The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy

CHAPTER V

RED MAN’S LAND

Red Man’s Land is the Americas between the Rio Grande and the tropic of Capricorn.Here dwells the “Amerindian” race.At the time of Columbus the whole western hemisphere was theirs, but the white man has extirpated or absorbed them to north and south, so that to-day the United States and Canada in North America and the southern portions of South America are genuine “white man’s country.”In the intermediate zone above mentioned, however, the Amerindian has survived and forms the majority of the population, albeit considerably mixed with white and to a lesser degree with negro blood.The total number of “Indians,” including both full-bloods and mixed types, is about 40,000,000—more than two-thirds of the whole population.In addition, there are several million negroes and mulattoes, mostly in Brazil.The white population of the intermediate zone, even if we include “near-whites,” does not average more than 10 per cent, though it varies greatly with different regions.The reader should remember that neither the West India Islands nor the southern portion of the South American continent are included in this generalization.In the West Indies the Amerindian has completely died out and has been replaced by the negro, while southern South America, especially Argentina and Uruguay, are genuine white man’s country in which there is little Indian and no negro blood. Despite these exceptions, however, the fact remains that, taken as a whole, “Latin America,” the vast land-block from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, is racially not “Latin” but Amerindian or negroid, with a thin Spanish or Portuguese veneer. In other words, though commonly considered part of the white world, most of Latin America is ethnically colored man’s land, which has been growing more colored for the past hundred years.

Latin America’s evolution was predetermined by the Spanish Conquest. That very word “conquest” tells the story. The United States was settled by colonists planning homes and bringing their women. It was thus a genuine migration, and resulted in a full transplanting of white stock to new soil. The Indians encountered were wild nomads, fierce of temper and few in number. After sharp conflicts they were extirpated, leaving virtually no ethnic traces behind. The colonization of Latin America was the exact antithesis. The Spanish Conquistadores were bold warriors descending upon vast regions inhabited by relatively dense populations, some of which, as in Mexico and Peru, had attained a certain degree of civilization. The Spaniards, invincible in their shining armor, paralyzed with terror these people still dwelling in the age of bronze and polished stone. With ridiculous ease mere handfuls of whites overthrew empires and lorded it like gods over servile and adoring multitudes. Cortez marched on Mexico with less than 600 followers, while Pizarro had but 310 companions when he started his conquest of Peru. Of course the fabulous treasures amassed in these exploits drew swarms of bold adventurers from Spain. Nevertheless, their numbers were always infinitesimal compared with the vastness of the quarry, while the proportion of women immigrants continued to lag far behind that of the men. The breeding of pure whites in Latin America was thus both scanty and slow.

On the other hand, the breeding of mixed-bloods began at once and attained notable proportions.Having slaughtered the Indian males or brigaded them in slave-gangs, the Conquistadores took the Indian women to themselves.The humblest man-at-arms had several female attendants, while the leaders became veritable pashas with great harems of concubines.The result was a prodigious output of half-breed children, known as “mestizos” or “cholos.”

And soon a new ethnic complication was added.The Indians having developed a melancholy trick of dying off under slavery, the Spaniards imported African negroes to fill the servile ranks, and since they took negresses as well as Indian women for concubines, other half-breeds—mulattoes—appeared.Here and there Indians and negroes mated on their own account, the offspring being known as “zambos.”In time these various hybrids bred among themselves, producing the most extraordinary ethnic combinations.As Garcia-Calderon well puts it: “Grotesque generations with every shade of complexion and every conformation of skull were born in America—a crucible continually agitated by unheard-of fusions of races.... But there was little Latin blood to be found in the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated America.”[56]

To be sure, this mongrel population long remained politically negligible.The Spaniards regarded themselves as a master-caste, and excluded all save pure whites from civic rights and social privileges.In fact, the European-born Spaniards refused to recognize even their colonial-born kinsmen as their equals, and “Creoles”[57] could not aspire to the higher distinctions or offices. This attitude was largely inspired by the desire to maintain a lucrative monopoly. Yet the European’s sense of superiority had some valid grounds. There can be no doubt that the Creole whites, as a class, showed increasing signs of degeneracy. Climate was a prime cause in the hotter regions, but there were many plateau areas, as in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which though geographically in the tropics had a temperate climate from their elevation.

Even more than by climate the Creole was injured by contact with the colored races.Pampered and corrupted from birth by obsequious slaves, the Creole usually led an idle and vapid existence, disdaining work as servile and debarred from higher callings by his European-born superiors. As time passed, the degeneracy due to climate and custom was intensified by degeneracy of blood. Despite legal enactment and social taboo, colored strains percolated insidiously into the creole stock. The leading families, by elaborate precautions, might succeed in keeping their escutcheons clean, but humbler circles darkened significantly despite fervid protestations of “pure-white” blood. Still, so long as Spain kept her hold on Latin America, the process of miscegenation, socially considered, was a slow one. The whole social system was based on the idea of white superiority, and the colors were carefully graded. “In America,” wrote Humboldt toward the close of Spanish rule, “the more or less white skin determines the position which a man holds in society.”[58]

