Chapter 11
THE RACIAL APTITUDES

SUCH are the three races, the Alpine, Mediterranean, and Nordic, which enter into the composition of European populations of to-day, and in various combinations comprise the great bulk of white men all over the world. These races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual, and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters, and are transmitted unchanged from generation to generation. In considering skull characters we must remember that, while indicative of independent descent, the size and shape of the head are not closely related to brain power. Aristotle was a Mediterranean and had a small, long skull, while Humboldt had a large and characteristically Nordic skull, but equally dolichocephalic. Socrates and Diogenes were apparently quite un-Greek and represent remnants of some early race, perhaps of Paleolithic man. The history of their lives shows clearly that each was recognized as in some degree alien by their fellow countrymen, just as the Jews apparently regarded Christ, as, in some indefinite way, un-Jewish. Mental spiritual and moral traits are closely as- sociated with the physical distinctions among the different European races, although like somatological characters, these spiritual attributes have in many cases gone astray. Enough remain, however, to show that certain races have special aptitudes for certain pursuits. The Alpine race is always and everywhere a race of peasants, an agricultural and never a maritime race. In fact, they only extend to salt water at the head of the Adriatic. The coastal and seafaring populations of north Europe are everywhere Nordic as far as the coast of Spain, and among Europeans this race is preeminently fitted to maritime pursuits. The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant character of the Alpines. Chivalry and knighthood, and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts, are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions, and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north. The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known, and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned. Before leaving this interesting subject of the correlation of spiritual and moral traits with physical characters, we may note that these influences are so deeply rooted in everyday consciousness that the average novelist or playwright would not fail to make his hero a tall, blond, honest, and somewhat stupid youth, or his villain a small, dark, and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character. The gods of Olympus were almost all described as blond, and it would be difficult to imagine a Greek artist painting a brunette Venus. In church pictures to-day all angels are blonds, while the denizens of the lower regions revel in deep brunetness. Most ancient tapestries show a blond earl on horseback and a dark haired churl holding the bridle, and in depicting the crucifixion no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour. This latter is something more than a convention, as such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord indicate his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes. These and other similar traditions clearly point to the relation of one race to another in classic, mediaeval, and modern times. How far they will be modified by democratic institutions and the rule of the majority remains to be seen. The wars of the last two thousand years in Europe have been almost exclusively wars between the various nations of this race, or between rulers of Nordic blood. From a race point of view the present European conflict is essentially a civil war, and nearly all the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides are members of this race. It is the same old story of mutual butchery and mutual destruction between Nordics, just as the Nordic nobility of Renaissance Italy seem to have been possessed with a blood mania to kill one another off. It is the modern edition of the old berserker blood rage, and is class suicide on a gigantic scale. It is hard to say on which side there is a preponderance of Nordic blood, as Flanders and northern France are more Teutonic than south Germany, and the backbone of the armies that England has put in the field, together with those of her colonies, are almost purely Nordic, while a large portion of the Russian armies is of the same race. The writer has carefully refrained in this article from the use of the words "Teutonic" and "Germanic"' except in their most limited sense, because the names are currently used in a national and not in a racial sense, to denote the inhabitants of the central empires. Such broader use would include millions who are totally un-Teutonic, and exclude millions, of pure Teutonic blood who are outside of the political borders of Austro-Germany.