In the interior of the island of Borneo there has been found a certain
race of wild creatures, of which kindred varieties have been discovered
in the Philippine Islands, in Terra del Fuego, and in Southern Africa.
They walk usually almost erect upon two legs, and in that attitude
measure about four feet in height; they are dark, wrinkled, and hairy;
they construct no habitations, form no families, scarcely associate
together, sleep in trees or in caves, feed on snakes and vermin, on ants
and ants' eggs, on mice, and on each other; they cannot be tamed, nor
forced to any labor; and they are hunted and shot among the trees, like
the great gorillas, of which they are a stunted copy. When they are
captured alive, one finds, with surprise, that their uncouth jabbering
sounds like articulate language; they turn up a human face to gaze upon
their captor; the females show instincts of modesty; and, in fine, these
wretched beings are Men.
Men, "created in God's image," born immortal and capable of progress,
and so differing from Socrates and Shakspeare only in degree. It is but
a sliding scale from this melancholy debasement up to the most regal
condition of humanity. A traceable line of affinity unites these outcast
children with the renowned historic races of the world: the Assyrian,
the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, the Jew,--the beautiful Greek, the strong
Roman, the keen Arab, the passionate Italian, the stately Spaniard, the
sad Portuguese, the brilliant Frenchman, the frank Northman, the wise
German, the firm Englishman, and that last-born heir of Time, the
American, inventor of many new things, but himself, by his temperament,
the greatest novelty of all,--the American, with his cold, clear eye,
his skin made of ice, and his veins filled with lava.
Who shall define what makes the essential difference between those
lowest and these loftiest types? Not color; for the most degraded races
seem never to be the blackest, and the builders of the Pyramids were far
darker than the dwellers in the Aleutian Islands. Not unmixed purity of
blood; since the Circassians, the purest type of the supreme Caucasian
race, have given nothing to history but the courage of their men and the
degradation of their women. Not religion; for enlightened nations have
arisen under each great historic faith, while even Christianity has its
Abyssinia and Arkansas. Not climate; for each quarter of the globe has
witnessed both extremes. We can only say that there is an inexplicable
step in progress, which we call civilization; it is the development of
mankind into a sufficient maturity of strength to keep the peace and
organize institutions; it is the arrival of literature and art; it is
the lion and the lamb beginning to lie down together, without having, as
some one has said, the lamb inside of the lion.
There are innumerable aspects of this great transformation; but there is
one, in special, which has been continually ignored or evaded. In the
midst of our civilization, there is a latent distrust of civilization.
We are never weary of proclaiming the enormous gain it has brought
to manners, to morals, and to intellect; but there is a wide-spread
impression that the benefit is purchased by a corresponding physical
decay. This alarm has had its best statement from Emerson. "Society
never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other.... What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing,
thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his
pocket, and the naked New-Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear,
a mat, and the undivided twentieth part of a shed to sleep under! But
compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal
strength the white man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike
the savage with a broad-axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch; and the same blow
shall send the white man to his grave."
Were this true, the fact would be fatal. Man is a progressive being,
only on condition that he begin at the beginning. He can afford to wait
centuries for a brain, but he cannot subsist a second without a body. If
civilization sacrifice the physical thus hopelessly to the mental, and
barbarism merely sacrifice the mental to the physical, then barbarism is
unquestionably the better thing, so far as it goes, because it provides
the essential preliminary conditions, and so can afford to wait.
Barbarism is a one-story log-hut, a poor thing, but better than nothing;
while such a civilization would be simply a second story, with a first
story too weak to sustain it, a magnificent sky-parlor, with all heaven
in view from the upper windows, but with the whole family coming down in
a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement. In such a
view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object,
good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain
built on. But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious
merchant-prince in his counting-room, tottering feebly about, his thin
underpinning scarcely able to support what he has already crammed
into that heavy brain of his, and he still piling in more,--one feels
disposed to cry out, "Unsafe passing here! Stand from under!"
Sydney Smith, in his "Moral Philosophy," has also put strongly this case
of physiological despair. "Nothing can be plainer than that a life of
society is unfavorable to all the animal powers of men.... A Choctaw
could run from here to Oxford without stopping. I go in the mail-coach;
and the time the savage has employed in learning to run so fast I have
employed in learning something useful. It would not only be useless in
me to run like a Choctaw, but foolish and disgraceful." But one may well
suppose, that, if the jovial divine had kept himself in training for
this disgraceful lost art of running, his diary might not have recorded
the habit of lying two hours in bed in the morning, "dawdling and
doubting," as he says, or the fact of his having "passed the whole day
in an unpleasant state of body, produced by laziness"; and he might
not have been compelled to invent for himself that amazing rheumatic
armor,--a pair of tin boots, a tin collar, a tin helmet, and a tin
shoulder-of-mutton over each of his natural shoulders, all duly filled
with boiling water, and worn in patience by the sedentary Sydney.
