Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/647

Rh settlers accustom themselves to Lower Canada and to Algeria, American to Alaska and Texas, English to Nova Scotia and Guiana. Australian farmers are not deterred by 120° in New South Wales. Queensland sugar planters are multiplying in the tropics. Gold diggers rush equally to torrid Coolgardie and frozen Klondike. Within these wide limits the indigenous races are everywhere melting away. They are merely the last of the vanquished. The softer native grasses have been eaten out by the sturdy European grasses. Native plants have been exterminated by imported plants or driven to the hills. The Norway rat has expelled the native rat. The moa is to be found only in museums; the emu, the kangaroo, and the wallaby are in full retreat. None of them can make a living in competition with stronger species. It is not otherwise with man. The white man destroys the black man's game or cultivates the red man's land, and both are driven into the sterile interior. By some undiscovered correlation the birth rate adjusts itself to the food supply, and few children are born. Other causes are assigned, but they might be shown to be a continuation of causes in operation before the white immigration. The chief cause is the effect on the reproductive system. To it mainly is due the decline of the Hawaiians, Maoris, and Australian blacks during the present century, of which statistics have been kept. Even where food is supplied, the decline continues. Like the ancient Hebrews and other Eastern nationalities, like the inhabitants of mediæval villages, like Circassians and Cherokees—forcible dislocations which but continued their own involuntary migrations—the surviving Tasmanian aboriginals were transported to an island in Bass's Strait, the change apparently precipitating the decline, for children ceased to be born; the remnant was brought back to their native island, which, twelve years ago, witnessed the total extinction of a once vigorous race.

A people may disappear by absorption, aiding extinction. There was a time in the history of French Canada when it was on the point of realizing the Jesuit ideal of a continent inhabited by a mixed race of reds and whites. The missionaries Samuel Marsden and Lawry, the eminent governor, Sir George Grey, and a well-informed writer in the Edinburgh Review, believed that a blended race of Maoris and English would dwell in the islands of the Southern Cross. How far the colony is now from so undesirable a consummation will appear from the fact that fewer than five thousand half-castes are sown through a population of seven hundred and twenty thousand. There is, however, a steady advance in their numbers. While the pure-blooded Maoris have in five years declined by one eleventh, the number of half-castes has in the same period increased by nearly one sixth. The figures relating to the blacks of New South Wales are