than females disposes of the theory that war is the cause of the decrease; and infanticide, which chiefly affected the females, has ceased since 1836. Small-pox has now visited the island; measles may be said to be the only epidemic disease brought by the Europeans, and this did not appear till 1853. There is very little intoxication, and the "vice-diseases" are said to take a very mild type. Finally, that some radical cause is in operation is shown by the fact that actually fewer children are born than before the colonization of the island, and that, while the half-breed families are large, the native families are small, and the infantile mortality is very great. In view of the wide extent of country over which this process is going on, the author sees nothing to expect but the speedy extinction of the race.
The history of the American Indians should obviously not be omitted in this consideration. Unfortunately, figures here are unreliable. Estimate necessarily replaced enumeration regarding the aboriginal population when the whites landed, and has continued in large degree to do so since. Doubtless terror and perhaps vain-glory added something to the report of the numbers of the savages whom our ancestors fought and vanquished. But we have some ground for a comparative estimate of the native population. In 1822 a census was taken by the Government of the Indians east of the Mississippi, with reference to the removal of them which was then contemplated. According to this enumeration, they were 120,000. Bancroft's estimate of the Eastern Indians in the first half of the seventeenth century is 180,000. This would indicate a diminution of thirty-three per cent in two centuries, during which the Indians had been more or less in contact with the whites, and during the latter part of which they had doubtless begun to modify their way of living in accordance with the customs of their neighbors. It was about this time that the policy of removal to reservations beyond the Mississippi was inaugurated. A few of the Cherokees had accepted a reservation in Arkansas in 1817, but it was not till 1828 that the majority of them left Georgia, and the emigration continued through the following ten years. In 1838, 81,000 had been removed, 39,000 remaining east of the Mississippi.[1] In 1853 only 18,000 remained in their original locality, and 00,000 out of a total of 90,000 removed Indians had been settled in the Indian Territory.
Now, according to the report of the Indian Commissioner for 1879, the population of the five so-called civilized tribes in that Territory, viz., the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, was 60,000; and the remaining reservations in the same Territory, some six or seven in number, include several thousands, so that the civilized tribes must have undergone considerable increase. Colonel Otis estimates that the Cherokee tribe has doubled in the last century.[2] He
