The cultures of the Caucasian race that have receded as a result of
absorption of the blood of colored races may be enumerated, in part, as
follows: In Africa: Egypt, Abyssinia, Nigeria, Uganda, Mashonaland, the
northern Littoral. In Asia: India, Babylonia, Persia, Cambodia, Ceylon, Java,
New Zealand (Maori), Polynesia, Northern China, Korea, Japan (early). In
Europe: The southern provinces of Portugal, Spain, and Italy; Greece, and the
Balkans. In America: Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru in early times; Haiti, and
portions of the equatorial mainland, within the past hundred years.
Civilizations may have been overthrown by armed invasions, but if the
victors were of the same race as the vanquished they assimilated the vanquished
or were assimilated by the vanquished, and the world did not suffer a permanent
loss. Greek culture was appropriated by the Roman conqueror, Roman culture by
the Germans, and Holland's high place well filled by the English.
It is not when the fit replace the fit that civilization suffers
irretrievable loss, but when the fit is replaced by the unfit. It is not when a
creative people succumb to the forceful measures of a people of their own race
that culture decays, but when a creative people are submerged by a non-creative
people.
As a result of recent developments in anthropology and allied sciences, we
may conclude that all civilizations have arisen from the white race. It is the
Caucasian who has shown cultural capacity in such measure as to deserve to rank
as "civilized." The cultures of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Phoenicia,
India, Greece, and Rome; of modern Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and South
Africa have been without question attributed to the white man. Keane, speaking
of the Caucasians in relation to the higher human achievements, says,
"Such is the dominant position of this the highest of the Hominidae, which
seems alone destined to a great future, as it alone is heir to a great past.
All the works of man worthy of record have, with few or doubtful exceptions,
emanated from the large and much convoluted brain of the white Homo
Caucasicus."
There remains three important cultural centers to be considered; those of
ancient China and of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and Peru. We
will now attempt to determine the relation of the early white man to these
civilizations.
Early Chinese civilization so nearly resembled that of Babylonia as to cause
some scientists to hold that the Chinese moved en masse from the regions
adjacent to Babylonia. As research progresses those inventions which were once
accredited to Chinese ingenuity are one by one being traced to the Caucasian.
The Chinese ability to hold but not advance his culture has been explained on
the probable basis that the Chinese suffer arrest of mental development a
little later in life than do the Negroes. The latter's precociousness in
childhood and relative stupidity in manhood is a trait characteristic of that
race in all of its widely divergent branches.
A non-creative race, whose progress depends upon assimilating the progress
of others, may nevertheless show high sustaining qualities. The culture
imparted to them will not, of necessity, depart immediately upon the passing of
the creative breed to which they are indebted, and the imparted culture is
likely to have long lease of life if the non-creative race be yellow rather
than black; for the yellow man represents a higher intellectual development
than the black. Add tot he yellow man's potentiality the additional capacity
derived from a cross breeding with the white, and it would seem that one might
safely infer that such a mixture would retain the white man's culture, at least
in its rudiments, throughout many generations. Such hybrids will not continue
the development of the culture of their white ancestors, for the white man
himself is not of such intellectual qualities that his offspring from union
with non-white are able to rise to the white man's culture level.
We do not have to rely merely upon the question of Chinese origin in
Mesopotamia to prove Caucasian influence in China, for we have more easily
ascertained knowledge that such is the case. Manchus, Mongols, Koreans and
Japanese are admitted to be partly Caucasian, the mongrel descendants of a
neolithic, and possibly also a paleolithic movement of the Caucasian across
northern Asia.