It is also to be remembered that this statement was made in 1805,
when England and Germany were both waking up to a revival of physical
training,--if we may trust Sir John Sinclair in the one case, and
Salzmann in the other,--such as America is experiencing now. Many years
afterwards, Sydney Smith wrote to his brother, that "a working senator
should lead the life of an athlete." But supposing the fact still true,
that an average red man can run, and an average white man cannot,--who
does not see that it is the debility, not the feat, which is
discreditable? Setting aside the substantial advantages of strength
and activity, there is a melancholy loss of self-respect in buying
cultivation for the brain by resigning the proper vigor of the body. Let
men say what they please, they all demand a life which shall be whole
and sound throughout, and there is a drawback upon all gifts that are
paid for in infirmities. There is no thorough satisfaction in art or
intellect, if we yet feel ashamed before the Indian because we cannot
run, and before the South-Sea Islander because we cannot swim. Give us a
total culture, and a success without any discount of shame. After all,
one feels a certain justice in Warburton's story of the Guinea trader,
in Spence's Anecdotes. Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day,
when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey,
"you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world." "I
don't know how great you may be," said the Guinea-man, "but I don't like
your looks; I have often bought a man, much better than both of you
together, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas."
Fortunately for the hopes of man, the alarm is unfounded. The advance
of accurate knowledge dispels it. Civilization is cultivation, whole
cultivation; and even in its present imperfect state, it not only
permits physical training, but promotes it. The traditional glory of
the savage body is yielding before medical statistics: it is becoming
evident that the average barbarian, observed from the cradle to the
grave, does not know enough and is not rich enough to keep his body in
its highest condition, but, on the contrary, is small and sickly and
short-lived and weak, compared with the man of civilization. The great
athletes of the world have been civilized; the long-lived men have been
civilized; the powerful armies have been civilized; and the average of
life, health, size, and strength is highest to-day among those races
where knowledge and wealth and comfort are most widely spread. And yet,
by the common lamentation, one would suppose that all civilization is a
slow suicide of the race, and that refinement and culture are to leave
man at last in a condition like that of the little cherubs on old
tomb-stones, all head and wings.
It must be owned that the delusion has all the superstitions of history
in its favor, and only the facts against it. If we may trust tradition,
the race has undoubtedly been tapering down from century to century
since the Creation, so that the original Adam must have been more than
twice the size of the Webster statue. However far back we go, admiring
memory looks farther. Homer and Virgil never let their hero throw a
stone without reminding us that modern heroes only live in glass houses,
to have stones thrown at them. Lucretius and Juvenal chant the same
lament. Xenophon, mourning the march of luxury among the Persians, says
that modern effeminacy has reached such a pitch, that men have even
devised coverings for their fingers, called gloves. Herodotus narrates,
that, when Cambyses sent ambassadors to the Macrobians, they asked what
the Persians had to eat and how long they commonly lived. He was told
that they sometimes attained the age of eighty, and that they ate a mass
of crushed grain, which they termed bread. On this, they said that it
was no wonder, if the Persians died young, when they partook of such
rubbish, and that probably they would not survive even so long, but for
the wine they drank; while the Macrobians lived on flesh and milk, and
survived one hundred and twenty years.
But, unfortunately, there were no Life Insurance Companies among the
Macrobians, and therefore nothing to bring down this formidable average
to a reliable schedule,--such as accurately informs every modern man how
long he may live honestly, without defrauding either his relict or his
insurers. We know, moreover, precisely what Dr. Windship can lift, at
any given date, and what the rest of us cannot; but Homer and Virgil
never weighed the stones which their heroes threw, nor even the words in
which they described the process. It is a matter of certainty that
all great exploits are severely tested by Fairbanks's scales and
stop-watches. It is wonderful how many persons, in the remoter
districts, assure the newspaper-editors of their ability to lift twelve
hundred pounds; and many a young oarsman can prove to you that he has
pulled his mile faster than Ward or Clark, if you will only let him give
his own guess at time and distance.
