dominion is only a survival of the colonial epoch. America, North and South, does form a separate system. Within that system power is divided as it has not been in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire. On the one hand are the United States and Canada. On the other are all the states formed out of the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal. The states of the American Union are non-tropical, adapted to the development of European races, not mixed with Indian blood, and possessed by long inheritance of the machinery needed for the successful conduct of self-government. They grew during the 19th century in population and wealth at a rate that placed them far ahead of the Spanish and Portuguese states, which in the year 1800 were the richer and the more populous. The Spanish and Portuguese states of America are mainly tropical, and therefore ill adapted to the health of a white race. Their population is divided between a white minority, among whom there are to be found strains of Indian blood, and a coloured majority, sometimes docile and industrious, sometimes mere savages. They inherited no machinery of self-government. Townships governed by close corporations, and all embedded in the despotic power of the crown, presented none of the elements out of which a commonwealth could be formed. It was inevitable that in the early stages of their history, the so-called Latin communities should fall under the control of “the single person,” and no less inevitable that he should be a soldier. The sword and military discipline supplied the only effective instruments of government. It would have been a miracle if the first generation of Mexican and South American history had not been anarchical. And though in recent years Spanish America has seemingly settled down, and republican institutions have followed upon long periods of continual revolution, yet over the American continent as a whole there is an overwhelming predominance, material and intellectual, of the communities of English speech and politically of English origin.
Authorities.—Separate bibliographies will be found under the headings of the separate states. Amid the plethora of books, the reader cannot do better than consult the Narrative and Critical History of America, edited by Justin Winsor (1886–1889), in eight large octavo volumes, in which all the chapters are supplied with copious and carefully compiled bibliographies. (D. H.)
III. Ethnology and Archaeology.—A summary account is here given of the American aborigines, who are discussed in more detail under Indians, North American. Whether with Payne it is assumed that in some remote time a speechless anthropoid passed over a land bridge, now the Bering Sea, which then sank behind him; or with The American aborigines.W. Boyd Dawkins and Brinton, that the French cave man came hither by way of Iceland; or with Keane, that two subvarieties, the long-headed Eskimo-Botocudo type and the Mexican roundheaded type, prior to all cultural developments, reached the New World, one by Iceland, the other by Bering Sea; or that Malayoid Wanderers were stranded on the coast of South America; or that no breach of continuity has occurred since first the march of tribes began this way—ethnologists agree that the aborigines of the western came from the eastern hemisphere,and there is lacking any biological evidence of Caucasoid or Negroid blood flowing in the veins of Americans before the invasions of historic times. The time question is one of geology.
Following Notes and Queries on Anthropology, published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the study of the American aborigines divides itself into two parts: that relating to their biology, and that relating to their culture. In the four subdivisions of humanity based on the hair, the Americans are straight—haired or Mongoloid. But it will free this account of them from embarrassments if they be looked upon as a distinct subspecies of Homo sapiens. Occupying 135 degrees of latitude, living on the shores of frozen or of tropical waters; at altitudes varying from sea-level to several thousands of feet; in forests, grassy prairies or deserts; here starved, there in plenty; with a night here of six months’ duration, there twelve hours long; here among health-giving winds, and there cursed with malaria—this brown man became, in different culture provinces, brunette or black, tall or short, long-headed or short-headed, and developed on his own hemisphere variations from an average type.
Since the tribes practised far more in-breeding than out-breeding, the tendency was toward forming not only verbal linguistic groups, but biological varieties; the weaker the tribe, the fewer the captures, the greater the isolation and harder the conditions—producing dolichocephaly, dwarfism and other retrogressive characteristics. The student will find differences among anthropologists in the interpretation of these marks—some averring that comparative anatomy is worthless as a means of subdividing the American subspecies, others that biological variations point to different Old World origins, a third class believing these structural variations to be of the soil. The high cheek-bone and the hawk’s-bill nose are universally distributed in the two Americas; so also are proportions between parts of the body, and the frequency of certain abnormalities of the skull, the hyoid bone, the humerus and the tibia. Viability, by which are meant fecundity, longevity and vigour, was low in average. The death-rate was high, through lack of proper weaning foods, and hard life. The readiness with which the American Indian succumbed to disease is well known. For these reasons there was not, outside of southern Mexico, northern Central America and Peru, a dense population. In the whole hemisphere there were not over ten million souls.
The materials for studying the American man biologically are abundant in the United States National Museum in Washington; the Peabody Museum, at Cambridge, Massachusetts; the American Museum of Natural History, New York; the Academy of Sciences and the Free Museum of Arts and Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Field Museum in Chicago; the National Museum, city of Mexico, and the Museum of La Plata. In Europe there are excellent collections in London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and Prague.
Professor Putnam measured for the World’s Columbian Exposition 1700 living Indians, and the results have been summed up by Boas. The breadth of the Indian face is one centimetre more than that of the whites, and the half-breeds are nearer the Indian standard; this last is true also of colour in the skin, eyes and hair. In stature, the tall tribes exceed 170 cm.; middle stature ranges between 166 and 170; and short tribes are under 166 cm. The Indians are on the whole a tall people. Tribes that