The presence of the early white man in central and east central Asia is now
recognized by ethnologists. Deniker in his Races of Men, p. 363, says:
"Southern Siberia, the Kirghiz steppes, north and
northwestern Mongolia are covered with stone circles, barrows, tumuli, menhirs
of every form, with burial places in which are found objects in wood, bone,
bronze, copper, iron. The skulls which have been taken from some of these
burial places, in the upper valley of the Hanssei, are dolichocephalic;
the plaster mortuary masks found in the same region by Adrian of present a type
somewhat European." (See also The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison
Grant)
Early Chinese records refer to blond tribes, and there yet
remain tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, individuals in Manchuria and Korea, the
racial outcroppings of the early Caucasian. China has been ruled by these
northern mixbreed tribes for many centuries. The Great Wall of China was built
to preserve China proper from the predatory incursions of these hybrid
Caucasians. The rulers of China, of course, will have constituted the upper
class; and it is from this class that Chinese higher culture issued. It is
apparent that the Caucasic element in China would do for that people what it
has done for all other colored races, that is impart to them a culture which in
its first stages would be progressive, and in its later stages dwarfed, as the
Caucasian blood became submerged. This will account for the fact that Chinese
civilization was more creative in its earlier stages. The Chinese were a more
progressive people twenty centuries ago than when the modern Europeans reached
East Asia.
Whatever the difference of opinion as to the western origin of the Chinese,
it will not affect our thesis, which is that Chinese higher culture, in common
with the higher culture of other colored races, was imparted, in the early
period as at present, through Caucasian influence. But the blood of the white
man has not, in China, as it has not in any other instance raised the mongrel
to the level of progressive culture. "They seem in some respects to be
almost as incapable of progress as the Negroes themselves, the only essential
difference begging that the arrest of mental development comes later in life
for the yellow than for the black. Meanwhile it may be pointed out that Chinese
culture has been stagnant since the early historic period, despite many
impulses from within and without to shake off the chronic state of lethargy in
which the nation seems to vegetate. The late Terrien de Lacuperie has advanced
many arguments to show that, before reaching their present homes in the
Hoang-ho and Yang-tse basins, the primitive Bak tribes had long been in contact
with the civilized Akkads of Babylonia. Hence they reached China already a
somewhat cultured people, with knowledge of letters, astronomy, and various
industrial arts.
In their new environment they continued the development up to a certain
point, after which; that is, throughout the greater part of their historic
life, they have mostly remained at a standstill, and even now find the greatest
difficulty in assimilating Western ideas. This inert mass of semi-civilized savagery
offers a dead resistance to all outward pressure, even at the period of the
national stability more than once overthrown by a few rude Tartar hordes. Their
religion remains a system of cold moral precepts, combined with the old
shamanistic superstitions, beneath a veneer of Buddhistic ceremonial, ancestry
and spirit (Daemon) worship.
Their astronomy has scarcely advanced beyond the astrological state, while
their medical art continues to be a hopeless mixture of superstitious
practices, absurd nostrums, and a few grains of common sense. Excessively
courteous among themselves, they are rude and aggressive toward strangers, with
a deep-rooted contempt and even hatred for foreigners and all their ways. On
the other hand, the Chinese, although reckless gamblers like all the
Indo-Chinese and Malay peoples, are naturally frugal, thrifty and parsimonious,
which combined with great staying power and capacity for enduring hardships on
poor fare, makes them formidable competitors with the western nations in the labor
markets of the world." (Ethnology, A. H. Keane, pp. 322, 323.)
The "Yellow Peril" is not so much that of armed aggression as of
economic superiority based upon low standards of life, and, ultimately, of
blood admixture of yellows with whites to whose lands the yellows incessantly
clamor to migrate.
Now let us turn to the civilizations of Mexico and Peru, which the Europeans
found in slow decay when they explored these countries four centuries ago.
We have sen that roads to America were open to migrants from Asia, and
perhaps Europe, at an early age. Stone age migrations of the white man had
carried him across northern Asia to Japan and across southern Asia to
Polynesia. Did the white man reach America? There yet remain some ethnologists,
chiefly American, who confidently assert that the cultures of Mexico and Peru
had independent origin, that they grew up in America as similar cultures grew
in Asia and Europe. For our purpose, we are not concerned with the local origin
of the cultures nor with the imparted influences, if there were such. Behind
every culture there is a race, and the matter that concerns us is the
determination of the race that produced the cultures.
