the evolution of civilised peoples is against disease, and the age
of pestilence and plague is passing. This picture of an incident
in the greatest plague that has affected London in historical
times--in the year 1665--is from the painting by F. W. Topham, R. I.
]
All our information indicates the Eastern Hemisphere as the place of
origin both of man and of his microbic diseases. Parts of it have been
inhabited by a dense and settled population from a time immensely
remote. “Behind dim empires ghosts of dimmer empires loom.” Beyond
the traces of the oldest civilisations we find evidences of primitive
agricultural communities, and far beyond these the remains of the
cave-men and hunters of the Stone Age. Even a race of hunters tends
to increase faster than the food supply. Doubtless the pressure of
population in the Old World led to the colonisation of the New. But
even in the New World there are signs of a civilisation so ancient that
some authorities have placed its beginnings as far back as a score
or more of thousands of years. With the exception of malaria, it is
extremely doubtful whether any zymotic disease existed in the whole of
the New World at the time of its discovery by Columbus.
The subject is involved in obscurity; but, while it is evident that
the European adventurers introduced many diseases, there is no clear
indication that they found and brought back one. Apparently all the
diseases which have been prevalent in Europe and America during the
last four hundred years were prevalent in the former continent before
the fifteenth century. Venereal disease and yellow fever have sometimes
been regarded as exceptions. But the former was well known to the
Roman physicians, and was common during the Middle Ages. Moreover, the
inhabitants of the New World take the disease in a very acute form, and
it is not found in remote communities to which Europeans have had no
access. Yellow fever was first noted with certainty in the West Indies
in the middle of the seventeenth century. The records of the time “tell
of the importation of the disease from place to place, and from island
to island.”
[Sidenote: Origins of Rare Diseases]
Not till more than a century later was it observed on the West Coast
of Africa. There can be no doubt, however, that the earlier observers
confused yellow fever with bilious malaria, and that it was present
both in the West Indies and Africa long before a differential diagnosis
was made. The fact that of all races negroes are most resistant to the
disease would seem to indicate West Africa as the place of origin. In
any case, it is certain that, with the exception of malaria, zymotic
diseases, if not entirely absent, were extremely rare in the New World.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE NATIVE RACES
[Sidenote: The Age of Pestilence is Passing]
Zymotic disease, then, arose amongst the slowly-growing populations of
the Old World. Air and insect borne diseases may have arisen amongst
the early hunters and nomads. Similar forms of disease, murrains
as they were anciently termed--for example, distemper, rinderpest,
the horse sickness in South Africa, the rabbit plague in Northern
Canada, and the cattle fever in Texas--occur among lower animals,
when these are present in considerable numbers. With the exception of
tuberculosis and leprosy, endemic disease was probably almost unknown
in the sparsely-peopled ancient world. The facts that air and water
borne diseases spread very rapidly, that the illnesses caused by them
are comparatively short and sharp, and that recovery is followed by
immunity, must have caused rapid exhaustion of the food supply of the
microbes. Under such conditions the persistence of the pathogenic
species was maintained among the scanty populations by a passage to new
and perhaps very distant sources of supply.
Introduced by travellers, or spreading from tribe to tribe, they
appeared suddenly in epidemic form as plagues and pestilences, and,
disappearing as suddenly, were not known again till a fresh generation
furnished a fresh supply of food.
When, however, in spite of war, famine, and pestilence, the human race
increased to such an extent that the number of fresh births furnished a
perennial supply of food, while at the same time a rising civilisation
and improved means of communication lessened the isolation of various
communities, then many diseases slowly passed from an epidemic to an
endemic form. Pestilence grew rare, but every individual was exposed
to infection, and, during youth, either perished from, or acquired
immunity against, the more prevalent forms of disease.
[Sidenote: Measles a National Scourge]
When endemic, zymotic disease--at any rate, disease against which
immunity can be acquired--is far less terrible than when epidemic.
Modern examples of ancient epidemics may be seen in isolated regions.
In Pacific islands, for example, air-borne disease spreads like a
flame. The whole community is stricken down. The sick are left untended
and perish in multitudes. The entire business of the community is
neglected, and famine frequently follows. Under such conditions measles
or whooping-cough, diseases which we in England are accustomed to
regard as scarcely more than nuisances, may rise to the level of a
great national disaster. Thus, in 1749, 30,000 natives perished of
measles on the banks of the Amazon. In 1829 half the population died in
Astoria. In 1846 measles committed frightful ravages in the Hudson Bay
territory. More recently a quarter of the total inhabitants was swept
away in the Fiji group of islands.
