The New Zealanders say that the
land will depart from their children; the Australians are vanishing;
the Tasmanians have vanished. If anything like this had happened in
antiquity, the classical moralists would have been sure to muse over
it; for it is just the large solemn kind of fact that suited them.
On the contrary, in Gaul, in Spain, in Sicily--everywhere that we
know of--the barbarian endured the contact of the Roman, and the
Roman allied himself to the barbarian. Modern science explains the
wasting away of savage men; it says that we have diseases which we
can bear, though they cannot, and that they die away before them as
our fatted and protected cattle died out before the rinderpest,
which is innocuous, in comparison, to the hardy cattle of the
Steppes. Savages in the first year of the Christian era were pretty
much what they were in the 1800th; and if they stood the contact of
ancient civilised men, and cannot stand ours, it follows that our
race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear,
and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients
carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a
metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose contact he
is exposed.
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