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last half century in the population of different regions, such a suggestion may not seem so very improbable. Almost everywhere, save in the older and more civilised nations, we see, as it were, one world of people passing off the stage, and another, and a more highly developed world coming on. In a few years the surface of the earth will be utterly altered; whole races, which now rule supreme over immense tracks, will have passed away for ever, and civilisation will turn to better account the lands that have so long been the undisturbed home of the "black fellow;" a new era will be inaugurated, and human responsibilities vastly multiplied.

Such being a process now in course of completion, the question proposed becomes at least an interesting one. Europe is now the centre from which this flood of civilised life is overspreading the globe, and our own Anglo-Saxon race constitutes one of the chief elements which are sweeping before them every vestige of earlier inhabitants. Such a world-wide reform has never before occurred, but may it not, at some far distant date, occur again? Europe, now pre-eminent in all the attainments of man-the home and the cradle of the noblest arts and the profoundest sciences, may have for her destiny to repopulate the globe, and then to tarry in her onward career. It may be the lot of nations now springing into existence at the antipodes, to outstrip her in the pursuit of knowledge, and when ages shall have passed away, to supply, in their turn, a nobler race, a more perfect humanity, to the lands which now rank foremost in civilisation. The New Zealand offspring of the imagination of our great essayist may be no unreal creation of the imagination, and England may yet be indebted to her descendants in the South for a people who shall as far surpass her present occupants as the civilised Englishman of this day excels the half barbarous Maori.

To speculate upon this, however, is of little value so far as affects the attainment of any satisfactory conclusion. Perhaps it is a pity to spoil so fine a field for the exercise of the imagination, to break the spell which builds up in the mind attractive hypotheses of the world's future history, and to destroy what might serve as an analogy in thus reasoning. But, viewed as a bare fact, and taking it in connexion with what we know of the previous history of man from earliest ages to the present time, there appears nothing, I think, in this extinction of races to justify us in regarding it as a type of anything similar to follow at some remote period in the future.

Between the white and the coloured populations of which we speak there are not even degrees of civilisation. The man who now wanders free through the unknown wilds of Australia represents nothing. Not only has he not advanced in moral development since the first formation of his species, but he has actually retrograded. There are not even the traditions of past renown among his ancestors to arouse those inspiriting emotions which should stimulate him to preserve the existence and identity of his race; and even where, as in the Maori or Polynesian, a certain pride of birth and dignity still cling, there is no bond, certainly not one of nationality, to secure them from the inevitable effects which greater moral power, under such circum

stances, seems intended to produce. Rather, then, we must regard it as only an illustration of humanity, in its crudest form, shrinking and passing away before a phase of humanity enlightened with intelligence, and endowed with vast intellectual superiority. It is the lesser light destroying the darkness, and though a greater brilliancy should ages hence appear, it will still continue to burn, mellowed and made more luminous through the accumulated experiences of time.

On the Extinction of Races.* By T. BENDYSHE, Esq., M.A., F.A.S.L. THE Continent of America has now been discovered about four hundred years. The groups of the islands of Polynesia or Oceania about two hundred years. The continent of Australia, and the neighbouring islands of New Zealand, Tasmania, etc., about a century.

Most, if not all of these countries, on their discovery by the Europeans, contained a larger number of aboriginal inhabitants than they do at present. Hence it has been concluded, with, I think, some unphilosophical haste, that the numbers of the aborigines must in all these countries continue to decline until none of them are left. And even before we can call the extinction of races a fact, theories of various kinds have been started to account for what has never yet taken place, at least in a sufficient number of instances to determine whether it is an exceptional or a strictly natural phenomenon.

There can be no reason for assuming in the outset that the laws of population are different in different parts of the globe. This may seem an unnecessary truism; but had it been borne in mind by many writers on this subject, much idle speculation would have been avoided. We must not, however, be too hard upon the earlier observers of the aborigines.

