Chapter VI
Race and Language

WHEN a country is invaded and conquered by a race speaking a foreign language, one of several things may happen, replacement of both population and language, as in the case of eastern England when conquered by the Saxons; or adoption of the language of the victors by the natives, as happened in Roman Gaul, where the invaders imposed their Latin tongue throughout the land, without substantially altering the race. In England and Scotland later conquerors, Danes and Normans, failed to change the Saxon speech of the country, and in Gaul the German tongue of the Franks, Burgundians, and Northmen could not displace the language of Rome. Autochthonous inhabitants frequently impose upon their invaders their own language and customs. In Normandy the conquering Norse pirates accepted the language, religion, and customs of the natives, and in a century they vanish from history as Scandinavian heathen and appear as the foremost representatives of the speech and religion of Rome. In Hindustan the blond Nordic invaders forced their Aryan language on the aborigines, but their blood was quickly and utterly absorbed in the darker strains of the original owners of the land. A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes. In our Southern States Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose and justification. The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language, but there remains not one recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the Northwest. The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship. The dim and uncertain traces of Nordic blood in northern India only serve to emphasize the utter swamping of the white man in the burning South. The power of racial resistance of a dense and thoroughly acclimated population to an incoming army, is very great. No ethnic conquest can be complete unless the natives are exterminated and the invaders bring their own women with them. If the conquerors are obliged to depend upon the women of the vanquished to carry on the race, the intrusive blood strain in a short time becomes diluted beyond recognition. It sometimes happens that an infiltration of population takes place either in the guise of unwilling slaves, or of willing immigrants, filling up waste places and taking to the lowly tasks which the lords of the land despise, gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters. The former catastrophe happened in the declining days of Rome, and the south Italians of to-day are very largely descendants of nondescript slaves of all races, chiefly from the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, who were imported by the Romans under the Empire to work their vast estates. The latter is occurring to-day in many parts of America, especially in New England. The eastern half of Germany has a Slavic Alpine substratum which now represents the descendants of the Wends, who by the sixth century had filtered in as far west as the Elbe, occupying the lands left vacant by the Teutonic tribes which had migrated southward. These Wends in turn were Teutonized by a return wave of military conquest from the tenth century onward, and to-day their descendants are considered Germans in good standing. Having adopted the German as their sole tongue they are now in religious, political, and cultural sympathy with the pure Teutons; in fact, they are quite unconscious of any racial distinction. This historic fact underlies the ferocious controversy which has been raised over the ethnic origin of the Prussians, the issue being whether the populations in Brandenburg, Silesia, Posen, and other districts in eastern Germany, are Alpine Wends or true Nordic Germans. The truth is that the dominant half of the population is purely Teutonic and the lower half of the population are merely Teutonized Wends and Poles of Alpine affinities. Of course these territories must also retain some of their early Teutonic population, and the blood of the Goth, Burgund, Vandal, and Lombard, who were at the commencement of our era located there, as well as the later Saxon element, must enter largely into the composition of the Prussian of to-day. The most important communities in continental Europe of pure German type are to be found in old Saxony, the country around Hanover, and this element prevails generally in the northwestern part of the German Empire among the Low Dutch-speaking population, while the High German-speaking population is largely composed of Teutonized Alpines. All the states involved in the present world war have sent to the front their fighting Nordic element, and the loss of life now going on in Europe will fall much more heavily on the blond giant than on the little brunet. As in all wars since Roman times, from a breeding point of view, the little dark man is the final winner. No one who saw one of our regiments march on its way to the Spanish War could fail to be impressed with the size and blondness of the men in the ranks as contrasted with the complacent citizen, who from his safe stand on the gutter curb gave his applause to the fighting man, and then stayed home to perpetuate his own brunet type. This same Nordic element, everywhere the type of the sailor, the soldier, the adventurer, and the pioneer, was ever the type to migrate to new countries, until the ease of transportation and the desire to escape military service in the last forty years reversed the immigrant tide. In consequence of this change our immigrants now largely represent lowly refugees from "persecution" and other social discards. In most cases the blood of pioneers has been lost to their race. They did not take their women with them. They either died childless or left halfbreeds behind them. The virile blood of the Spanish conquistadores, who are now little more than a memory in Central and South America, died out from these causes. This was also true in the early days of our Western frontiersmen, who individually were a far finer type than the settlers who followed them.