It is easy, therefore, to trace the origin of these exaggerations. Those
old navigators, for instance, who saw so many fine things which were
not to be seen, how should they help peopling the barbarous realms with
races of giants? Job Hartop, who three times observed a merman rise
above water to his waist, near the Bermudas,--Harris, who endured such
terrific cold in the Antarctics, that once, perilously blowing his nose
with his fingers, it flew into the fire and was seen no more,--Knyvett,
who, in the same regions, pulled off his frozen stockings, and his toes
with them, but had them replaced by the ship's surgeon,--of course
these men saw giants, and it is only a matter for gratitude that they
vouchsafed us dwarfs also, to keep up some remains of self-respect in
us. In Magellan's Straits, for instance, they saw, on one side, from
three to four thousand pigmies with mouths from ear to ear; while on the
other shore they saw giants whose footsteps were four times as large as
an Englishman's,--which was a strong expression, considering that the
Englishman's footstep had already reached round the globe.
The only way to test these earlier observations is by later ones. For
instance, in the year 1772, a Dutchman named Roggewein discovered Easter
Island. His expedition had cost the government a good deal, and he
had to bring home his money's worth of discoveries. Accordingly, his
islanders were all giants,--twice as tall, he said, as the tallest of
the Europeans; "they measured, one with another, the height of twelve
feet; so that we could easily,--who will not wonder at it?--without
stooping, have passed between the legs of these sons of Goliath.
According to their height, so is their thickness." Moreover, he "puts
down nothing but the real truth, and upon the nicest inspection," and,
to exhibit this caution, warns us that it would be wrong to rate the
women of those regions as high as the men, they being, as he pityingly
owns, "commonly not above ten or eleven feet." Sweet young creatures
they must have appeared, belle and steeple in one. And it was certainly
a great disappointment to Captain Cook, when, on visiting the same
Island, fifty years later, he could not find man or woman more than six
feet tall. Thus ended the tale of this Flying Dutchman.
Thus lamentably have the inhabitants of Patagonia been also dwindling,
though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the
apostles of human degeneracy. Pigafetta originally estimated them at
twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown
downward; yet he said of them that they were "enormous goblins," seven
feet high, every one of them. One of his officers, however, writing an
independent narrative, seemed to think this a needless concession; he
admits, indeed, that the women were not, perhaps, more than seven feet,
or seven and a half, or, it might be, eight, "but the men were, for
the most part, about nine feet high, and very often more." Lieutenant
Cumming, he said, being but six feet two, appeared a mere pigmy among
them. But it seems, that, in after-times, on some one's questioning this
diminutive lieutenant as to the actual size of these enormous goblins,
the veteran frankly confessed, that, "had it been anywhere else but in
Patagonia, he should have called them good sturdy savages and thought no
more on't."
But, these facts apart, there are certain general truths which look
ominous for the reputation of the _physique_ of savage tribes.
First, they cannot keep the race alive, they are always tending to
decay. When first encountered by civilization, they usually tell stories
of their own decline in numbers, and after that the downward movement is
accelerated. They are poor, ignorant, improvident, oppressed by others'
violence, or exhausted by their own; war kills them, infanticide and
abortion cut them off before they reach the age of war, pestilences
sweep them away, whole tribes perish by famine and smallpox. Under the
stern climate of the Esquimaux and the soft skies of Tahiti, the same
decline is seen. Parkman estimates that in 1763 the whole number of
Indians east of the Mississippi was but ten thousand, and they were
already mourning their own decay. Travellers seldom visit a savage
country without remarking on the scarcity of aged people and of young
children. Lewis and Clarke, Mackenzie, Alexander Henry, observed this
among Indian tribes never before visited by white men; Dr. Kane remarked
it among the Esquimaux, D'Azara among the Indians of South America, and
many travellers in the South-Sea Islands and even in Africa, though the
black man apparently takes more readily to civilization than any other
race, and then develops a terrible vitality, as American politicians
find to their cost.
Meanwhile, the hardships which thus decimate the tribe toughen the
survivors, and sometimes give them an apparent advantage over civilized
men. The savages whom one encounters are necessarily the picked men of
the race, and the observer takes no census of the multitudes who have
perished in the process. Civilization keeps alive, in every generation,
multitudes who would otherwise die prematurely. These millions of
invalids do not owe to civilization their diseases, but their lives. It
is painful that your sick friend should live on Cherry Pectoral; but if
he had been born in barbarism, he would neither have had it to drink nor
survived to drink it.
And again, it is now satisfactorily demonstrated that these picked
survivors of savage life are commonly suffering under the same diseases
with their civilized compeers, and show less vital power to resist them.
