Austria indicates the
destiny of these Danubian states as fixed by the law of increasing
territorial aggregates.

What is true of states is true also of peoples. The extinction of the
retarded "provisional peoples" of the earth progresses more rapidly in
small groups than in large, and in small islands more quickly than in
continental areas. Of the twenty-one Indian stocks or families which
have died out in the United States, fifteen belonged to the small bands
once found in the Pacific coast states, and four more were similar
fragments found on the lower Mississippi and its bayous.[305] [See map
page 54.] The native Gaunches of Teneriffe Island disappeared long ago.
The last Tasmanian died in 1876. New Zealand, whose area is four times
that of Tasmania, and therefore gives some respite before the
encroachments of the whites, still harbors 47,835 Maoris, or little over
one-third the native population of the island in 1840.[306] But these
compete for the land with nearly one million English colonists, and in
the limited area of the islands they will eventually find no place of
retreat before the relentless white advance.

To the Australians, on the other hand, much inferior to the Maoris, the
larger area of their continent affords extensive deserts and steppes
into which the natives have withdrawn and whither the whites do not care
to follow. Hence mere area, robbed of every other favorable geographical
circumstance, has contributed to the survival of the 230,000 natives in
Australia. Similarly the Arawaks were early wiped out on the island of
Cuba and the Caribs on San Domingo and the smaller Antilles by the
truculent methods of the Spanish conquerors, while both stocks survive
on the continent of South America. Even the truculent methods of the
Spanish conquerors could make little impression upon the relatively
massive populations of Mexico and Peru, whose survival and latter-day
recovery of independence can be ascribed largely though not solely to
their ample territorial base. So the vast area of the United States and
Canada has afforded a hinterland of asylum to the retreating Indians,
whose moribund condition, especially in the United States, is betrayed
by their scattered distribution in small, unfavorable localities. On the
other hand, the vast extent of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada, combined
with the adverse climatic conditions of the region, will guarantee the
northern Indians a longer survival. In Tierra del