It is only recently that the laws of population have been understood or even studied in our own country. The treatise of Malthus, from the publication of which are to be dated all sound views upon the subject, appeared in 1798. He showed that population has a tendency to increase in a geometrical ratio; and the obstacles which prevent it from actually so increasing, except what he calls moral restraint, which is peculiar to civilised nations, occur equally in all parts of the world. These may be summed up under the heads of promiscuous intercourse, artificial abortion, infanticide, wars, diseases. and poverty. In every country some of these checks are with more or less force in constant operation; yet, notwithstanding their general prevalence, there are few states in which there is not a constant effort of the population to increase beyond the means of subsistence. During such seasons as these, the discouragements to marriage and the difficulties of rearing a family are so great, that population is nearly at a stand. After some time, however, either from the actual diminution of the population, or the increase of the means of subsistence, the restraints to population are in some degree lessened, and after a short period again the same retrograde and progressive movements are repeated. This sort of oscillation, says he, will not

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Perhaps the title ought rather to be the Extinction of Populations.

propably be obvious to common view, and it may be difficult even for the most attentive observer to calculate its periods.

"In savage life it is little to be doubted that similar oscillations take place. When population has increased nearly to the utmost limits of the food, all the preventive and positive checks will naturally operate with increased force. Vicious habits with respect to the sex will be more general, the exposing of children more frequent, and both the probability and fatality of wars and epidemics considerably greater; and these causes will probably continue their operation till the population is sunk below the level of the food, and then the return to comparative plenty will again produce an increase, and, after a certain period, its further progress will again be checked by the same causes."

The correctness of the Malthusian theory is now so universally admitted, that I shall not waste any more time in its enunciation. The question we have to consider is whether it applies in full force to those parts of the world where the aborigines appear to be dying out, and who therefore may be merely undergoing one of those retrograde periods of numerical diminution which are common to all races of mankind, or whether there is some particular cause superadded to those enumerated by Malthus, which will continue to operate until its victims cease to exist, and the exact nature of which it is at present impossible to explain.

The latter opinion is the one perhaps most commonly held, and the particular cause is generally asserted to be "the will of Providence." Thus, Professor Waitz, in the translation made by our learned secretary, Mr. Collingwood, says,* "According to the teaching of the American school, the higher races are destined to displace the lower. This extinction of the lower races is predestined by nature, and it would thus appear that we must not merely acknowledge the right of the white American to destroy the red man, but perhaps praise him that he has constituted himself the instrument of Providence in carrying out and promoting this law of destruction. The pious manslayer thus enjoys the consolation that he acts according to the laws of nature, which govern the rise and extinction of races. Such a theory has many advantages: it reconciles us both with Providence and the evil dispositions of man; it flatters our self-esteem by the specific excellence of our moral and intellectual endowment, and saves us the trouble of inquiring for the causes of the differences existing in civilisation."

And Mr. Lang in nearly the same words tells us, "It seems, indeed, to be a general appointment of Divine Providence, that the Indian wigwam of North America, and the miserable aborigines of New Holland, should be utterly swept away by the floodtide of European colonisation; or, in other words, generalising, as writers of this stamp do, as they go', that races of uncivilised men should gradually disappear before the progress of civilisation, in those countries that have been taken possession of by Europeans."

* Waitz, p. 351.

+ History of New South Wales, 1852, vol. i, p.

25.

These opinions respecting the laws of population were held in all their force by the early English, Spanish, and the Portuguese colonists. That by some divine interference the aborigines melted away before them, whilst their own increase was by the same power carefully provided for, was an article of faith, and is so still amongst almost all the descendants of Europeans. Nor was such a belief at all wanting amongst the aborigines themselves. One of the principal causes of the success of Cortes in Mexico-indeed, so great a cause, that probably without its occurrence all his energy and abilities would have been in vain-was the firm conviction of Montezuma, long before the appearance of Cortes, that the time was at hand when he and his race were to give way to another and a more powerful people. Had the American monarch been aware of the resistance which natural laws would oppose to the dispossession of his people from their native soil, and depended upon them rather than on the prophecies of his priests or the terrors of his gods, Mexico might not even at the present moment have had to beg for an emperor from the house of its original conquerors. There are not, however, wanting, persons to take a more reasonable view of the subject. Amongst others, first, a most experienced traveller; and, secondly, one of our first living

statesmen.