All will admit that the American is derived in whole or in part from Asia.
There is an unquestioned Mongolian strain in the Indian. Is the Indian wholly
Mongolian or is he partly Caucasian? Let us ask those who maintain that the
civilizations of early America were evolved locally by the Mongolian, who long
before had reached America, whether, if the Mongolian element in eastern Asia
could reach America, there is any inherent improbability that the more
aggressive Caucasian of that region could also have managed to cover the same
route? The cultures of Mexico and Peru were Caucasian-like, and the Caucasian
was as close to the western world as the Mongolian. Those who maintain that the
American cultures were locally evolved and simply represent a stage in human
progress, are burdened with the necessity of showing that it is improbable that
the early whites of Asia would cross as did the yellows, and, further, by the
difficulty of explaining why the yellows developed a Caucasian-like culture in
America, but not elsewhere.
The way before the Caucasian was easy and enticing. It was peopled by inferiors
that the Caucasian's race-long history had taught him he could subdue and
enslave. Did the Caucasian not follow the colored to America as he did to
central Africa dn southern Asia, everywhere eventually inter-breeding with
those whom he had conquered? Caste, or some such social prohibition against
blood admixture, preserved the early Caucasian for a time in Mexico and Peru,
as it did in India and Uganda; but caste has never permanently preserved a
breed. The civilizations of America were crumbling when the Spaniards came, and
there were aristocracies exhibiting unmistakable evidences of a breed differing
from the mass of Mongoloids over whom they ruled. In India, the mongrel Aryan
aristocracy shows clearly that it is in part Caucasian, and the same may be
said of many ethnic groups, where the white man has produced a culture and
suffered its loss by interbreeding with non-white races.
Those who oppose the theory of the Caucasian origin of the civilizations of
Central and South America in reality ask us to believe that the yellow turned
megalithic architect in America! That here, but nowhere else in the world, he
built mighty pyramids as did the whites of Egypt! That here, but nowhere else,
he evolved a religion like the whites of India, the Mediterranean shores, and
East Asia! That the creative elements in the pyramid builders of Mexico and
Peru were highly specialized Mongolians with out the slant eye and short nose,
who, in some way not explained, acquired these non-racial characteristics and,
in some way equally mysterious, aped the spiritual and material culture of the
white race. The great stone architecture of Mexico and Peru rivals, if it does
not excel, the mighty works of Egypt. There is striking similarity in design.
(Read the Secret of the Pacific, by C. Reginald Enoch, or the articles
on Mexico and Peru in the Encyclopedia Britannica. These references will
give a summary of the arguments in favor of the theory of Caucasian origin of
the cultures of early America.) The remarkable similarity between these
cultures and those of the white man elsewhere are explained away by certain
Americanists, such, for instance, as Brinton, who says that the similarities
have arisen from "certain fixed relations of man to his environment, and
therefore are of little value in tracing ethnic affinities." When the
Americanists show that the use of steam as an industrial power in Japan
"has arisen from a certain fixed relation of man to his environment,"
that the electric lights of Victoria Nyanza, the use of "wireless" on
Tanganyika, the Andean railways of South America and the steamers of the Amazon
have arisen from "certain fixed relations of man to his environment,"
the more valuable will their studies become. The truth of the matter is, that
the Caucasian has undoubtedly originated every high culture of whose origin we
are certain; and of cultures whose origin is in doubt there is evidence of dat
and authority accrediting them to the white race.
