While the Negroes were thus undergoing the radical surgery of natural
selection, what was happening to the aborigines of America? The answer
of history is unmistakable; they were meeting the same fate, in an even
more violent form. Not tuberculosis alone, but small-pox, measles,
alcohol and a dozen other importations of the conquerors, found in the
aborigines of the New World a stock which had never been selected
against these diseases.
It is the custom of sentimentalists sometimes to talk as if the North
American Indian had been killed off by the white man. So he was,--but
not directly: he was killed off by natural selection, acting through the
white man's diseases and narcotics. In 1841 Catlin wrote, "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." Small-pox is an old story to the
white race, and the death of the least resistant strains in each
generation has left a population that is fairly resistant. It was new to
the natives of America, and history shows the result. Alcohol, too,
counted its victims by the thousand, for the same reason. The process of
natural selection among the North American Indians has not yet stopped;
if there are a century from now any Indians left, they will of
necessity belong to stocks which are relatively resistant to alcohol and
tuberculosis and the other widespread and fatal diseases which were
unknown upon this continent before Columbus.
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