The revolution against Spain had momentous consequences for the racial future of Latin America.In the beginning, to be sure, it was a white civil war—a revolt of the Creoles against European oppression and discrimination.The heroes of the revolution—Bolívar, Miranda, San Martín, and the rest—were aristocrats of pure-white blood.But the revolution presently developed new features.To begin with, the struggle was very long.Commencing in 1809, it lasted almost twenty years.The whites were decimated by fratricidal fury, and when the Spanish cause was finally lost, multitudes of loyalists mainly of the superior social classes left the country. Meanwhile, the half-castes, who had rallied wholesale to the revolutionary banner, were demanding their reward. The Creoles wished to close the revolutionary cycle and establish a new society based, like the old, upon white supremacy, with themselves substituted for the Spaniards. Bolívar planned a limited monarchy and a white electoral oligarchy. But this was far from suiting the half-castes. For them the revolution had just begun. Raising the cry of “democracy,” then become fashionable through the North American and French revolutions, they proclaimed the doctrine of “equality” regardless of skin. Disillusioned and full of foreboding, Bolívar, the master-spirit of the revolution, disappeared from the scene, and his lieutenants, like the generals of Alexander, quarrelled among themselves, split Latin America into jarring fragments, and waged a long series of internecine wars. The flood-gates of anarchy were opened, the result being a steady weakening of the whites and a corresponding rise of the half-castes in the political and social scale. Everywhere ambitious soldiers led the mongrel mob against the white aristocracy, breaking its power and making themselves dictators. These “caudillos” were apostles of equality and miscegenation. Says Garcia-Calderon: “Tyrants found democracies; they lean on the support of the people, the half-breeds and negroes, against the oligarchies; they dominate the colonial nobility, favor the crossing of races, and free the slaves.”[59]

The consequences of all this were lamentable in the extreme.Latin America’s level of civilization fell far below that of colonial days.Spanish rule, though narrow and tyrannical, had maintained peace and social stability.Now all was a hideous chaos wherein frenzied castes and colors grappled to the death.Ignorant mestizos and brutal negroes trampled the fine flowers of culture under foot, while as by a malignant inverse selection the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished.

These deplorable conditions prevailed in Latin America until well past the middle of the nineteenth century.Of course, here as elsewhere, anarchy engendered tyranny, and strong caudillos sometimes perpetuated their dictatorship for decades, as in Paraguay under Doctor Francia and in Mexico under Porfirio Diaz.However, these were mere interludes, of no constructive import.Always the aging lion lost his grip, the lurking hyenas of anarchy downed him at last, and the land sank once more into revolutionary chaos.Some parts of Latin America did, indeed, definitely emerge into the light of stable progress.But those favored regions owed their deliverance, not to dictatorship, but to race.One of two factors always operated: either (1) an efficient white oligarchy; or (2) Aryanization through wholesale European immigration.

Stabilization through oligarchy is best illustrated by Chile.Chilean history differs widely from that of the rest of Latin America.A land of cool climate, no gold, and warlike Araucanian Indians, Chile attracted the pioneering settler rather than the swashbuckling seeker of treasure-trove. Now the pioneering types in Spain come mainly from those northern provinces which have retained considerable Nordic blood. The Chilean colonists were thus largely blond Asturians or austere, reasonable Basques, seeking homes and bringing their women. Of course there was crossing with the natives, but the fierce Araucanian aborigines clung to their wild freedom and kept up an interminable frontier warfare in which the occasions for race-mixture were relatively few. The country was thus settled by a resident squirearchy of an almost English type. This ruling gentry jealously guarded its racial integrity. In fact, it possessed not merely a white but a Nordic race-consciousness. The Chilean gentry called themselves sons of the Visigoths, scions of Euric and Pelayo, who had found in remote Araucania a chance to slake their racial thirst for fighting and freedom.

In Chile, as elsewhere, the revolution provoked a cycle of disorder.But the cycle was short, and was more a political struggle between white factions than a social welter of caste and race.Furthermore, Chile was receiving fresh accessions of Nordic blood.Many English, Scotch, and Irish gentleman-adventurers, taking part in the War of Independence, settled down in a land so reminiscent of their own.Germans also came in considerable numbers, settling especially in the colder south.Thus the Chilean upper classes, always pure white, became steadily more Nordic in ethnic character. The political and social results were unmistakable. Chile rapidly evolved a stable society, essentially oligarchic and consciously patterned on aristocratic England. Efficient, practical, and extremely patriotic, the Chilean oligarchs made their country at once the most stable and the most dynamic factor in Latin America.

The distinctly “Northern” character of Chile and the Chileans strike foreign observers.Here, for example, are the impressions of a recent visitor, the North American sociologist, Professor E.A.Ross.Landing at the port of Valparaiso, he is “struck by signs of English influence.On the commercial streets every third man suggests the Briton, while a large proportion of the business people look as if they have their daily tub.The cleanliness of the streets, the freshness of the parks and squares, the dressing of the shop-windows, and the style of the mounted police remind one of England.”[60] As to the Nordic affinities of the upper classes: “One sees it in stature, eye color, and ruddy complexion.... Among the pupils of Santiago College there are as many blonds as brunets.”[61] Even among the peon or “roto” class, despite considerable Indian crossing, Professor Ross noted the strong Nordic strain, for he met Chilean peasants “whose stature, broad shoulders, big faces, and tawny mustaches proclaimed them as genuine Norsemen as the Icelanders in our Red River Valley.”[62]

Chile is thus the prime example of social stability and progress attained through white oligarchic rule.Other, though less successful, instances are to be noted in Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica.Peru and Colombia, though geographically within the tropics, have extensive temperate plateaux.Here numerous whites settled during the colonial period, forming an upper caste over a large Indian population.Unlike Chile, few Nordics came to leaven society with those qualities of constructive genius and racial self-respect which are the special birthright of Nordic man.Unlike Chile again, not only were there dense Indian masses, but there was also an appreciable negro element.Lastly, the number of mixed-bloods was very large.It is thus not surprising that for both Peru and Colombia the revolution ushered in a period of turmoil from which neither have even yet emerged.The whites have consistently fought among themselves, invoking the half-castes as auxiliaries and using Indians and negroes as their pawns.The whites are still the dominant element, but only the first families retain their pure blood, and miscegenation creeps upward with every successive generation.As for Costa Rica, it is a tiny bit of cool hill-country, settled by whites in colonial times, and to-day rises an oasis of civilization, above the tropic jungle of degenerate, mongrel Central America.

