peace congress was started in the hope of making a saving by a reduction in the army and navy budgets which could be used in the church, and that this was not viewed with favor by the military and naval authorities. This reform is contemplated in the new ukase, but I doubt whether it would be possible to make much difference in the ways either of the clergy or of the peasantry by any such means in a generation, unless it should result in destroying all reverence in the peasant. No peasant thinks of passing a church without crossing himself, and he is very apt to kneel down on the steps and kiss them. This is done. even in the cities, and the car of Juggernaut hardly receives greater veneration than a certain particularly sacred picture of the Virgin which is daily carried in its own vehicle through the streets of Moscow. The Roman Bambino can not compare with it. The reverence for sacred pictures (images are forbidden by the Greek church as by the English) is incomprehensible. There is one in every poorest hovel and in every room in hotels. It is even impossible to find workmen for factories unless in every room there is an ikon in its gilded frame with a lamp burning in front of it. This superstition goes so far that the Russian commercial head of a great manufacturing concern excused himself for delaying to call on a German who had been imported to take charge of the technical side of this business, on the ground that he did not like to go to a house where there was no ikon.

The great number of fasts and holidays also stands severely in the way of progress. In 1902, without reckoning ordinary Wednesdays and Fridays, which are always fast days, there were only 176 days which did not fall under one head or the other, and many fall under both. Besides the ordinary Lenten period, which, however, in Russia is 48 days long instead of 40, they have three shorter periods of fasting, one of 19 days, in June; one of 14 days, in August; and another of 33 days, in November and December. There are also three single days of fasting, of which two are also holidays. Fasting is a serious matter in Russia, for fish, milk and eggs are forbidden as well as meats. The result is that the markets for such products are largely cut off for about one-third of the year, and dairy farming becomes

unprofitable, as strict observance of fasts is a weightier matter with the people than honesty or any other feature of our system of morals.

My observation shows all these things working together against prosperity in Russia, but the worst feature of all appears in the characteristics of the Russian people, which will be considered in another article.

Peace Dale, R. I.

N. T. BACON.

A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE "NATIVE

QUESTION."

AKEN in its most common and evident sense, the "native

question" is a political problem which confronts the practical legislator of an expanding state and for which many empirical and few rationally devised solutions have been proposed or put into execution. Taken somewhat more broadly, it has to do with the phenomena incident to the contact of two or more unequally advanced stages of human progress or civilization. Taken still more generally, it is nothing less than a special phase of the competition of life within a species, where the forms of life are, after all, homogeneous. This competition is one of societies rather than of individuals; the broader and fundamental aspects of the problem are therefore sociological, and should be viewed from the vantage-ground of the best knowledge available in the field of the science of society.

None would be so credulous as to hope for a sweeping solution of so complicated a sociological problem as that presented by the meeting of civilized with uncivilized or semi-civilized societies. The terms with which one has to deal differ in almost every case of contact. "Native" peoples are differentiated from one another in an endless series of gradations, and the European nations even, though they approach a common type of culture, present many and sharply contrasting features of national character and custom. The French have learned to their cost that a single system will not apply successfully to all of their colonies, though these colonies are mostly of a single (tropical) type; and the Germans have discovered that British methods, while eminently successful in British hands, lose part or all of their efficiency when militarists and bureaucrats are set to operate them. It would seem at first sight that no general principles whatsoever could be formulated to cover all phases of the native question. Any such principles must certainly be of an extremely general character; and more special conclusions as to policy must rest upon clearly marked

local distinctions between the different races and peoples brought into contact.1

The phenomena of contact differ fundamentally according to the climate of the area of contact. In the temperate zone, where European settlers have met races of a crude civilization, and so of a comparatively thin population, extinction of the native peoples has been the rule. In a cool or temperate climate, vital conditions are so favorable to the whites that they increase rapidly in numbers and maintain a high quality of physique and of energy. The native, on the other hand, finds himself in an ethnic, and soon in a physical, environment to which he cannot, within a measurable time, conform; he is exposed to a lusty and generally unscrupulous aggression; and in consequence of wars, homesickness, the cultivation of perverted appetites and exposure to strange diseases, he rapidly declines. In temperate regions, besides, the native race has small chance of that partial selfpreservation attained by intermarriage with the dominant peoples. These regions have regularly been held by a race averse to mixed marriages; and the settler in a moderate climate is likely, in any case, to contract matrimony within his own race, if indeed, he has not originally immigrated with both wife and children. The volume of immigration into a temperate region tends, sooner or later, to efface the native stock, even if intermarriage at first occurs.

In these cases, there is, evidently, no native question of a permanent nature. The details of the taking-off of the weaker race are interesting rather than vital. The stage is soon cleared, or all but cleared, for the performances of the new proprietors. A more or less close approach to this situation is to be found in the temperate belts of both hemispheres. The old culture-states of the Orient, with their dense population, have been able, at least temporarily, to resist; and the Russians in Siberia, and the French, while they held Canada, have formed contrasts to the typical native policy of the dominant Teutonic race, as exhibited most strikingly in Australasia and North America. In general,

1 In the present paper it is always assumed that one of these races is of European stock; the contact of, for example, the Chinese with inferior races presents complications which it is here desired to avoid.

however, where the white race can live and reproduce freely, the integrity of the native races is fatally menaced.

In the long run, then, the native question connects itself with conditions of ethnic contact within the tropics.1 Though the chronicle of the treatment of the native peoples in the temperate zone is replete with interest and should form a considerable part of any extended discussion of the general subject, it yields in distinctive character and in permanent importance to the study of racial contact under almost exactly opposite conditions. The native question in the tropics is not a passing inconvenience or menace; it is, in the present stage of the sciences, at least, of a permanent and ever-recurring nature.

There is, in the tropics, no prospect of a general settlement of pure-blooded Europeans. Vital conditions are too adverse to admit of the development of either numbers or energy. Immigration is almost exclusively of males, and the prevalent idea of the temporary settler is speedy exploitation and a quick return. The native population, on the other hand, is generally as dense as the law of population' will admit, and forms the permanent element in the society, under any at present conceivable conditions. The question of contact resolves itself, therefore, if miscegenation is avoided, into a matter of adjustment of peaceful mutual relations between peoples likely to abide side by side over indefinite periods of time. This is in reality an adjustment of claims to political ascendency, with all the advantages which that implies. And the existence of miscegenation, assumed hypothetically to be absent, but in reality usually present in the tropics, does not materially alter the conclusion. If miscegenation takes place in any degree approaching universality, there is,

'This would seem to pass by the great racial question of our own land. As a matter of fact, the position of the negro in the United States is a somewhat anomalous one, taking origin as it does from an imported and acclimatized labor-supply; but it approximates economically, ethnologically and politically to the position of the native in the tropics rather than to that of the native in temperate regions. The character of the industries of the South demanded such a labor-supply as colonies in lower latitudes desire, and for many decades after the large-scale introduction of slaves, the elements of population were distributed according to ratios not essentially diverse from those found in the English and French West Indies. A little reflection will cause the case of the American negro to fall into general lines with the main discriminations here made.