Note 227 — Chapter IV · —The Movements Of Peoples In Their Geographical Significance

The ceaseless human movements making for new combinations have stimulated development. They have lifted the level of culture, and worked towards homogeneity of race and civilization on a higher plane. Since the period of the great discoveries inaugurated by Columbus enabled the historical movement to compass the world, whole continents, like North America and Australia, have been reclaimed to civilization by colonization. The process of assimilation is often ruthless in its method. Hence it has been attended by a marked reduction in the number of different ethnic stocks, tribes, languages, dialects, social and cultural types through wide-spread elimination of the weak, backward or unfit.227 These have been wiped out, either by extermination or the slower process of absorption. The Indian linguistic stocks in the United States have been reduced from fifty-three to thirty-two; and of those thirty-two, many survive as a single tribe or the shrinking remnant of one.228 In Africa the slave trade has caused the annihilation of many small tribes.229 The history of the Hottentots, who have been passive before the active advance of the English, Dutch and Kaffirs about them, shows a race undergoing a widespread process of hybridization230 and extermination.231