The second method of social stabilization in Latin America—Aryanization through wholesale European immigration—is exemplified by Argentina and Uruguay.Neither of these lands had very promising beginnings.Their populations, at the revolution, contained strong Indian infusions and traces of negro blood, while after the revolution both fell under the sway of tyrannical dictators who persecuted the white aristocrats and favored miscegenation.However, Argentina and Uruguay possessed two notable advantages: they were climatically white man’s country, and they at first contained a very small population.Since they produced neither gold nor tropical luxuries, Spain had neglected them, so that at the revolution they consisted of little more than the port-towns of Buenos Aires and Montevideo with a few dependent river-settlements.Their vast hinterlands of fertile prairie then harbored only wandering tribes of nomad savages.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, however, the development of ocean transport gave these antipodean prairies value as stock-raising and grain-growing sources for congested Europe, and Europe promptly sent immigrants to supply her needs.This immigrant stream gradually swelled to a veritable deluge.The human tide was, on the whole, of sound stock, mostly Spaniards and north Italians, with some Nordic elements from northern Europe in the upper strata.Thus Europe locked antipodean America securely to the white world.As for the colonial stock, it merged easily into the newer, kindred flood. Here and there signs of former miscegenation still show, the Argentino being sometimes, as Madison Grant well puts it, “suspiciously swarthy.”[63] Nevertheless, these are but vestigial traces which the ceaseless European inflow will ultimately eradicate. The large impending German immigration to Argentina and Uruguay should bring valuable Nordic elements.

This same tide of European immigration has likewise pretty well Aryanized the southern provinces of Brazil, adjacent to the Uruguayan border.Those provinces were neglected by Portugal as Argentina and Uruguay were by Spain, and half a century ago they had a very sparse population.To-day they support millions of European immigrants, mostly Italians and European Portuguese, but with the further addition of nearly half a million Germans.Brazil is, in fact, evolving into two racially distinct communities.The southern provinces are white man’s country, with little Indian or negro blood, and with a distinct “color line.”The tropical north is saturated with Indian and negro strains, and the whites are rapidly disappearing in a universal mongrelization.Ultimately this must produce momentous political consequences.

Bearing in mind the exceptions above noted, let us now observe the vast tropical and semi-tropical bulk of Latin America.Here we find notable changes since colonial days.White predominance is substantially a thing of the past. Persons of unmixed Spanish or Portuguese descent are relatively few, most of the so-called “whites” being really near-whites, more or less deeply tinged with colored bloods.It is a striking token of white race-prestige that these near-whites, despite their degeneracy and inefficiency, are yet the dominant element; occupying, in fact, much the same status as the aristocratic Creoles immediately after the War of Independence.Nevertheless, the near-whites’ supremacy is now threatened.Every decade of chronic anarchy favors the darker half-breeds, while below these, in turn, the Indian and negro full-bloods are beginning to stir, as in Mexico to-day.

Most informed observers agree that the mixed-bloods of Latin America are distinctly inferior to the whites.This applies to both mestizos and mulattoes, albeit the mestizo (the cross between white and Indian) seems less inferior than the mulatto—the cross between white and black.As for the zambo, the Indian-negro cross, everybody is agreed that it is a very bad one.Analyses of these hybrid stocks show remarkable similarities to the mongrel chaos of the declining Roman Empire.Here is the judgment of Garcia-Calderon, a Peruvian scholar and generally considered the most authoritative writer on Latin America.“The racial question,” he writes, “is a very serious problem in American history.It explains the progress of certain peoples and the decadence of others, and it is the key to the incurable disorder which divides America. Upon it depend a great number of secondary phenomena; the public wealth, the industrial system, the stability of governments, the solidity of patriotism.... This complication of castes, this admixture of diverse bloods, has created many problems. For example, is the formation of a national consciousness possible with such disparate elements? Would such heterogeneous democracies be able to resist the invasion of superior races? Finally, is the South American half-caste absolutely incapable of organization and culture?”[64] While qualifying his answers to these queries, Garcia-Calderon yet deplores the half-caste’s “decadence.”[65] “In the Iberian democracies,” he says, “an inferior Latinity, a Latinity of the decadence, prevails; verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, oratorical exaggeration, just as in Roman Spain.... The half-caste loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions and desires do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish forefather, stoical and adventurous.”[66] Garcia-Calderon therefore concludes: “The mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences.... None of the conditions established by the French psychologists are realized by the Latin American democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate. The lower castes struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial scepticism; and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing its work, and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.”[67] This melancholy fate can, according to Garcia-Calderon, be averted only by wholesale white immigration: “In South America civilization is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races.”[68]

