For the last three thousand years this latter process has been the prevailing tendency over all or nearly all the earth. It is more energetic to-day than ever before, for barbarism was not more pitiless than is civilization, even where civilization may wish to spare.
We all remember the many nations or tribes enumerated by Herodotus as inhabiting Scythia and Libya. How few could a geographer enumerate in the same regions now! In Europe and its isles (excluding Russia) there are now about thirty languages spoken, and of course still fewer of those national types, or aggregates referable to a definite type, which we call nationalities. In the time of Herodotus the number must have been three or four times as large. The mountain fastnesses of the Caucasus have preserved about ten peoples, dissimilar in speech, aspect, and habits. A century hence scarcely one of these may be left.
I have referred to the hill-tribes of India, singular relics of an unrecorded past, singular evidence of what the primitive world must have been. On the rolling upland of the Nilghiri Hills in the Presidency of Madras, I saw one of these tribes, the Todas, not a feeble race, for the men are tall and handsome. There are to-day not 2,000 of them all told. But they are wholly unlike all their neighbours, not only in speech, but in appearance, in customs, in their pastoral way of life—a tiny nation, standing alone in the world, and likely in a few generations to vanish for ever. The same thing is happening over most of the earth. Every decade sees some little race or tribe engulfed in the rising tide of the great peoples.
