Page:National Life and Character.djvu/42

---

limits of a country India or China is no impediment to its expansion abroad.—Emigration abroad will often stimulate the growth of a population at home.—The increase of population in Europe has been retarded for eighteen centuries by misgovernment and internal wars.—The general law is that the lower race increases faster than the higher.—The English aristocracy is favoured by a great many circumstances that would seem calculated to promote increase.—Its families are constantly dying out.—The French and the negroes of the United States furnish characteristic instances of slow and rapid growth.—England is an apparent but not a real exception to the rule that a race with a high standard of comfort increases slowly.— The condition of the Jews in Russia has been one of inferiority, but not of intolerable hardship.—Having a strong motive to make money, and no temptation to spend it freely, they have increased so rapidly as to become a danger to the Empire.—The increased humanity of war is telling in favour of the weaker races. —So are sanitation, and the increased means of transport afforded by railways.—Therefore, when we are swamped in certain parts of the world by the black and yellow races, we shall know that it has been inevitable.

It seems to be generally assumed that the higher races of men, or those which are held to have attained the highest forms of civilisation, are everywhere triumphing over the lower. North America is almost occupied by men of European ancestry, and in South America the European element has received notable accessions in Brazil and the Argentine Republic. Australasia is British; Central Asia is being Russianised; and the Turk is being driven out of Europe, where his heritage is bound to fall to some race that has assimilated modern ideas better than the Ottoman. In Africa the North-west is passing under French influence, and has received a leaven of French or Spanish colonists. Egypt is practically part of Europe; South Africa is English or Dutch; and it seems scarcely questionable that England and Germany will divide Central Africa. We are perpetually assured that countries which till now were assumed to be unfitted for European colonists, will really allow them to multiply and prosper if they will only comply with such reasonable conditions as the