[Sidenote: Sanitation is Sometimes Powerless]
At the dawn of history, long after the evolution of zymotic disease,
the population of the Eastern Hemisphere was still sparse and
scattered. Even as late as the Norman Conquest that of England was
barely two millions--about one-third of the number now present in
London. Means of communication were poor and beset by dangers. A
journey from York to London was then a more serious affair than a
journey from London to San Francisco to-day. Water and air borne
diseases were, therefore, absent during long periods of time. When
they came they spread as epidemics. Accordingly we read of plague and
pestilence; of diseases suddenly becoming epidemic and sweeping away a
fourth or half of entire communities. Historians are apt to attribute
these immense catastrophes partly to the bad sanitation of the period
and partly to diseases which have died out of the world, or, at any
rate, out of Europe. Doubtless they are right in a few instances.
But, apart from diseases which spread under special circumstances
from tropical centres, had sanitation, under modern conditions of
intercommunication and crowding, tends to render water-borne disease
endemic, not epidemic. Over air-borne disease it has no effect.
Measles, whooping-cough, chicken-pox, influenza, common cold, and
small-pox (in a modified form) are as common as ever.
[Sidenote: Plagues “the Wrath of God”]
The character of these ancient epidemics, their special symptoms as
indicated in old literature, their sudden and portentous appearance,
which men attributed to the wrath of God, their tremendous infectivity
and rapid spread, their equally sudden and complete departure as of
Divine anger assuaged, point rather to air and water borne diseases of
the types now endemic and comparatively harmless among us, but still
so fearful in their effects on isolated communities. Like the light
flashed from a child’s mirror on a darkened wall, so they flickered and
swept forwards and backwards from end to end of the Old World--from
the Malay Peninsula to the North Cape of Norway, from Kamschatka to the
south point of Africa. A parallel may be found in the recent epidemic
of rinderpest amongst the herbivorous animals of Africa. Years might
pass, old men might remember, the peoples might sacrifice to their
gods; but when a fresh generation of those who knew not the disease
had arisen, when the harvest of the non-immune was ripe and ready,
the diseases would return to the dreadful reaping. Behind them the
earth was heaped with the dead, and the few and stricken survivors
grubbed for roots to satisfy their hunger. To-day sanitation has nearly
abolished water-borne diseases, and, in a population largely immune,
epidemics of air-borne disease, like a light thrown on a sunlit wall,
are but faint shadows of that which they were in their old days of
awful power.
[Sidenote: Growth of Resisting Power]
The progress of consumption was different; it was never truly epidemic.
Owing to its low infectivity, to its lingering nature, to the fact that
no immunity could be acquired against it, it did not spread suddenly
when first introduced, but when once established its virulence did
not abate within measurable time. In other words, it was endemic from
the beginning. It made its home in the hovels of the early settlers
on the land. In such situations--as in Polynesian villages--modern
Englishmen do not take the disease. But their remote ancestors were
more susceptible; they could be infected by a smaller dose of the
bacilli. Gradually, as civilisation advanced, the conditions grew
more stringent; men gathered into larger and denser communities, into
hamlets and villages in which they built houses ill lighted and worse
ventilated.
With the rise of towns, and ultimately of great cities, the stringency
of selection continually increased; and with it, step by step, the
resisting power of the race. To-day Englishmen dwell under conditions
as impossible to their remote ancestors as to the modern Red Indians.
In fact, no race, especially in cold and temperate climates, is now
able to achieve civilisation, to dwell in dense communities, unless it
has previously undergone evolution against tuberculosis. But of this
more anon.
So during the long sweep of the ages microbic diseases strengthened
their hold on the inhabitants of the Eastern Hemisphere, who in turn
slowly evolved powers of resistance. In like manner antelopes grew
swift and wild sheep active when persecuted by beasts of prey. Then,
when the germs of disease were rife in every home and thick on the
garments of every man, there occurred the greatest event in human
history, the vastest tragedy. Columbus, sailing across an untracked
ocean, discovered the Western Hemisphere. The long separation between
the inhabitants of the East and West ended. The diseases of the Old
World burst with cataclysmal results on the New.
[Sidenote: 3,500,000 Destroyed by Small-pox]
The ancient condition of the Eastern Hemisphere was reproduced in
the West. Again we read of plague and pestilence, of water-borne and
air-borne diseases coming and going in great epidemics, and of the
famines that followed. Measles and cholera piled the earth with the
dead. The part played by small-pox was even greater. When taken to the
West Indies in 1507 whole tribes were exterminated. A few years later
it quite depopulated San Domingo. In Mexico it destroyed three and a
half millions of people. Prescott describes this first fearful epidemic
as “sweeping over the land like fire over the prairies, smiting down
prince and peasant, and leaving its path strewn with the dead bodies of
the natives, who--in the strong language of a contemporary--perished
in heaps like cattle stricken with murrain.” In 1841 Catlin wrote of
the United States: “Thirty millions of white men are now scuffling for
the goods and luxuries of life over the bones of twelve millions of red
men, six millions of whom have fallen victims to small-pox.”
