of battle and conflict. The Western powers gradually rise into prominence, the vigorous life which they represent making itself felt in ever-widening circles. Out of the more local rivalries the great struggle for the possession of the New World, and for room for the expanding peoples to develop, begins slowly to take shape. The seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries are filled with events marking the progress of a great ethical and political revolution destined, as we shall see, to affect in the most marked manner the future development of the world. But these events in no way stay the course of the rivalry which is proceeding; the conflict of nations continues, and the eighteenth century draws to a close leaving still undecided that stupendous duel for an influential place in the future in which the two leading peoples of Western Europe, facing each other in nearly every part of the world, have closed. We watch the Anglo-Saxon overflowing his boundaries, going forth to take possession of new territories, and establishing himself like his ancestors in many lands. A peculiar interest attaches to the sight. He has been deeply affected, more deeply than many others, by the altruistic influences of the ethical system upon which our Western civilisation is founded. He had seen races like the ancient Peruvians, the Aztecs, and the Caribs, in large part exterminated by others, ruthlessly driven out of existence by the more vigorous invader, and he has at least the wish to do better. In the North American Continent, in the plains of Australia, in New Zealand, and South Africa, the representatives of this vigorous and virile race are at last in full possession,-that same race which, with all its faults, has for the most part honestly endeavoured to carry humanitarian principles into its dealings with inferior peoples, and which not improbably deserves the tribute paid to it on this account by Mr. Lecky who counts its "unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade against slavery" amongst "the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations."1 Yet neither wish nor intention has power apparently to arrest a destiny which works itself out irresistibly. The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come into competition even more effectively than other races have done in like case; not necessarily indeed by fierce and cruel wars of extermination, but through the operation of laws not less deadly and even more certain in their result. The weaker races disappear before the stronger through the effects of mere contact. The Australian Aboriginal retires before the invader, his tribes dispersed, his hunting-grounds taken from him to be utilised for other purposes. In New Zealand a similar fate is overtaking the Maoris. This people were estimated to number in 1820, 100,000; in 1840 they were 80,000; they are now estimated at 40,000.2 The Anglo-Saxon, driven by forces inherent in his own civilisation, comes to develop the natural resources of the land, and the consequences appear to be inevitable. The same history is repeating itself in South Africa. In the words used recently by a leading colonist of that country, "the natives must go; or they must work as laboriously to develop the land as we are prepared to do;" the issue in such a case being 1 History of European Morals, vol. i. p. 160. 2 Vide Report by Registrar-General of New Zealand on the condition of that country in 1889, quoted in Nature, 24th October 1889. Vide also paper by F. W. Pennefather in Journal of Anthropological Institute, 1887. already determined. In North America we have but a later stage of a similar history. Here two centuries. of conflict have left the red men worsted at every point, rapidly dwindling in numbers, the surviving tribes hemmed in and surrounded by forces which they have no power to resist, standing like the isolated patches of grass which have not yet fallen before the knives of the machine-mower in the harvest field. No motives appear to be able to stay the progress of such movements, humanise them how we may. We often in a self-accusing spirit attribute the gradual disappearance of aboriginal peoples to the effects of our vices upon them; but the truth is that what may be called the virtues of our civilisation are scarcely less fatal than its vices. Those features of Western civilisation which are most distinctive and characteristic, and of which we are most proud, are almost as disastrous in their effects as the evils of which complaint is so often made. There is a certain grim pathos in the remark of the author of a paper on the New Zealand natives, which appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute a few years ago, who, amongst the causes to which the decay of the natives might be attributed, mentioned, indiscriminately, drink, disease, European clothing, peace, and wealth. In whatever part of the world we look, amongst civilised or uncivilised peoples, history seems to have taken the same course. Of the Australian natives "only a few remanents of the powerful tribes linger on. . . . All the Tasmanians are gone, and the Maoris will soon be following. The Pacific Islanders are departing childless. The Australian natives as surely are descending to the grave. Old 1 1887, F. W. Pennefather. "2 races everywhere give place to the new. There are probably, says Mr. F. Galton, "hardly any spots on the earth that have not within the last few thousand years been tenanted by very different races.' Wherever a superior race comes into close contact and competition with an inferior race, the result seems to be much the same, whether it is arrived at by the rude method of wars of conquest, or by the silent process which we see at work in Australia, New Zealand, and the North American Continent, or by the subtle, though no less efficient, method with which science makes us acquainted, and which is in operation in many parts of our civilisation, where extinction works slowly and unnoticed through the earlier marriages, the greater vitality, and the better chance of livelihood of the members of the superior race.3 Yet we have not perhaps in all this the most striking example of the powerlessness of man to escape from one of the fundamental conditions under which his evolution in society is proceeding. There is scarcely any more remarkable situation in the history of our Western civilisation than that which has been created in the United States of America by the emancipation of the negro as the result of the War of Secession. The meaning of this extraordinary chapter in our social history has as yet scarcely been grasped. As the result primarily of an ethical movement having its roots far back in the past, the United States abolished slavery with the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. The negro was raised to a position of equality with his late masters in the sight of the law, and admitted to full 1 J. Bonwick, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1887. 8 Vide Inquiries into Human Faculty, by F. Galton. political rights. According to the census of 1890 the negroes and persons of African descent in the United States numbered 7,470,040, principally distributed in some fifteen of the Southern States known as the 'Black Belt." In some of these states the black population outnumbers the white. 66 Any one who thinks that the emancipation of the negro has stayed or altered the inexorable law which we find working itself out through human history elsewhere, has only to look to the remarkable literature which this question is producing in the United States at the present day, and judge for himself. The negro has been emancipated and admitted to full voting citizenship; he has grown wealthy, and has raised himself by education. But to his fellow-men of a different colour he remains the inferior still. His position in the United States to-day is one of absolute subordination, under all the forms of freedom, to the race amongst whom he lives. To intermarry with him the white absolutely refuses; he will not admit him to social equality on any terms; he will not even allow him to exercise the political power which is his right in theory where he possesses a voting majority. Mr. Laird Clowes, whose careful and detailed investigation of this remarkable question has recently attracted attention in England, says that the impartial observer might expect to find in some of the coloured states of the Union the government almost, if not entirely, in the hands of the negro and coloured majority; but he finds no trace of anything of the kind. "He finds, on the contrary, that the white man rules as supremely as he did in the days of slavery. The black man is permitted to have little or nothing to say upon the point; he is simply thrust on one side. At every political crisis the cry of the minority is, 'This E |