Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/245

Rh law of arrest, exemplified in the early history of the Cherokees, is now in operation in the majority of the Indian tribes, as in all other peoples exposed to the sudden contact of a new culture. A late Commissioner of Indian affairs says, "Indian blood, thus far in the history of this country, has tended decidedly toward extinction." And the most recent writer on the Indian question tells us that wherever civilization is attempted among those people "the results are at first discouraging, with increased mortality and disease."

These three races, the Hawaiian, the Maori, and the American, have been selected as the best instances of the adoption of a civilization involving complete and radical changes in mental, moral, and physical circumstances, made with some spontaneity, perhaps, in a few cases, but still essentially alien from the natural tendencies of the people, and devoid of that great safeguard of gradualness which Nature, when left to herself, throws about that critical process. In these peoples the exposure to the new leaven has been most sudden and most complete. We may allude, however, in passing, to some of the less perfect illustrations of the same process. The African negro has been in contact with the whites nearly as long as the Indian, but under circumstances widely different. Up to twenty years ago he was sedulously kept from becoming civilized. It was the express aim of his masters to repress his intellectual nature as completely as possible. The effect of his enslavement, then, was not to civilize him in any sense, but merely to change him from a wild animal into a domesticated or "tame" one. Since the war, his condition as a whole, in the South, has not materially changed in this respect. Of course, now and then an individual has emerged into an intellectual consciousness, and has become an intelligent and civilized member of society. But the great multitude, ignorant, improvident, lazy, have undergone no sufficient change in their natural way of living to disturb their physical equipoise, and with food enough to keep their bodies well nourished, and with scarcely a conscious nervous system, they increase and multiply faster than our white population.

Japan is a country which has undergone a most remarkable and sudden mental awakening. But here we are deterred by two facts from tracing any effect upon the stability of the physical organization of the people. In the first place, the intellectual development has not permeated the whole social structure. Only a small class have as yet felt it. In the second place, the movement is so recent, beginning since the revolution of 1868, that sufficient time has not elapsed for it