We have spoken of many Strange Peoples. We have gone around the world in our search. But after all we have examined but a small part. Remember that there are fifty-one peoples at least in the Philippines alone. We have not examined the Australians, or the unfortunate Tasmanians, or the many tribes of Siberia, or the sixty native populations of India. We have omitted great nations like the southeast Asians,—Siamese, Burmese, Annamese. In fact there are many times more Strange Peoples in the world whom we have not examined, than whom we have. But we have examined enough, I hope, to learn that they are interesting and deserve our acquaintance and our sympathy.

There are few unknown peoples left. Travellers have gone to almost all parts of the world. The spots which represent absolutely unexplored regions on our maps are now neither large nor numerous. There are many peoples about whom we know little, but there are not many who are actually unknown. Those that may be discovered hereafter will be interesting, but they are not likely to be very different from those now known.

Many of the Strange Peoples are becoming less “strange” every year. Old customs and peculiar practices are dying out in every part of the world. Travellers, missionaries, and merchants from white men’s lands are taking our ideas, our tools, our weapons, our dress, our learning, our religion, and our vices to the remotest parts of the world. Some of the Strange Peoples here described have already lost most of their old customs. The Polynesians and Fijians have little of the old life which we have described. Many American Indian tribes have changed less. Some populations have still changed little. But a tribe must indeed be remote and difficult of access to actually escape our touch absolutely. Usually the change is not improvement. Other people more quickly adopt our vices than our virtues. Many tribes have become drunken, diseased, and depraved through the white man’s influence. It is rare, indeed, that a lower people gains in happiness or virtue by contact with “higher civilization.”

Many of the Strange Peoples will disappear. The Tasmanians were killed off almost like so many animals by the English. American Indian tribes have suffered almost as badly at our hands. Many tribes have gone; others are going. The Lipans were once a fairly numerous tribe. In 1892 I saw all who were left in the United States—four women and one man; six months later I saw them again—the man was dead and only four women remained. The Tonkaways are dying out at the rate of one-third each eight years. The Polynesians, strong, handsome, active, and happy as they were when James Cook visited their islands little more than one hundred years ago, have dwindled, and fifty years more may blot them from the earth. Not all American Indian tribes are dying out; it is possible too that Polynesian decline began before Cook’s travels. But it is certain that on the whole the changes brought by the newcomers sealed the doom of the Indian and Polynesian.

There have always been movements of peoples from place to place. We have seen the Malays pouring three great masses of immigrants into the Philippines. There are white peoples in Asia; there are yellow peoples in Europe. Recently plenty of whites and of blacks have poured into America. Such movements contain some danger. The fair whites will probably never be able to live in the tropical lands. A certain sort of skin, hair, nose, breathing apparatus, is necessary for men who are to live and prosper in low, hot, marshy parts of Africa. For Germans to try to colonize equatorial Africa is probably a fatal blunder. So far as we know the dark whites—Spaniards, Italians, south Frenchmen—make better tropical colonizers than we do; but even they are not successful. The negro is a bad colonizer, he hardly holds his own even in our Southern states. Of all the peoples of the globe the Chinese seem to be the best able to colonize differing countries. He seems to go to hot lands and cold lands, to small islands and to great continents, but flourishes everywhere. So true is this that some writers have urged that Africa be opened up for settlement to the crowded millions of the old empire. For most peoples, however, migration, if they must migrate, is best along the lines of latitude into lands as much like the old home as possible. Many Scandinavians live to-day happily where Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan join; and they may be expected to prosper there, for land and water, soil and products, scenery and climate, are there much what they were in the fatherland.