We are prepared to admit that the coming of the Caucasian type to the New
World is of great antiquity, but, however great the lapse of time between the
coming of the Stone Age Caucasian and the arrival of those armed with iron
helmet, sword and gun, the first white migrant in his intellect and race type
was already conditioned to development along race lines. We must not ignore the
persistence of race type. The races physically and intellectually are today
very much as they were at the beginning of the age of metals. Our advancement
has not been evonolutional as much as cultural. We have acquired the use of
steam and electricity and worked them out to man's use in manifold ways. We
have learned more of the laws governing health, and have made education more
general; but our improvements are due in minor degree, if any, to increase in
brainbulk or quality of the individual. We have simply had more light by which
our feet may be guided, more knowledge from which to profit.
That there is a non-Mongoloid element in the American Indian is apparent. So
Caucasian-like are, or were, some of the tribes, that Alfred Wallace suggested
that they came form Europe when that country, Greenland, and much of North
America, constituted a single continent. Philologists will endeavor to trace
many Indian words, such as, for instance, "Manhattan," through East
and Central Asia into Europe, while anthropologists of high standing, like the
ever critical Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, are of the opinion that the elements which go
to make up the American Indian, in part, may be traced through Asia into Europe.
This phase of ethnology is as yet barely touched, and offers a rich field for
the student. (See Remains in Eastern Asia of the Race That Peopled America,
by Ales Hrdlicka, Curator of Physical Anthropology, United States National
Museum.)
The Caucasian has been constituted as such, has been differentiated from the
yellow and black races, for so vast a period of time that there is no inherent
difficulty in attributing the American cultures to that race, even though it be
shown that the Americas were peopled in the Old Stone Age. During the later
paleolithic era the races were hopelessly differentiated, no longer plastic,
conditioned to development in accord with their inherent capacity and racial
trend. So we may well concede remote date in the peopling of America and grant
that the Caucasian element was proto-Caucasian, or, if need be, precursor of
the Caucasian, if this will satisfy, and yet justly infer that the
non-Mongoloid culture of early America, like that of later America, proceeded
from migrants of Caucasic type.
We ignore the persistence of type. We ignore the laws of heredity. We
imagine that, in one way or another, man of yesterday was detached from
ourselves. But he is not to be considered as a thing separate. We are what we
are by reason of our ancestors being what they were. If the human family
proceeded from a single pair, this common ancestral pair lived untold centuries
ago. Man was still young. Climate and other environment were radically
different from the present. Differences between the races were determined when
man was plastic. The fortunate or unfortunate combination of parental factors
from which the races have been evolved was at such a remote period in human
history that for practical purposes we may consider the races to have had independent
origin rather than separate development after common origin. The changing of
Negro to Chinese or Chinese to European is not to be conceived as possible by
human agency, for the creation of physical environment, which, acting in
conjunction with heredity, is essential to success in such task, is beyond the
power of man.
Now, race, that "stiffening in the evolutionary process (See Anthropology,
Robert R. Marett, Osxford, p. 62.), let it not be forgotten, extends to mind as
well as to body. It is not merely skin-deep." Race not only conditions us
to what we are and to what we are to become, but the differentiations in the
sub-species of humanity were determined in all their essentials untold ages
ago. The absence of man-like ape, with the failure to discover the remains of
ape-like man, or even the works of man other than those of late origin,
together with the knowledge that the race types which constitute the aborigines
may be found in Europe and Asia, have led some ethnologists to conclude that
man not only did not originate in the Western World but that his coming thither
was during the New Stone Age. (See Early Man in South America, by Ales
Hrdlicks)
The Caucasian, the only race that has produced a great stone architecture,
turned to such achievements in the New World as well as the Old. The
great-stone temples of Peru and Mexico show an astonishing resemblance to those
of Egypt. They owe origin either to the Caucasian, who did reach these shores,
or to the Mongoloid over whom the Caucasian ruled. Can there be difference of
opinion as to the source from which they proceeded?