In barbarous nations every foreigner is taken for a physician, and the
first demand is for medicines; if not the right medicines, then the
wrong ones; if no medicines are at hand, the written prescription,
administered internally, is sometimes found a desirable restorative. The
earliest missionaries to the South-Sea Islands found ulcers and dropsy
and hump-backs there before them. The English Bishop of New Zealand,
landing on a lone islet where no ship had ever touched, found the
whole population prostrate with influenza. Lewis and Clarke, the first
explorers of the Rocky Mountains, found Indian warriors ill with fever
and dysentery, rheumatism and paralysis, and Indian women in hysterics.
"The tooth-ache," said Roger Williams of the New England tribes, "is the
only paine which will force their stoute hearts to cry"; even the Indian
women, he says, never cry as he has heard "some of their men in this
paine"; but Lewis and Clarke found whole tribes who had abolished this
source of tears in the civilized manner, by having no teeth left. We
complain of our weak eyes as a result of civilized habits, and Tennyson,
in "Locksley Hall," wishes his children bred in some savage land, "not
with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books." But savage life
seems more injurious to the organs of vision than even the type of a
cheap edition; for the most vigorous barbarians--on the prairies, in
Southern archipelagos, on African deserts--suffer more from different
forms of ophthalmia than from any other disease; without knowing the
alphabet, they have worse eyes than if they were professors, and have
not even the melancholy consolation of spectacles.
Again, the savage cannot, as a general rule, endure transplantation,--he
cannot thrive in the country of the civilized man; whereas the latter,
with time for training, can equal or excel him in strength and endurance
on his own ground. As it is known that the human race generally can
endure a greater variety of climate than the hardiest of the lower
animals, so it is with the man of civilization, when compared with the
barbarian. Kane, when he had once learned how to live in the Esquimaux
country, lived better than the Esquimaux themselves; and he says
expressly, that "their powers of resistance are no greater than those of
well-trained voyagers from other lands." Richardson, Parkyns, Johnstone,
give it as their opinion, that the European, once acclimated, bears
the heat of the African deserts better than the native negro. "These
Christians are devils," say the Arabs; "they can endure both cold and
heat." What are the Bedouins to the Zouaves, who unquestionably would be
as formidable in Lapland as in Algiers? Nay, in the very climates where
the natives are fading away, the civilized foreigner multiplies: thus,
the strong New-Zealanders do not average two children to a family, while
the households of the English colonists are larger than at home,--which
is saying a good deal.
Most formidable of all is the absence of all recuperative power in
the savage who rejects civilization. No effort of will improves his
condition; he sees his race dying out, and he can only drink and forget
it. But the civilized man has an immense capacity for self-restoration;
he can make mistakes and correct them again, sin and repent, sink and
rise. Instinct can only prevent; science can cure in one generation, and
prevent in the next. It is known that some twenty years ago a thrill
of horror shot through all Anglo-Saxondom at the reported physical
condition of the operatives in English mines and factories. It is not so
generally known, that, by a recent statement of the medical inspector of
factories, there is declared to have been a most astounding renovation
of female health in such establishments throughout all England since
that time,--the simple result of sanitary laws. What science has done
science can do. Everybody knows which symptom of American physical decay
is habitually quoted, as most alarming; one seldom sees a dentist who
does not despair of the republic. Yet this calamity is nothing new; the
elder branch of our race has been through that epidemic, and outlived
it. In the robust days of Queen Bess, the teeth of the court ladies were
habitually so black and decayed, that foreigners used constantly to ask
if Englishwomen ate nothing but sugar. Hentzner, who visited the country
in 1697, speaks of the same calamity as common among the English of all
classes. Two centuries and a half have removed the stigma,--improved
physical habits have put fresh pearls between the lips of all England
now; and there seems no reason why we Americans may not yet be healthy,
in spite of our teeth.
Thus much for general considerations; let us come now to more specific
tests, beginning with the comparison of size. The armor of the knights
of the Middle Ages is too small for their modern descendants: Hamilton
Smith records that two Englishmen of average dimensions found no suit
large enough to fit them in the great collection of Sir Samuel Meyrick.
