Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/641

Rh commensalism, and mutualism—exhaust the possible forms of relationship between the immigrants who land in a new country and the indigenes whom they find there.

I. Desert islands or other unoccupied portions of the earth's surface having been at all times scarce, outside the books of Rousseau and Defoe, the would-be settlers in a promised or desired land have usually found themselves face to face with a native people in prior occupation of the soil. Like the penguins on the Auckland Islands, or the birds in the Australian forest, these peoples have no instinctive fear of the white man. They are not shy nor without provocation hostile. They are eager to trade, willing to sell their land, glad to have the foreigner in their midst. Things do not run smoothly very long. The natives, being still imperfectly initiated in the distinction between meum and tuum, "convey" the white man's coveted possessions. Harsh reprisals convert the black or the red man's passions into mere powder magazines. Or the rape of some red or black Helen fires another Troy. Realizing at last that it is pro focis they have to fight, they unite against the Yenghese or the Pakeha as they have never united against one another. The warfare has different fortunes in different ages. It was impossible before the invention of arms of precision, so that America could not have been colonized had there been an earlier Columbus. It was at its hardest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the weapons of civilization were but little superior to those of barbarism. It is at its easiest now, when the breechloader has first made man the undisputed lord of creation, alike over wild beasts and wilder men. The issue grows daily more assured with every new invention, and Marconi's discovery hastens the advent of the era of omnipotent science imagined by Renan, when, like the mere gaze of the Brahman, the very approach or the most distant action of a scientifically equipped community will insure its victory over a barbaric race.

The resulting peace is sometimes enduring. The Massachusetts treaty with Massasoit was loyally observed for over half a century; the pacification of the Maoris lasted for twelve or fourteen years—an almost equal space of time in our swifter age. But it gets always broken sooner or later, and usually by one grand peace-breaker. When Chief-Justice Marshall ruled that the declaration of sovereignty over a territory carried with it, subject to the rights of prior occupancy, the paramount ownership of all land within that territory, he laid down a principle that has proved the fruitful mother of native wars in every quarter of the globe. Not that it has ever been universally accepted. Roger Williams disavowed it beforehand. The British Government has ostensibly acted on a very different canon. And