Garcia-Calderon’s pronouncements are echoed by foreign observers.During his South American travels Professor Ross noted the same melancholy symptoms and pointed out the same unique remedy.Speaking of Ecuador, he says: “I found no foreigners who have faith in the future of this people.They point out that while this was a Spanish colony there was a continual flow of immigrants from Spain, many of whom, no doubt, were men of force.Political separation interrupted this current, and since then the country has really gone back.Spain had provided a ruling, organizing element, and, with the cessation of the flow of Spaniards, the mixed-bloods took charge of things, for the pure-white element is so small as to be negligible.No one suggests that the mestizos equal the white stock either in intellect or in character....Among the rougher foreigners and Peruvians the pet name for these people is ‘monkeys.’ The thoughtful often liken them to Eurasians, clever enough, but lacking in solidity of character. Natives and foreigners alike declare that a large white immigration is the only hope for Ecuador.”[69]

Concerning Bolivia, Professor Ross writes: “The wisest sociologist in Bolivia told me that the zambo, resulting from the union of Indian with negro, is inferior to both the parent races, and that likewise the mestizo is inferior to both white and Indian in physical strength, resistance to disease, longevity, and brains. The failure of the South American republics has been due, he declares, to mestizo domination. Through the colonial period there was a flow of Spaniards to the colonies, and all the offices down to corregidor and cura were filled by white men. With independence, the whites ceased coming, and the lower offices of state and church were filled with mestizos. Then, too, the first crossing of white with Indian gave a better result than the union between mestizos, so that the stock has undergone progressive degeneration. The only thing, then, that can make these countries progress is a large white immigration, something much talked about by statesmen in all these countries, but which has never materialized.”[70]

These judgments refer particularly to Spanish America.Regarding Portuguese Brazil, however, the verdict seems to be the same.Many years ago Professor Agassiz wrote: “Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races, more wide-spread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.”[71]

The mongrel’s political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have been expected.These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability.The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters.Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes: “Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics.Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.”[72] The tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward “atomic disintegration.... Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from neurosis.”[73]

The stock feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the “revolution.”These senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as comic opera, but the grim truth of the matter is that few Latin American revolutions are laughing matters. The numbers of men engaged may not be very large according to our standards, but measured by the scanty populations of the countries concerned, they lay a heavy blood-tax on the suffering peoples. The tatterdemalion “armies” may excite our mirth, but the battles are real enough, often fought out to the death with razor-edged machetes and rusty bayonets, and there is no more ghastly sight than a Latin American battle-field. The commandeerings, burnings, rapings, and assassinations inflicted upon the hapless civilian population cry to heaven. There is always wholesale destruction of property, frequently appalling loss of life, and a general paralysis of economic and social activity. These wretched lands have now been scourged by the revolutionary plague for a hundred years, and W. B. Hale does not overstate the consequences when he says: “Most of the countries clustering about the Caribbean have sunk into deeper and deeper mires of misrule, unmatched for profligacy and violence anywhere on earth. Revolution follows revolution; one band of brigands succeeds another; atrocities revenge atrocities; the plundered people grow more and more abject in poverty and slavishness; vast natural resources lie neglected, while populations decrease, civilization recedes, and the jungle advances.”[74] Of course, under these frightful circumstances, the national character, weak enough at best, degenerates at an ever-quickening pace.Peaceful effort of any sort appears vain and ridiculous, and men are taught that wealth is procurable only by violence and extortion.

Another important point should be noted.I have said that Latin American anarchy was restrained by dictatorship.But the reader must not infer that dictatorships are halcyon times—for the dictated.On the contrary, they are usually only a trifle less wretched and demoralizing than times of revolution.The “caudillos” are nearly always very sinister figures.Often they are ignorant brutes; oftener they are blood-thirsty, lecherous monsters; oftenest they are human spiders who suck the land dry of all fluid wealth, banking it abroad against the day when they shall fly before the revolutionary blast to the safe haven of Paris and the congenial debaucheries of Montmartre.The millions amassed by tyrants like Castro of Venezuela and Zelaya of Nicaragua are almost beyond belief, considering the backward, bankrupt lands they have “administered.”

Yet how can it be otherwise? Consider Critchfield’s incisive account of a caudillo’s accession to power: “When an ignorant and brutal man, whose entire knowledge of the world is confined to a few Indian villages, and whose total experience has been gained in the raising of cattle, doffs his alpagartes, and, machete in hand, cuts his way to power in a few weeks, with a savage horde at his back who know nothing of the amenities of civilization and care less than they know—when such a man comes to power, evil and evil only can result. Even if the new dictator were well-intentioned, his entire ignorance of law and constitutional forms, of commercial processes and manufacturing arts, and of the fundamental and necessary principles underlying all stable and free governments, would render a successful administration by him extremely difficult, if not impossible. But he is surrounded by all the elements of vice and flattery, and he is imbued with that vain and absurd egotism which makes men of small caliber imagine themselves to be Napoleons or Cæsars. Thus do petty despotisms, unrestrained by constitutional provisions or by anything like a virile public opinion, lead from absurdity to outrage and crime.”[75]

Such is the situation in mongrel-ruled America: revolution breeding revolution, tyranny breeding tyranny, and the twain combining to ruin their victims and force them ever deeper into the slough of degenerate barbarism.The whites have lost their grip and are rapidly disappearing.The mixed-breeds have had their chance and have grotesquely failed.The oft-quoted panacea—white immigration—is under present conditions a vain dream, for white immigrants will not expose themselves (and still less their women) to the horrors of mongrel rule.So far, their, as internal factors are concerned, anarchy seems destined to continue unchecked.