But the principal part was played by tuberculosis. Air-borne and
water-borne diseases generally left an immune remnant, but against
tuberculosis no immunity could be acquired. Red Indians and Caribs
could not in a few generations achieve an evolution which the
inhabitants of the Old World had accomplished only after thousands of
years, and at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. Civilisation,
which implies a dense and settled community with cities and towns,
had suddenly become a necessity, but remained an impossibility to all
the inhabitants of the temperate parts of the West. It is a highly
significant fact that throughout the New World no city or town has its
native quarter, whereas every European settlement in Asia and Africa
has its native suburbs. The aborigines of the New World are found only
in remote or inaccessible parts.
[Sidenote: A Plague that Spread like Fire]
The following is an example of the manner in which tuberculosis went to
work: “The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred
when the smallpox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months
later, a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread
like fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a
man and a woman, fled from the newly-created solitude.... Early in the
year of my visit, for example, or late in the year before, a first case
of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by the
end of August, when the tale was told to me, one soul survived, a boy
who had been absent on his schooling.”
The Caribs of the West Indies are almost extinct. The Red Indians
are going fast, as are the aborigines of cold and temperate South
America. The Tasmanians have gone. The Australians and the Maoris are
but a dwindling remnant. As surely as the trader with his clothes, or
the missionary with his church and schoolroom appears, the work of
extermination begins on Polynesian islands. Throughout the whole vast
extent of the New World the only pure aborigines who seem destined to
persist are those which live remote in mountains or in the depths of
fever-haunted forests, where the white man is unable to build the towns
and cities with which he has studded the cooler and more “healthy”
regions of the north and south.
[Sidenote: Races that Decline before the Whites]
Many explanations, or pseudo-explanations, have been offered to
account for the disappearance of the natives. We are told that they
cannot endure “domestication,” that they “pine like caged eagles”
in confinement, that the change produced by civilisation makes them
infertile, as the change produced by captivity makes some wild animals
infertile, and so forth. But the only peoples who are disappearing
are those of the New World, some of whom were by no means savage. In
Asia and Africa are many tribes far lower in the scale of civilisation
who have persisted in constant communication with dense and settled
communities from time immemorial. Notwithstanding all that has been
written, the people of the New World do not wither away mysteriously
when brought into contact with the white man. They die as other men
do of violence, or famine, or old age, or disease. But deaths from
all these causes, except the last, are now comparatively rare amongst
them--much rarer than formerly during the time of their perpetual wars.
The vast majority die of imported diseases--exactly the same diseases
as white men die of. But their mortality is invariably much higher than
that of white men, and they perish on an average at a younger age.
[Illustration: THE EVE OF “THE VASTEST TRAGEDY IN HISTORY”: COLUMBUS
SIGHTING AMERICA
“The greatest event and the vastest tragedy in human history” is Dr.
Archdall Reid’s striking description of the discovery of America by
Columbus. It ended the long separation between the inhabitants of East
and West, and the diseases of the Old World burst with cataclysmal
results upon the New. The picture, by George Harvey, shows Columbus
approaching America, his rebellious crew pleading for pardon.]
All this is not mere hypothesis. It can be proved by reference to
carefully collected and tabulated statistics published by every
department of Public Health in America, Australasia, and Polynesia. The
cause of the sterility cannot be demonstrated with the same precision;
but it is hardly necessary to invent fanciful causes when a reasonable
one is to hand. The high mortality indicates a high sick-rate, and
presumably illness is as much a cause of sterility in the New World as
in the Old, among savages as among civilised people.
The Spanish conquest of the West Indies was followed by the swift
disappearance of the natives. To that end the Spaniards unconsciously
adopted the most effectual means possible. They satisfied their greed
by forcing the natives to labour in plantations and in mines, and
their religious enthusiasm by compelling attendance in churches and
cathedrals. In other words, they placed the natives under conditions
the most favourable for acquiring the diseases which they imported by
every vessel. When the native population dwindled, it was replaced by
negro slaves from West Africa.
[Sidenote: Africans Die in our Civilisation]
The history of negro migrations is extremely interesting and
illuminating. There are no accounts of negro conquest outside the
limits of Africa, but from very ancient times a constant stream of
slaves has passed to Southern Europe and Asia, where they have been
employed mainly in domestic service, and in more modern times to
America, where their occupation has been mainly agricultural. The
invasion of Asia has continued to our own day. But one may search
from Spain to the Malay peninsula and, except in recent importations,
find scarcely a trace of a negro ancestry. Yet slaves, like cattle,
are valuable property, more cheaply bred than imported. In Eastern
countries they have often been kindly treated, and many have attained
to wealth and power. Like the African soldiers in Ceylon, of whom it
is recorded that, though many thousands were imported by the Dutch
and English, hardly a descendant survives, all perished in a few
generations, the elimination of the unfit being so stringent as to
cause extinction, not evolution. A permanent colony of native Africans
in the midst of an ancient consumption-infested civilisation is
impossible.
