Many of the Strange Peoples will disappear. The Tasmanians were killed
off almost like so many animals by the English. American Indian tribes
have suffered almost as badly at our hands. Many tribes have gone;
others are going. The Lipans were once a fairly numerous tribe. In 1892
I saw all who were left in the United States—four women and one man; six
months later I saw them again—the man was dead and only four women
remained. The Tonkaways are dying out at the rate of one-third each
eight years. The Polynesians, strong, handsome, active, and happy as
they were when James Cook visited their islands little more than one
hundred years ago, have dwindled, and fifty years more may blot them
from the earth. Not all American Indian tribes are dying out; it is
possible too that Polynesian decline began before Cook’s travels. But it
is certain that on the whole the changes brought by the newcomers sealed
the doom of the Indian and Polynesian.
There have always been movements of peoples from place to place. We have
seen the Malays pouring three great masses of immigrants into the
Philippines. There are white peoples in Asia; there are yellow peoples
in Europe. Recently plenty of whites and of blacks have poured into
America. Such movements contain some danger. The fair whites will
probably never be able to live in the tropical lands. A certain sort of
skin, hair, nose, breathing apparatus, is necessary for men who are to
live and prosper in low, hot, marshy parts of Africa. For Germans to try
to _colonize_ equatorial Africa is probably a fatal blunder. So far as
we know the dark whites—Spaniards, Italians, south Frenchmen—make better
tropical colonizers than we do; but even they are not successful. The
negro is a bad colonizer, he hardly holds his own even in our Southern
states. Of all the peoples of the globe the Chinese seem to be the best
able to colonize differing countries. He seems to go to hot lands and
cold lands, to small islands and to great continents, but flourishes
everywhere. So true is this that some writers have urged that Africa be
opened up for settlement to the crowded millions of the old empire. For
most peoples, however, migration, if they _must_ migrate, is best along
the lines of latitude into lands as much like the old home as possible.
Many Scandinavians live to-day happily where Wisconsin, Iowa, and
Michigan join; and they may be expected to prosper there, for land and
water, soil and products, scenery and climate, are there much what they
were in the fatherland.
LIST OF BOOKS REGARDING STRANGE PEOPLES.
This list makes no pretension to completeness; a few only of the many
books of the kind are mentioned. Those with a prefixed asterisk will be
useful to teachers; those without will interest children; those followed
by an asterisk have directly contributed to this book in reading matter
or illustration.
ARNOLD: Japonica.*
BATCHELLER: The Ainu of Japan.*
BRAMHALL: The Wee Ones of Japan.*
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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