We have, then, the road to America open to the Caucasian, as well as to the
Mongolian. We find a Caucasic type of Indian who, though mixed with the
Mongolian, is not more divergent from the true Caucasian than from the true
Mongolian. We find a similarity between the higher material culture of America
and that of the early white man elsewhere. As yet we have not closely
considered the similarity of language, social customs and religion. Capable
authorities have claimed to identify the language used in such localities as
Mexico with the tongue spoken by Caucasianoids in Asia. In connection with
social custom, it has been observed that there is similarity even between the
game splayed in Mexico and those known to have been familiar to eastern Asia.
(The same designs, patterns and even games are found in ancient Mexico and
India and China," article "Archaeology," 11th ed., Encyclopedia
Britannica) Alexander von Humboldt declared that the Mexican calendar was
essentially identical with the Tibeto-Chinese calendar, and we know, of course,
that the latter is derived from the early Caucasian method of reckoning time.
Of this calendar, C. Reginald Enoch (The Secret of the Pacific, p.
112.) says:
It was both a sun-dial and a calendar, such s the
Egyptians and the Chaldeans used in the most remote time."
Religious beliefs are unusually persistive. The story of a
well-nigh universal flood is wide-spread and has been held for millennia. The
Aryan idea of God become incarnate and walking before man for an example for
man to follow, is so remote in its beginning that it is lost in antiquity. We
are not surprised, then, to learn that the early Caucasian in Mexico and Peru
held religious beliefs similar to those of his race in Asia, though he may have
been separated form the latter for many centuries.
Common religion is not conclusive evidence of common race origin, we know,
for there are both black and yellow Christians, yet the Christian faith arose
within and is dependent upon the white race for dissemination. While there are
Christians who are not white, yet there being no colored Christians who have
not received their religion directly or indirectly from the white race. We may
dismiss as uncritical the assumption that similar culture may be evolved by the
various races because of common brain structure of the races. Identity of brain
structure would be shown by identity of action and reaction under any given
environment. Race extends to brain as well as to skin-color or hair-texture.
When race lines are crossed there is no common cerebral structure from which
similarity of culture may proceed. Nor has there been since the races have been
constituted as such.
If we find in early Mexico a religion closely analogous to one known to have
been of Asiatic origin, such will imply Asiatic influence in America through
the physical presence of Asiatic immigrants or by cultural contact with a Asia,
one or both.
Buddhism arose among the mixbreed whites of India and grafted its peculiar
tenets upon the prevailing and long since ancient religious beliefs,
eliminating some but utilizing others. Let us note the similarity in the soul's
progress after death, according to the Buddhists' teaching, and that of the
Aztecs of Mexico: (From Anthropology, by A. H. Keane)
Buddhist Purgatory.
Aztec Journey to Spirit Land.
There is not space, nor is there necessity, for a separate discussion of the
Caucasian origin and mongrel ending of the race stocks that produced the
various cultures enumerated at the beginning of this chapter. We have singled
out ancient China and America because there is less known of these
civilizations and because they were important centers. There is ample evidence
that Egypt, Abyssinia, the northern Littoral, Nigeria, Uganda, and Mashonaland
in Africa; Babylonia, Phoenicia, India, Cambodia, Java, Ceylon, New Zealand,
China, Japan, and Korea in Asia; Mexico, Yucatan and Peru in America, possessed
relatively advanced cultures originating from Caucasian peoples, and we have
sought to show that the decay of these cultures synchronizes with the gradual absorption
of the Caucasian elements by the always more numerous colored races among whom
they dwelt.
The causation of the decay of culture is the substitution of the culturally
unfit for the culturally fit. Civilization is but the outward expression of
peculiar mentality operating upon and in response to environment. A peculiar
mentality is the expression of relative peculiarity in brain matter, and any
given mentality cannot be but an expression of breed. Mind is dependent upon
brain quality and quality, and peculiar brain quality and quantity arise from
and are inseparable from race.
