Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/276

264 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 communities. We—and thereby we prove our own barbarity, 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