THE THEORY OF COLONIZATION 257
ments that the decurions should themselves bear the heavy burden of the cost of the municipal administration the cause to which Guizot chiefly ascribes the fall of the empire. They also newly illustrate the rise and growth of towns. And it is largely such inscriptions, discovered lately in Africa or less recently in Gaul, that permit us to realize the character, the reality, and the wide prevalence of that strange worship of the emperors which had killed all other native cults to such an extent that the emperors at one time dreamt of making it the center of resistance to the advance of Christianity.
Modern colonies, their histories once ransacked, will have other tracts to light up. The obscure problem of the disappear- ance or absorption of the Britons by the invading English, on which authoritative history is, or was, at variance with anthro- pology, will perhaps take on a new complexion, as the nature of the absorption or suppression of indigenous races in former or contemporary colonies is thoroughly understood. Are we not reading, in its main outlines, the story of the German conquest of England, and its expulsion or assimilation of the Britons, when we witness the advance of British colonization in New Zealand? Early linguistic stages, which have passed away in England and left no record of their passage, are still to be found in Kentucky and Tennessee. The township, which long ago dis- appeared from among English institutions, experienced a vigor- ous resurrection in the New England colonies, and became the unit and center of their political activity. Doubtless, it had undergone a sea-change in its transit across the Atlantic. Social protoplasm does not remain constant, but, as Weismann believes of vital protoplasm, it receives a historical modification.
But when we have recounted the parallel between the evolu- tion of the mother-country and the evolution of its colonies, we have told only one-half of the story of colonial evolution. Evolu- tionists of the new school would say that it is not even the more significant half. The final cause of colonies, they would allege, is not merely to recapitulate the evolution of the parent state. That is but their embryology and their infancy. Their chief end is to supply a field for variations already in germ in the mother-