When a race is qualified by blood admixture with alien stocks, there is, of
necessity, a corresponding qualification of brain matter, and hence, of
mentality. We in America must daily bear in mind that amalgamation of races is
the ultimate result of race contact. We have give but little attention to race
and heredity. Work along these lines has been mainly by European scientists. As
for the America public, ethnology may be classified as an almost unknown
science, especially so with regard to results following upon the contact of
races. Our interest has been in other things, and in those things we have
succeeded greatly.
The courage and intelligence which we have called into service in
establishing our civilization must be used in its preservation. It may be that
we shall be called upon to use still greater courage and ability in the latter
than in the former. We have in our midst increasing millions of a culturally
inferior race, in the presence of which the white man's civilization has never
survived. On our southwestern frontier there are a still larger number of the
culturally inferior, wholly alien to our race and institutions, whose presence
led the foremost ethnologist of his day (Alexander von Humboldt) to cast the
gloomy prophecy, "The United States shall absorb Mexico and crumble to
pieces."
Amicable relations with Latin America and the West Indies are drawing to our
shores an increasing number of the partly Negro, partly Indian, partly white,
who, under disguise of national, rather than racial, designations; Cubans,
Puerto Ricans, Peruvians, Ecuadoreans, Venezuelans, Jamaicans, etc., rather
than Indian-Negro-Caucasian mongrels, arrive in our midst and intermarry with
our white inhabitants. Of late years, south and southeastern Europeans;
black-white, and even yellow-white mongrels, are deluging our nation. Negroid
Sicily is being transplanted to America.
Beyond the Pacific there arises a grave danger to our institutions. These
people left to their own resources are not a menace. They have not initiated a
stage in human progress. Their danger to civilization lies in their ability to
assimilate the arts and sciences of peace and war, and, by utilization of the
white man's culture make their numbers a menace to the white man's progress and
ultimately to the white man's existence.
Color problems are permanent problems. They will die only with the
obliteration of the color line. If the white man is to remain white, color
problems must persist. As long as there is a color line, there will be a
color problem. Our future is clouded by such problems. They will not grow
less, but ever greater, and our children's children will bear them as
intensified burdens.
The history of higher cultures will reveal that all those which are
popularly called "civilizations" may be traced in origin to the white
race, while the history of the contact of races will reveal that the
civilizations of the white man have never survived contact with the colored. We
need and must have this knowledge if we are to reverse history.
Great Britain's far-flung empire and her incessant problems arising from the
contact of the races have led British statesmen and scientists to a marked
reaction form the conventional attitude of the British people of six or eight
decades ago. In the last century, British popular thought, led to a high pitch
by the teaching of abolitionists (philanthropists), conceived the colored races
to be child races in the process of development. The color problem was
considered to be but a problem of color and not one of mentality. The
abolitionists taught that the Negro was, to all effects, a white child and
should be treated as such, for ere long he would reach maturity, and the color
problem vanish as a result of religious instruction and training in the
sciences and arts.
The teaching of the abolitionists wrought a revolution in British colonial
policy. It created consternation among the colonial English who, threatened
with bankruptcy by the abolition of slavery, found their civilization itself
menaced by the English doctrine that the races were equal and that the Negro
should have equal share with the Caucasian in controlling the British possessions.
While many Englishmen at home were not permitted to vote, suffrage was
conferred upon the Negro. In the West Indies, British colonials threatened
rebellion, but their numbers were too limited to influence the race
equalization policies of the British government. In South Africa, non-slave
holding Dutch, together with their British sympathizers, fled from "mad
necrophilism." Leaving their settled homes in Cape Colony, they passed
into the interior and founded there the Orange Free State and the Transvaal governments.