The Oriental sabre will not admit the English hand, nor the bracelet of
the Kaffir warrior the English arm. The swords found in Roman tumuli
have handles inconveniently small; and the great mediaeval two-handed
sword is now supposed to have been used only for one or two blows at the
first onset, and then exchanged for a smaller one. The statements given
by Homer, Aristotle, and Vitruvius represent six feet as a high standard
for full-grown men; and the irrefutable evidence of the ancient
doorways, bedsteads, and tombs proves the average size of the race to
have certainly not diminished in modern days. The gigantic bones have
all turned out to be animal remains; even the skeleton twenty-five
feet high and ten feet broad, which one _savant_ wrote a book called
"Gigantosteologia" to prove human, and another, a counter-argument,
called "Gigantomachia," to prove animal,--neither of the philosophers
taking the trouble to draw a single fragment of the fossil. The enormous
savage races have turned out, as has been shown, to be travellers'
tales,--even the Patagonians being brought down to an average of five
feet ten inches, and being, moreover, only a part of a race, the
Abipones, of which the other families are smaller. Indeed, we can all
learn by our own experience how irresistible is the tendency of the
imagination to attribute vast proportions to all hardy and warlike
tribes. Most persons fancy the Scottish Highlanders, for instance, to
have been a race of giants; yet Charles Edward was said to be taller
than any man in his Highland army, and his height was but five feet
nine. We have the same impression in regard to our own Aborigines. Yet,
when first, upon the prairies of Nebraska, I came in sight of a tribe of
genuine, unadulterated Indians, with no possession on earth but a
bow and arrow and a bear-skin,--bare-skin in a double sense, I might
add,--my instinctive exclamation was, "What race of dwarfs is this?"
They were the descendants of the glorious Pawnees of Cooper, the heroes
of every boy's imagination; yet, excepting the three chiefs, who were
noble-looking men of six feet in height, the tallest of the tribe could
not have measured five feet six inches.
The most careful investigations give the same results in respect to
physical strength. Early travellers among our Indians, as Hearne and
Mackenzie, and early missionaries to the South-Sea Islands, as Ellis,
report athletic contests in which the natives could not equal the
better-fed, better-clothed, better-trained Europeans. When the French
_savans_, Péron, Regnier, Ransonnet, carried their dynamometers to the
islands of the Indian Ocean, they found with surprise that an average
English sailor was forty-two per cent, stronger, and an average
Frenchman thirty per cent, stronger, than the strongest island tribe
they visited. Even in comparing different European races, it is
undeniable that bodily strength goes with the highest civilization.
It is recorded in Robert Stephenson's Life, that, when the English
"navvies" were employed upon the Paris and Boulogne Railway, they used
spades and barrows just twice the size of those employed by their
Continental rivals, and were regularly paid double. Quetelet's
experiments with the dynamometer on university students showed the same
results: first ranked the Englishman, then the Frenchman, then the
Belgian, then the Russian, then the Southern European: for those races
of Southern Europe which once ruled the Eastern and the Western worlds
by physical and mental power have lost in strength as they have paused
in civilization, and the easy victories of our armies in Mexico show us
the result.
It is impossible to deny that the observations on this subject are yet
very imperfect; and the only thing to be claimed is, that they all point
one way. So far as absolute statistical tables go, the above-named
French observations have till recently stood almost alone, and have been
the main reliance. The just criticism has, however, been made, that the
subjects of these experiments were the inhabitants of New Holland and
Van Diemen's Land, by no means the strongest instances on the side of
barbarism. It is, therefore, fortunate that the French tables have now
been superseded by some more important comparisons, accurately made by
A.S. Thomson, M.D., Surgeon of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment of the British
Army, and printed in the seventeenth volume of the Journal of the London
Statistical Society.
The observations were made in New Zealand,--Dr. Thomson being stationed
there with his regiment, and being charged with the duty of vaccinating
all natives employed by the government. The islanders thus used for
experiment were to some extent picked men, as none but able-bodied
persons would have been selected for employ, and as they were, moreover,
(he states,) accustomed to lifting burdens, and better-fed than the
majority of their countrymen. The New Zealand race, as a whole, is
certainly a very favorable type of barbarism, having but just emerged
from an utterly savage condition, having been cannibals within one
generation, and being the very identical people among whom were recorded
those wonderful cures of flesh-wounds to which Emerson has referred.
Cook and all other navigators have praised their robust physical aspect,
and they undoubtedly, with the Fijians and the Tongans, stand at the
head of all island races. They are admitted to surpass our American
Indians, as well as the Kaffirs and the Joloffs, probably the finest
African races; and a careful comparison between New-Zealanders and
Anglo-Saxons will, therefore, approach as near to an _experimentum
crucis_ as any single set of observations can. The following tables have
been carefully prepared from those of Dr. Thomson, with the addition
of some scanty facts from other sources,--scanty, because, as Quetelet
indignantly observes, less pains have as yet been taken to measure
accurately the physical powers of man than those of any machine he has
constructed or any animal he has tamed.