THE THEORY OF COLONIZATION 255
indigenes, and the more beneficent institutions that grow out of the forms of co-operation will also repeat themselves. Colonial governorship, sometimes in half a century, will recapitulate the history of the monarchy for more than a thousand years, and the legislature and the judicature will pass as rapidly through similar phases. Colonial slavery in its darkest shape will make ancient slavery seem bright; convict labor will recall the slave of the Roman ergastnlum; and mediaeval serfage will live again in modern times. In industry we shall find the primitive undiffer- entiated state repeat itself, and the division of labor rapidly grows up in the daughter-land as it had slowly grown up in the mother- land. We shall see the first colonists take shelter in burrows, like animals, and in caves, like savages. The strongest moral sentiment of savage peoples the thirst for revenge shows itself unslaked and predominant even in advanced colonies, and the highest public sentiment that which forbids wanton aggres- sion upon others, whether individuals or peoples is hardly to be found in colonies, as indeed it is of slow growth and precarious existence in older peoples. Colonial religion seems completely to overlap the alleged earliest stage, at least if that stage be ancestor- worship, but it often sinks into, and starts afresh from a stage that seems to be still earlier that of virtual agnosticism. Liter- ature in the colony, as in the motherland, is at first imitative of an older literature, and it continues to repeat the literary evolu- tion of the mother-country long after the colony has become inde- pendent. Colonial art passes through only a few of the phases it describes in old countries.
A social state may reproduce itself. In several European countries the church before the Reformation possessed one-third of the land ; and shortly after independence, as presumably before it, the church in Mexico possessed fully one-third of the real and personal wealth of the republic. There, too, as in mediaeval Europe, the clergy played a disturbing part in public life.
Mere events may strangely repeat themselves. Spain held the silver mines whence its Carthaginian rulers sent the tribute which left them free to pursue a career of conquest, and in these mines they compelled the native Spaniards to labor. Seventeen or