At a great cost of blood and treasure, the Negro policies of white peoples
who dwelt apart from the colored races were forced upon those of their own race
who were custodians of civilization among the colored races. After more than a
half a century the results of this great upheaval strike us with astonishment,
for we find that both Britain and the United States have tacitly abandoned the
theory of the equality of races, after having secured its practical application
at such cost. British self-governing colonies, upon which the British
government forced Negro equalization, have quietly relinquished their charters
of autonomy and by such step, escaped co-racial control in these colonies. By
placing themselves under control of the British crown, the white colonials have
eliminated the Negro as a political factor in colonial affairs, preferring to
be wholly subject to distant whites rather than share control with local
blacks. Not only have the British abandoned the theory of the equality of races
by negative measures, as in the West Indies, but there is a later and more
striking development. The constitution of the Union of South Africa expressly
limits seats in parliament to "British subjects of European descent"
and the Australians expressly deny suffrage to black aborigines. Within the
past two decades British opinion as represented in Parliamentary sanction of
the fundamental laws of British self-governing colonies, has been completely
reversed. The United States has just as quietly and as surely abandoned the
Negro police arising as a result of the Civil War.
The change of attitude which has been affected is strikingly observable in
the scientific world. The spirit of inquiry and search for facts upon which to
base conclusions has led scientists to declare that the Negro is not a child
race, that he is not a youthful Caucasian, but a full-grown, black adult, alien
to the Caucasian in instinct and tendency. Far from espousing the enslavement
of the Negro, the student, basing his conclusion upon the results of the
thousands of years of race contact, asserts that the Negro problem is not
essentially that of slavery or of freedom, but one arising from the physical
presence of the Negro. Whether the Negro be slave of freeman, there will be a
Negro problem as long as the two races remain together.
The abolitionist taught that freedom and equality were the solvent for the
Negro problem; the slave-owner taught that slavery was the solvent; but the
student of the results upon the white race of its historic contact with the
black will affirm that neither of slavery nor freedom will solve the problem,
but that its only solution is separation of races, with the alternative of
ultimate amalgamation of races. Not only has there been a marked reaction from
the French theory of equality of races which, appropriated by the English and
practically applied, brought hatred and ruin into the Anglo-Saxon world, but
there has been a more notable advance. At first the French and German, later
the English ethnologists, began investigations which, well worked out, have led
them to assert that not merely the races are unequal as factors in
civilization, but that there is clear debarkation of cultural values between
groups of the same race. They point to the fact that modern civilization is not
only Caucasic, but that it is farther restricted by being essentially Nordic.
They will tell you that a Nordic (Aryan) people conquered and civilized India,
Persia, Greece, and Rome; that just as the Nordic factor in modern civilization
is the highest factor, so has it been for many thousand years.
The author would like the reader to realize that he is attempting to deal
with our great problems not as a partisan writer, but with the permanency of
our civilization in view; that he is not the source nor the chief exponent of
the theories here presented. Especially would he like the reader to know that
in his opinion, his years of travel and research have not revealed or added a
single fact or theory not known to modern science. If there is value in this
treatise, such value lies in the bringing to bear upon one theory many of the
facts known to specialists at present. With this in view, the following
extracts are presented from the thesis of an eminent scientist who has not
lived in daily contact with the colored races and consequently escapes the bias
usually accredited to those students who have. The quotation is a clear
exposition that not race merely, but breed within the race may produce
civilization, and that culture may perish with the breed that produces it.
"No individual can acquire a particular
characteristic unless the requisite factors entered into the composition of
that individual of fertilization, being received from the father or from the
mother, or from both, and consequently no individual can pass on to his
offspring positive characters which he does not himself possess...The factors
which the individual receives from his parents and no others are those he can
transmit to his offspring; and if a factor was received from one parent only,
not more than one-half of the offspring, on an average, will inherit it...It is
only quite recently that prominent horse breeders have come to see that the dam
matters as much as the sire...The popular notion that any parents can have any
kind of children within the racial limits is contrary to all experience, yet we
have gravely entertained such ideas...At various times it has been declared
that men are born equal and that the inequality is brought about by unequal
opportunities. Acquaintance with the pedigrees of disease soon show the fatuity
of such fancies...We, on the contrary, would feel it something of a puzzle if
two parents, both mathematically gifted, had any children not
mathematicians."