In fact, new conflicts loom on the horizon.The Indian masses, so docile to the genuine white man, begin to stir.The aureole of white prestige has been besmirched by the near-whites and half-castes who have traded so recklessly upon its sanctions.Strong in the poise of normal heredity, the Indian full-blood commences to despise these chaotic masters who turn his homelands into bear-gardens and witches’ sabbaths.An “Indianista” movement is to-day on foot throughout mongrel-ruled America.It is most pronounced in Mexico, whose interminable agony becomes more and more a war of Indian resurgence, but it is also starting along the west coast of South America.Long ago, wise old Professor Pearson saw how the wind was blowing.Noting how whites and near-whites were “everywhere fighting and intriguing for the spoils of office,” he also noted that the Indian masses, though relatively passive and “seemingly unobservant,” were yet “conquering a place for themselves in other ways than by increasing and multiplying,” and he concluded: “the general level of the autochthonous race is being raised; it is acquiring riches and self-respect, and must sooner or later get the country back into its hands.”[76] Recent visitors to the South American west coast note the signs of Indian unrest. Some years ago Lord Bryce remarked of Bolivia: “There have been Indian risings, and firearms are more largely in their hands than formerly. They so preponderate in numbers that any movement which united them against the upper class might, could they find a leader, have serious consequences.”[77] Still more recently Professor Ross wrote concerning Peru: “In Cuzco I met a gentleman of education and travel who is said to be the only living lineal descendant of the Incas. He has great influence with the native element and voices their bitterness and their aspirations. He declares that the politics of Peru is a struggle between the Spanish mestizos of Lima and the coast and the natives of Cuzco and the interior, and predicts an uprising unless Cuzco is made the capital of the nation. He even dreams of a Kechua republic, with Cuzco as its capital and the United States its guarantor, as she is guarantor of the Cuban republic.”[78] And of Bolivia, Professor Ross writes: “Lately there has been a general movement of the Bolivian Indians for the recovery of the lands of which they have been robbed piecemeal. Conflicts have broken out and, although the government has punished the ringleaders, there is a feeling that, so long as the exploiting of the Indian goes on, Bolivians are living ‘in the crater of a slumbering volcano.’ ”[79]

Since the white man has gone and the Indian is preparing to wrest the sceptre of authority from the mongrel’s worthless hands, let us examine this Indian race, to see what potentiality it possesses of restoring order and initiating progress.

To begin with, there can be no doubt that the Indian is superior to the negro.The negro, even when quickened by foreign influences, never built up anything approaching a real civilization; whereas the Indian, though entirely sundered from the rest of mankind, evolved genuine polities and cultures like the Aztec of Mexico, the Inca of Peru, and the Maya of Yucatan. The Indian thus possesses creative capacity to an appreciable degree. However, that degree seems strictly limited. The researches of archæologists have sadly discounted the glowing tales of the Conquistadores, and the “Empires” of Mexico and Peru, though far from contemptible, certainly rank well below the achievements of European and Asiatic races in mediæval and even in classic times.

The Indian possesses notable stability and poise, but the very intensity of these qualities fetters his progress and renders questionable his ability to rise to the modern plane.His conservatism is immense.With incredible tenacity he clings to his ancestral ways and exhibits a dull indifference to alien innovation.Of course the Indian sub-races differ considerably among themselves, but the same fundamental tendencies are visible in all of them.Says Professor Ellsworth Huntington: “The Indians are very backward.They are dull of mind and slow to adopt new ideas.Perhaps in the future they will change, but the fact that they have been influenced so little by four hundred years of contact with the white man does not afford much ground for hope.Judging from the past, there is no reason to think that their character is likely to change for many generations.... Those who dwell permanently in the white man’s cities are influenced somewhat, but here as in other cases the general tendency seems to be to revert to the original condition as soon as the special impetus of immediate contact with the white man is removed.”[80] And Lord Bryce writes in similar vein: “With plenty of stability, they lack initiative. They make steady soldiers, and fight well under white or mestizo leaders, but one seldom hears of a pure Indian accomplishing anything or rising either through war or politics, or in any profession, above the level of his class....”[81]

The truth about the Indian seems to be substantially this: Left alone, he would probably have continued to progress, albeit much more slowly than either white or Asiatic peoples.But the Indian was not left alone.On the contrary, he was suddenly felled by brutal and fanatical conquerors, who uprooted his native culture and plunged him into abject servitude.The Indian’s spiritual past was shorn away and his evolution was perverted.Prevented from developing along his own lines, and constitutionally incapable of adapting himself to the ways of his Spanish conquerors, the Indian vegetated, learning nothing and forgetting much that he knew.This has continued for four hundred years.Is it not likely that his ancestral aptitudes have atrophied or decayed?Slavery and mental sloth have indeed scarred him with their fell stigmata. Says Garcia-Calderon: “Without sufficient food, without hygiene, a distracted and laborious beast, he decays and perishes; to forget the misery of his daily lot he drinks, becomes an alcoholic, and his numerous progeny present the characteristics of degeneracy.”[82]

Furthermore, the Indian degenerates from another cause—mongrelization.Miscegenation is a dual process.It works upward and downward at one and the same time.In Latin America hybridization has been prodigious, the hybrids to-day numbering millions.In some regions, as in Venezuela and parts of Central America, there are very few full-blooded Indians left, hybrids forming practically the entire population.Now, on the whole, the white or “mestizo” crossing seems hurtful to the Indian, for what he gains in intelligence he more than loses in character.But the mestizo crossing is not the worst.There is another, much graver, racial danger.The hot coastlands swarm with negroes, and the zambo or negro-Indian is universally adjudged the worst of matings.Thus, for the Indian, white blood appears harmful, while black blood is absolutely fatal.Yet the mongrelizing tide sweeps steadily on.The Indian draws no “color line,” and continually impairs the purity of his blood and the poise of his heredity.

