But, these facts apart, there are certain general truths which look ominous for the reputation of the physique of savage tribes.

First, they cannot keep the race alive, they are always tending to decay.  When first encountered by civilization, they usually tell stories of their own decline in numbers, and after that the downward movement is accelerated.  They are poor, ignorant, improvident, oppressed by others’ violence, or exhausted by their own; war kills them, infanticide and abortion cut them off before they reach the age of war, pestilences sweep them away, whole tribes perish by famine and smallpox.  Under the stern climate of the Esquimaux and the soft skies of Tahiti, the same decline is seen.  Parkman estimates that in 1763 the whole number of Indians east of the Mississippi was but ten thousand, and they were already mourning their own decay.  Travellers seldom visit a savage country without remarking on the scarcity of aged people and of young children.  Lewis and Clarke, Mackenzie, Alexander Henry, observed this among Indian tribes never before visited by white men; Dr. Kane remarked it among the Esquimaux, D’Azara among the Indians of South America, and many travellers in the South-Sea Islands and even in Africa, though the black man apparently takes more readily to civilization than any other race, and then develops a terrible vitality, as American politicians find to their cost.

Meanwhile, the hardships which thus decimate the tribe toughen the survivors, and sometimes give them an apparent advantage over civilized men.  The savages whom one encounters are necessarily the picked men of the race, and the observer takes no census of the multitudes who have perished in the process.  Civilization keeps alive, in every generation, multitudes who would otherwise die prematurely.  These millions of invalids do not owe to civilization their diseases, but their lives.  It is painful that your sick friend should live on Cherry Pectoral; but if he had been born in barbarism, he would neither have had it to drink nor survived to drink it.

And again, it is now satisfactorily demonstrated that these picked survivors of savage life are commonly suffering under the same diseases with their civilized compeers, and show less vital power to resist them.  In barbarous nations every foreigner is taken for a physician, and the first demand is for medicines; if not the right medicines, then the wrong ones; if no medicines are at hand, the written prescription, administered internally, is sometimes found a desirable restorative.  The earliest missionaries to the South-Sea Islands found ulcers and dropsy and hump-backs there before them.  The English Bishop of New Zealand, landing on a lone islet where no ship had ever touched, found the whole population prostrate with influenza.  Lewis and Clarke, the first explorers of the Rocky Mountains, found Indian warriors ill with fever and dysentery, rheumatism and paralysis, and Indian women