Civilized man, with his increasing power over nature,
"invokes these powers for the preservation and maintenance of many of the
inferior and all the defective members of his species. The inferior freely
multiply, and the defective, if their defects be not so grave as to lead to
their detention in prisons or asylums, multiply also without restraint.
Heredity being strict in its action, the consequences are in civilized
countries much what they would be in the kennels of the dog breeder who
continued to preserve all his puppies, good and bad; the proportion of
defective increases.
"Genetic research will make it possible for a
nation to elect by what sort of beings it will be represented not many
generations hence...The time cannot be far distant when both individuals and
communities will begin to think in terms of biological fact...To the deliberate
intervention of civilization for the preservation of inferior strains there
must sooner or later come an end, and before long nations will realize the
responsibility they have assumed multiplying these 'cankers of a calm world and
a long peace.'
"The extraordinary mentality
of the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. has been described by Galton in his Hereditary
Genius, a few generations later the display was over...At the end of the
sixth century came the reforms' of Cleisthenes (507 B.C.), which sanctioned
foreign marriages and admitted to citizenship a number not only of resident
aliens but also of manumitted slaves. As Aristotle says, Cleisthenes legislated
with the deliberate purpose of breaking up the phratries and gentes. In order
that the various sections of the population might be mixed up as much as
possible, and the old tribal associations abolished...at the end of the fifth
century the strict rule was re-enacted that a citizen must be of citizen birth
on both sides, the population by that time may well have become largely
mongrelized.
"Some experiments of this
kind are going on at the present time in the United States, for example, on a
very large scale. Our grandchildren may live to see the characteristics of the
American population entirely altered by the vast invasion of Italian and other
South European elements... Historians commonly ascribe such changes as occurred
in Athens, and will almost certainly come to pass in the United States, to
conditions of life, and especially to political institutions. These
agencies, however, do little unless they are such as to change the breed.
Conditions give opportunities but cause no variations.
"The long-standing
controversy as to the relative importance of nature and nurture, to use
Galton's convenient jingle of words,' is drawing to an end, and of the
overwhelming greater significance of nature there is no longer any possibility
of doubt. It may be well briefly to recapitulate the arguments on which
naturalists rely in coming to this decision, both as regards races and
individuals. First, as regards human individuals, there is the common
experience of children of the same parents, reared under conditions sensibly
identical, may develop quite differently, exhibiting in character and aptitudes
a segregation just as great as in their colors or hair forms. Conversely all
the more marked aptitudes have at various times appeared and not rarely reached
perfection in circumstances least favorable to their development. Next, appeal
can be made to the universal experience of the breeder, whether of animals or
plants, that strain is absolutely essential; that though bad conditions may
easily spoil a good strain, yet, under the best conditions a bad strain will
never give a fine result. It is faith, not evidence, which encourages
educationalist and economists to hoe so greatly in the ameliorating effects of
the conditions of life." (Extracts from Heredity by Professor
William Bateson, M.A., F.R.S. -- two addresses in 1914 at the Australian
meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Reprinted by
permission in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1915.)
That the Roman world was "bastardized with Levantine
mongrel" (Stoddard), and that the change in race gradually wrought a
change in institutions is clearly recognized by Madison Grant, in his The
Passing of the Great Race, who says:
"In the last days of the Republic Caesar was the
leader of the mob, the Plebs, which by that time had ceased to be of Roman
blood. Pompey's party represented the remnants of the old native Roman
aristocracy and was defeated at Pharsalia, not by Caesar's plebeian clients but
by his Nordic legionaries form Gaul. Cassius and Brutus were the last successors
of Pompey and their overthrow at Philippi was the final death blow to the
Republican party; with them the native Roman families disappear almost
entirely...The abjectness of the Roman spirit under the Empire is to be
explained by a change in race."