Bearing all the above facts in mind, can we believe the Indian capable of drawing mongrel-ruled America from its slough of despond?Can he set it on the path of orderly progress? It does not seem possible. Assuming for the sake of argument complete freedom from foreign intervention, the Indian might in time displace his mongrel rulers—provided he himself were not also mongrelized. But the present “Indianista” movement is not a sign of Indian political efficiency; not the harbinger of an Indian “renaissance.” It is the instinctive turning of the harried beast on his tormentor. Maddened by the cruel vagaries of mongrel rule and increasingly conscious of the mongrel’s innate worthlessness, the Indian at last bares his teeth. Under civilized white tutelage the “Indianista” movement would have been practically inconceivable.

However, guesses as to the final outcome of an Indian-mongrel conflict are academic speculation, because mongrel America will not be left to itself.Mongrel America cannot stand alone.Indeed, it never has stood alone, for it has always been bolstered up by the Monroe Doctrine.But for our protection, outside forces would have long since rushed into this political and economic vacuum, and every omen to-day denotes that this vacuum, like all others, will presently be filled.A world close packed as never before will not tolerate countries that are a torment to themselves and a dangerous nuisance to their neighbors.A world half bankrupt will not allow vast sources of potential wealth to lie in hands which idle or misuse.Thus it is practically certain that mongrel America will presently pass under foreign tutelage.Exactly how, is not yet clear.It may be done by the United States alone, or, what is more probable, in “Pan-American” co-operation with the lusty young white nations of the antipodean south. It may be done by an even larger combination, including some European states. After all, the details of such action do not lie within the scope of this book, since they fall exclusively within the white man’s sphere of activity.

There is, however, another dynamic which might transform mongrel America.This dynamic is yellow Asia.The Far East teems with virile and laborious life.It thrills to novel ambitions and desires.Avid with the urge of swarming myriads, it hungrily seeks outlets for its superabundant vitality.We have already seen how the Mongolian has earmarked the whole Far East for his own, and in subsequent pages we shall see how he also beats restlessly against the white world’s race-frontiers.But mongrel America!What other field offers such tempting possibilities for Mongolian race-expansion?Vast regions of incalculable, unexploited wealth, sparsely inhabited by stagnant populations cursed with anarchy and feeble from miscegenation—how could such lands resist the onslaught of tenacious and indomitable millions?The answer is self-evident.They could not resist; and such an invasion, once begun, would be consummated with a celerity and thoroughness perhaps unexampled in human history.

Now the yellow world is alive to this momentous possibility.Japan, in particular, has glimpsed in Latin America precious avenues to that racial expansion which is the key-note of Japanese foreign policy. For years Japanese statesmen and publicists have busied themselves with the problem. The Chinese had, in fact, already pointed the way, for during the later decades of the nineteenth century Chinamen frequented Latin America’s Pacific coast, economically vanquishing the natives with ease, and settling in Peru in such numbers that the alarmed Peruvians hastily stopped the inflow by drastic exclusion acts. The successes of these Chinese pioneers, humble coolies entirely without official backing, have fired the Japanese imagination. The Japanese press has long discussed Latin America in optimistic vein. Count Okuma is a good exemplar of these Japanese aspirations. Some years ago he told the American sociologist Professor Ross: “South America, especially the northern part, will furnish ample room for our surplus.”[83] To his fellow countrymen Count Okuma was still more specific. In 1907 he stated in the Tokio Economist that the Japanese were to overspread the earth like a cloud of locusts, alighting on the North American coasts, and swarming into Central and South America. Count Okuma expressed a strong preference for Latin American countries as fields for Japanese immigration, because most of them were “much easier to include within the sphere of influence of Japan in the future.”[84]

And the Japanese have supplemented words with deeds.Especially since 1914, Japanese activity in Latin America has been ubiquitous and striking. The west coast of South America, in particular, is to-day flooded with Japanese goods, merchants, commercial missions, and financial agents seeking concessions of every kind. Our State Department has had to exercise special vigilance concerning Japanese concession-hunting in Mexico.

Japan’s present activity is of course mere reconnoitring—testings and mappings of terrain for possible later action on a more extensive scale.One thing alone gives Japan pause—our veto.Japan knows that real aggression against our southern neighbors would spell war with the United States.Japan does not contemplate war with us at present.She has many fish to fry in the Far East.So in Latin America she plays safe.But she bides her time.In Latin America itself she has friends—even partisans.Japan seeks to mobilize to her profit that distrust of the “Yanqui” which permeates Latin America.The half-castes, in particular, rage at our “color line” and see in the United States the Nemesis of their anarchic misrule.They flout the Monroe Doctrine, caress dreams of Japanese aid, and welcome Nippon’s pose as the champion of color throughout the world.

Japanese activities in Mexico are of especial interest.Here Japan has three strong strings to her bow: (1) patriotic dislike of the United States; (2) mestizo hatred of the white “gringo”; (3) the Indianista movement.In Mexico the past decade of revolutionary turmoil has developed into a complicated race-war of the mestizos against the white or near-white upper class and of the Indian full-bloods against both whites and mestizos. The one bond of union is dislike of the gringo, which often rises to fanatical hatred. Our war against Mexico in 1847 has never been forgotten, and many Mexicans cherish hopes of revenge and even aspire to recover the territories then ceded to us. During the early stages of the European War our military unpreparedness and apparent pacifism actually emboldened some Mexican hotheads to concoct the notorious “Plan of San Diego.” The conspirators plotted to rouse the Mexican population of our southern border, sow disaffection among our Southern negroes, and explode the mine at the psychological moment by means of a “Reconquering Equitable Army” invading Texas. Our whole Southwest was to be rejoined to Mexico, while our Southern States were to form a black republic. The projected war was conceived strictly in terms of race, the reconquering equitable army to be composed solely of “Latins,” negroes, and Japanese. The racial results were to be decisive, for the entire white population of both our South and Southwest was to be pitilessly massacred. Of course the plot completely miscarried, and sporadic attempts to invade Texas during 1915 were easily repulsed.