Mr. Stokes says,* *History teaches us that whenever civilised man comes in contact with a savage race, the latter almost inevitably begins to decrease, and to approach by more or less gradual steps towards extinction. Whether this catastrophe is the result of political, moral or physical causes, the ablest writers have not been able to decide; and most men seem willing to content themselves with the belief that the event is in accordance with some mysterious dispensation of Providence. For my own part I am not willing to believe that in this conflict of races there is an absence of moral responsibility on the part of the whites; I must deny that it is in obedience to some all-powerful law, the inevitable operation of which exempts us from blame, that the depopulation of the countries we colonise goes on. There appears to me to be the means of tracing this national crime to the individuals who perpetrate it."

The present Lord Derby, in a dispatch, dated December 20th, 1842, and addressed to the Governor of Victoria, says, "I cannot acquiesce in the theory that they, the aborigines, are incapable of improvement, and their extinction before the advance of the white a necessity which it is impossible to control."

The course I propose to take in pursuing the investigation will be this. I shall first point out countries where the white man and the native live and increase side by side. I shall then consider those cases where it is alleged that the mere contact of the white man has ensured the speedy extinction of the indigenous population, and I hope to prove that this conclusion has been arrived at upon very insufficient data.

And then I will examine the causes which have brought about the

Stokes, vol. ii, p. 463.

diminution of the populations of New Zealand, Australia, and North America; in which countries alone, with the exception of a few limited areas, the fact of any considerable decrease of the indigenous races has been proved to be taking place. I believe it will be found that these causes are in no respect different from those which have produced the same effect in other parts of the world at various periods, and are quite independent of any considerations of superiority or inferiority of race. And I think I shall be able to establish as a concluding one this proposition :

That races have only been extinguished, or brought to the verge of extinction, when it has happened that the soil on which they subsisted has been occupied by other races at the same time that their number was in process of diminution through the operation of the same causes to which all races are periodically subject.

In the Philippine Islands, which have been under the dominion of Spain about three hundred years, the native population is found under favourable circumstances to increase. So also do the Spaniards; and though their number is not large, owing to the disposition to return home as soon as a fortune is realised, yet the excess of births over deaths in Manilla is such, as to prove that the ordinary law of increase is not in any way interfered with by the climate, or contact with the natives. They, indeed, do not increase quite so fast, but the difference is small. In other parts of the Archipelago, the increase of the population, since the missionaries have been able to observe it, seems to have been very considerable: thus, in 1736, that of Panay numbered 67,708 persons, and by the last census, 527,970, of whom only a very small number were Spaniards. Here, therefore, the theory of the necessary extinction of inferior races is manifestly at fault.

No colonies have been planted in Polynesia, unless we except the recent establishments of the French in Tahiti and New Caledonia, and of the Spaniards in the Ladrone Islands. The soil, therefore, of most of the innumerable islands of Oceania remains in the hands of the indigenous races; still it has been said by many writers that their numbers are gradually but certainly diminishing. After a careful comparison of the statistics on this point, I have come to the con. clusion that it is not so. That is to say, that although in some instances, no doubt, an absolute decrease within a certain number of years can be proved, yet the same thing has taken place in other cases, and has lately been succeeded by an increase; and there is no reason why the ordinary but somewhat violent oscillations which take place among savage nations should not be considered sufficient to account for all the phenomena hitherto observed.

Thus at Nine or Savage Island, the population has lately risen from 4,700 at the census taken by the Samoans, to 5,000 in 1862.

In the Friendly Islands, it is asserted, says Erskine, that the abandonment of polygamy, combined with other causes, has tended of late to an increase of the population. Capt. Wilkes estimated their numbers in 1839 at 18,500; but the missionaries in 1847 gave them as 50,000. Erskine thinks this calculation excessive; but admits that in all the islands he visited, the proportion of children to the

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