[Sidenote: Fate of Natives of America]
The fate of the negro migrations into America has been different. The
race had undergone some evolution against consumption in Africa, and,
therefore, was more resistant than the vanishing aborigines. In its
new home, employed in agriculture in a hot climate where white men
and tubercle bacilli, also recent importations, were as yet few in
numbers, it was placed under the best conditions possible. Gradually,
as the stringency of selection waxed, it evolved resisting power.
To-day, American negroes are able to dwell even in Northern cities,
though it is said “every other adult negro dies of consumption.” After
the discovery of America the principal maritime races of Western
Europe competed for its possession. Spain and Portugal, then powerful
nations, had the first start in the race, and chose the seemingly
richer tropics. But the forests of the centre and south were defended
by malaria, which raised a barrier against immigration, and by heat
and light, which raised a barrier against tuberculosis. Moreover, the
Spaniards and the Portuguese intermarried freely with the aborigines,
and the mixed race which resulted inherits in half measure the
resisting power of both stocks. At the present day this mixed race,
with a leavening of mulattoes, pure Spaniards, Portuguese, and negroes,
inhabits the cities and more civilised parts. Even in tropical America
the pure aborigines are found, speaking generally, only beyond the
verge of civilisation. Farther south the disappearance of the natives
has been more complete, and the cooler, healthier, and more open pampas
are settled by a race more purely European.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLES
[Sidenote: Expansion of the Anglo-Saxon]
The weaker British and French were shouldered into the seemingly
inhospitable north. But the British won the battle of Quebec, and
the French immigration soon ceased. That little fight is half
forgotten, but it is doubtful if any battle in history had results
half so important. It placed all North America in the grasp of the
Anglo-Saxon, and gave his race enormous space for expansion. Unchecked
by malaria, the new-comers gathered into communities and built towns
and cities such as those which across the Atlantic were the homes of
tuberculosis. The cold forced them to admit little air and light into
their dwellings. The aborigines melted away from the borders of the
settlements. Under the conditions there was little intermarriage. In
that climate Indian women, and even half-caste children, could not
exist within stone walls. The few white men who took native wives
preserved them only while living a wild life remote from their kin.
The British conquest of North America and Australasia resembles the
Saxon conquest of Great Britain. The natives have been exterminated
within the area of settlement. It is in sharp contrast to their
conquests in Asia and Africa. Both in the Old World and in the New
the subjugation of the natives was accompanied by many wars and much
bloodshed, and probably the conflicts in the former were more prolonged
and destructive than those in the latter. But in no part of the Old
World have the British exterminated the natives. They do not supplant
them; they merely govern them. Southern Asia and East and West Africa
are defended by malaria. The British cannot colonise them, and the
natives have undergone such evolution against tuberculosis that
they are capable of resisting the hard conditions imposed by modern
civilisation. In South Africa, where there is little malaria, Europeans
share the land with the natives, but the latter are likely to remain in
an overwhelming majority.
[Illustration: WHERE THE ANGLO-SAXON RACE OBTAINED POSSESSION OF NORTH
AMERICA
On the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec, the British and French
troops fought in 1759, and the battle placed all North America in
the grasp of the Anglo-Saxon, giving his race enormous space for
expansion. It is doubtful, says Dr. Archdall Reid, if any battle in
history had results half so important as this, although it is half
forgotten.
]
If history teaches any lesson with clearness it is this--that conquest,
to be permanent, must be accompanied with extermination, otherwise in
the fulness of time the natives expel or absorb the conquerors. The
Saxon conquest of England was permanent; of the Norman conquest there
remains scarcely a trace. The Huns and the Franks founded permanent
empires in Europe; the Roman Empire, and that of the Saracens in Spain,
soon tumbled into ruins. It is highly improbable, therefore, that
the British will retain their hold on their Old World dependencies.
A handful of aliens cannot for ever keep in subjugation large and
increasing races that yearly become more intelligent and insistent
in their demands for self-government. But no probable conjunction of
circumstances can be thought of that will uproot the Anglo-Saxons from
their wide possession in the New World. The wars of extermination are
ceasing with the spread of civilisation. We have ransacked the world,
and now know every important disease. Diseases cannot come to us as
they came to our forefathers and to the Red Indians, like visitations
from on high. All the diseases that are capable of travelling have
very nearly reached their limits; the rest we are able to check. Even
in the unlikely event of a new disease arising, it would affect other
races equally. Canada and Australasia, like the United States, may
separate from the parent stem, but the race will persist. If ever a
New Zealander broods over the ruins of London, he will be of British
descent.
[Sidenote: The Natural History of Mankind]