Nevertheless, this incident reveals the trend of many Mexican minds.The framers of the “Plan of San Diego” were not ignorant peons, but persons of some standing.The outrages and tortures inflicted upon numerous Americans in Mexico during recent years are further indications of that wide-spread hatred which expresses itself in vitriolic outbursts like the following editorial of a Mexican provincial paper, written during our chase after the bandit Villa in 1916: “Above all, do not forget that at a time of national need, humanity is a crime and frightfulness is a virtue. Pull out eyes, snatch out hearts, tear open breasts, drink—if you can—the blood in the skulls of the invaders from the cities of Yankeeland. In defense of liberty be a Nero, be a Caligula—that is to be a good patriot. Peace between Mexico and the United States will be closed in throes of terror and barbarism.”[85]

All this is naturally grist for the Japanese mill.Especially interesting are Japanese attempts to play upon Mexican Indianista sentiment.Japanese writers point out physical and cultural similarities between the Mexican native races and themselves, deducing therefrom innate racial affinities springing from the remote and forgotten past.All possible sympathetic changes were rung during the diplomatic mission of Señor de la Barra to Japan at the beginning of 1914.His reception in Tokio was a memorable event.Señor de la Barra was greeted by cheering multitudes, and on every occasion the manifold bonds between the two peoples were emphasized.This of course occurred before the European War.During the war Japanese-Mexican relations remained amicable. So far as official evidence goes, the Japanese Government has never entered into any understandings with the Mexican Government, though some Mexicans have hinted at a secret agreement, and one Mexican writer, Gutierrez de Lara, asserts that in 1912 Francisco Madero, then President, “threw himself into the arms of Japan,” and goes on: “We are well aware of the importance of this statement and of its tremendous international significance, but we make it deliberately with full confidence in our authority. Not only did Madero enlist the ardent support of the South American republics in the cause of Mexico’s inviolability, but he entered into negotiations with the Japanese minister in Mexico City for a close offensive and defensive alliance with Japan to checkmate United States aggression. When during the fateful twelve days’ battle in Mexico City a rumor of American intervention, more alarming than usual, was communicated to Madero, he remarked coldly that he was thoroughly anxious for that intervention, for he was confident of the surprise the American Government would receive in discovering that they had to deal with Japan.”[86]

But, after all, an official Japanese-Mexican understanding is not the fundamental issue.The really significant thing is Mexican popular antagonism to the United States, which is so wide-spread that Japan could in a crisis probably count on Mexican benevolent neutrality if not on Mexican support. The present Carranza government of Mexico is of course notoriously anti-American. Its consistent policy, notably revealed in its complaisance toward Germany and its intrigues with other anti-American régimes like those of Colombia and Venezuela, makes Mexico the centre of anti-Americanism in Latin America. As for the numerous Japanese residents in Mexico, they have lost no opportunity to abet this attitude. Here, for instance, is the text of a manifesto signed by prominent members of the Japanese colony during the American-Mexican crisis of 1916: “Japanese: Mexico is a friendly nation. Our commercial bonds with her are great. She is, like us, a nation of heroes who will never consent to the world-domination of a hard and brutal race, as are the Yankees. We cannot abandon Mexico in her struggle against a nation supposedly stronger. The Mexicans know how to defend themselves, but there is lacking aid which we can furnish. If the Yankees invade Mexico, if they seize the California coasts, Japanese commerce and the Japanese navy will face a grave peril. The Yankees believe us impotent because of the European War, and we will be expelled from American soil and our children from American schools. We will aid the Mexicans. We will aid Mexico against Yankee rapacity. This great and beautiful country is a victim of Yankee hatred toward Japan. Our indifference would be a lack of patriotism, since the Yankees already are against us and our divine Emperor. They have seized Hawaii, they have seized the Philippine Islands, near our coasts, and are now about to crush under foot our friend and possible ally, and injure our commerce and imperil our naval power.”[87]

The fact is that Latin America’s attitude toward the yellow world tends everywhere to crystallize along race lines. The half-castes, naturally hostile to the United States, see in Japan a welcome offset to the “Colossus of the North.” The self-conscious Indianista elements likewise heed Japanese suggestions of ethnic affinity. On the other hand, the whites and near-whites instinctively react against Japanese advances. Even those who have no love for the Yankee see in the Mongolian the greatest of perils. Garcia-Calderon typifies this point of view. He dreads our imperialistic tendencies, yet he reproves those Latin Americans who, in a Japanese-American clash, would favor Japan. “Victorious,” he writes, “the Japanese would invade Western America and convert the Pacific into a vast closed sea, closed to foreign ambitions, mare nostrum, peopled with Japanese colonies.The Japanese hegemony would not be a mere change of tutelage for the nations of America.In spite of essential differences, the Latins oversea have certain common ties with the people of the (United) States: a long-established religion, Christianity, and a coherent, European, Occidental civilization.Perhaps there is some obscure fraternity between the Japanese and the American Indians, between the yellow men of Nippon and the copper-colored Quechuas, a disciplined and sober people. But the ruling race, the dominant type of Spanish origin, which imposes the civilization of the white man upon America, is hostile to the entire invading East.”[88]

