Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/237

Rh has conferred on mankind. The prolonged "expectation of life" which tables of life-insurance exhibit is of itself sufficient to demonstrate this fact; and much has been written to show in what the elements of this gain consist.

On the other hand, however, there is reason to believe that, for the newer races, the immediate effect of a contact with civilization has been disastrous. The rapid growth out from barbarism is not always a safe or a simple process. The birth of "a nation in a day" is not devoid of grave perils. A brief consideration of the physical effects of civilization upon primitive peoples is the object of this paper. First, as to the facts. There are upon our globe numerous barbarous and semi-barbarous tribes who have never come much in contact with the world's progress, and we have no reason to believe that these peoples are in any degree dying out. Nature keeps them, like the lower animals which the hunter has never molested, in full and probably somewhat increasing ranks. It is obvious that figures are very difficult to obtain regarding such races—almost as difficult as in respect to the dumb animals with which we have compared them. Both alike undergo reduction from the attacks of their natural enemies, and from famine, disease, flood, fire, and hurricane. Yet no general law of survival of the fittest sweeps these races entirely from the earth, or even greatly reduces their numbers. This law may and probably does have effect within the tribes themselves, bringing the strongest to the front and leaving the weakest in the rear, but it does not operate against the existence of the tribe as a whole so long as there is no contact or conflict with a superior race, any more than it operates against the increase of the human species as a whole. In China and Japan, almost alone of such peoples, we have means of judging of the population at different intervals; and, while there is room for doubt as to the absolute accuracy of the census, yet the figures are so numerous and the general tendency so uniform that it may be taken to show with certainty an increase within the last few centuries almost equal to that of England. For instance, we have statements of the population of China at many periods within the last five hundred years, in part from native and in part from European authorities, showing an increase of from eight to ten hundred per cent in the number of inhabitants. This enormous gain has been in spite of many and terrible famines, of sanguinary wars, and of extensive infanticide. It is reasonable to suppose that in other lands, of which we have no figures to inform us, there has also been a like fertility, and that savages have a vigor of stock which has led to increase and multiplication on a scale not greatly different from that of our own race.

When, however, barbarous peoples come in contact with a higher civilization, they almost invariably undergo a decay pretty nearly