Also remember that
there is no getting acclimatised to the Coast. There are, it is true, a
few men out there who, although they have been resident in West Africa
for years, have never had fever, but you can count them on the fingers
of one hand.' There can be no acclimatisation where the weeding out is
as drastic as this. Either the anopheles mosquito or the European must
quit. There are parts of tropical America where the natives have
actually been protected by the malaria, which keeps the white man at
arm's length. But more often the microbe is on the side of the civilised
race, killing off the natives who have not run the gauntlet of
town-life. The extreme reluctance of the barbarians who overran the
Roman Empire to settle in the towns is easily accounted for if, as is
probable, the towns killed them off whenever they attempted to live in
them. The difference is remarkable between the fate of a conquered race
which has become accustomed to town-life, and that of one which has not.
There are no 'native quarters' in the towns of any country where the
aborigines were nomads or tillers of the soil. To the North American
Indian, residence in a town is a sentence of death. The American Indians
were accustomed to none of our zymotic diseases except malaria. In the
north they were destroyed wholesale by tuberculosis; in Mexico and Peru,
where large towns existed before the conquest, they fared better. Fiji
was devastated by measles; other barbarians by small-pox. Negroes have
acquired, through severe natural selection, a certain degree of
immunisation in America; but even now it is said that 'every other negro
dies of consumption.' There are, however, two races, both long
accustomed to town-life under horribly insanitary conditions, which have
shown that they can live in almost any climate. These are the Jews and
the Chinese. The medieval Ghetto exterminated all who were not naturally
resistant to every form of microbic disease; the modern Jew, though
often of poor physique, is hard to kill. The same may be said of the
Chinaman, who, when at home, lives under conditions which would kill
most Europeans.

The other factor, which is really promoting the gradual disappearance of
the Anglo-Saxons from the United States, is of a very different
character. The descendants of the old immigrants are on the whole the
aristocracy of the country. Now it is a law which hardly admits of
exceptions, that aristocracies do not maintain their