White men throughout Latin America generally echo these sentiments.Chile and Argentina repulse Oriental immigration, and the white oligarchs of Peru dread keenly Japanese designs directed so specifically against their country.Very recently a Peruvian, Doctor Jorge M.Corbacho,[89] wrote most bitterly about the Japanese infiltration into Peru and adjacent Bolivia, while some years ago Señor Augustin Edwards, owner of the leading Chilean periodical, El Mercurio, denounced Count Okuma’s menaces and called for a Pan-American rampart against Asia from Behring Strait to Cape Horn.“Japanese immigration,” asserted Señor Edwards, “must be firmly opposed, not only in South America, but in the whole American continent.The same remark applies to Chinese immigration....In short, these threats of Okuma should induce the nations of South America to adopt the Monroe Doctrine—an invincible weapon against the plans and intentions of that ‘Empire of the Orient,’ which has so lately risen up to new life, and already manifests so dire a greed of conquest.”[90] From Central America similar voices arise. A Salvadorean writer urges political federation with the United States as the sole refuge against the “Yellow Peril,” to avoid becoming “slaves and utterly insignificant”;[91] and a well-known Nicaraguan politician, Señor Moncada,[92] writes in similar vein.

The momentous implications of Mongolian pressure upon Latin America are admirably described by Professor Ross.“Provided that no barrier be interposed to the inflow from man-stifled Asia,” he says, “it is well within the bounds of probability that by the close of this century South America will be the home of twenty or thirty millions of Orientals and descendants of Orientals....But Asiatic immigration of such volume would change profoundly the destiny of South America.For one thing, it would forestall and frustrate that great immigration of Europeans which South American statesmen are counting on to relieve their countries from mestizo unprogressiveness and misgovernment.The white race would withhold its increase or look elsewhere for outlets; for those with the higher standard of comfort always shun competition with those of a lower standard.Again, large areas of South America might cease to be parts of Christendom.Some of the republics there might come to be as dependent upon Asiatic Powers as the Cuban republic is dependent upon the United States.”[93]

Very pertinent is Professor Ross’s warning as to the fate of the Indian population—a warning which Indianista believers in Japanese “affinity” should seriously take to heart. Whatever might be the lot of the Latin American whites, Professor Ross points out that “an Asiatic influx would seal the doom of the Indian element in these countries.... The Indians could make no effective economic stand against the wide-awake, resourceful, and aggressive Japanese or Chinese. The Oriental immigrants could beat the Indians at every point, block every path upward, and even turn them out of most of their present employments. In great part the Indians would become a cringing sudra caste, tilling the poorer lands and confined to the menial or repulsive occupations. Filled with despair, and abandoning themselves even more than they do now to pisco and coca, they would shrivel into a numerically negligible element in the population.”[94]

Such are the underlying factors in the Latin American situation. Once more we see the essential instability of mere political phenomena. Once more we see the supreme importance of race. No conquest could have been completer than that of the Spaniards four centuries ago. The Indians were helpless as sheep before the mail-clad Conquistadores. And military conquest was succeeded by complete political domination. The Indian even lost his cultural heritage, and became a passive tool in the hands of his white masters.But the Spaniard did not seal his title-deed with the indelible signet of race.Indian blood remained numerically predominant, and the conqueror further weakened his tenure by bringing in black blood—the most irreducible of ethnic factors.The inflow of white blood was small, and much of what did come lost itself in the dismal swamp of miscegenation.Lastly, the whites quarrelled among themselves.

The result was inevitable.The colonial whites triumphed only by aid of the half-castes, who promptly claimed their reward.A fresh struggle ensued, ending (save in the antipodean regions) in the triumph of the half-castes.But these, in turn, had called in the Indians and negroes.Furthermore, the half-castes recklessly squandered the white political heritage.So the colored full-bloods stirred in their turn, and a new movement began which, if allowed to run its natural course, might result in complete de-Aryanization.In other words, the white race has been going back, and Latin America has been getting more Indian and negro for the past hundred years.

This cycle, however, now nears its end.Latin America will be neither red nor black.It will ultimately be either white or yellow.The Indian is patently unable to construct a progressive civilization.As for the negro, he has proved as incapable in the New World as in the Old.Everywhere his presence has spelled regression, and his one New World field of triumph—Haiti—has resulted in an abysmal plunge to the jungle-level of Guinea and the Congo. Thus is created a political vacuum. And this vacuum unerring nature makes ready to fill.

The Latin American situation is, indeed, akin to that of Africa.Latin America, like Africa, cannot stand alone.An inexorable dilemma impends: white or yellow.The white man has been first in the field and holds the central colored zone between two strong bases, north and south, where his tenure is the unimpeachable title of race.The yellow man has to conquer every step, though he has already acquired footholds and has behind him the welling reservoirs of Asia.Nevertheless, white victory in Latin America is sure—if internecine discord does not rob the white world of its strength.In Latin America, as in Africa, therefore, the whites must stand fast—and stand together.

 

 

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PART II

THE EBBING TIDE OF WHITE

 

CHAPTER VI

THE WHITE FLOOD

The world-wide expansion of the white race during the four centuries between 1500 and 1900 is the most prodigious phenomenon in all recorded history.In my opening pages I sketched both the magnitude of this expansion and its ethnic and political implications.I there showed that the white stocks together constitute the most numerous single branch of the human species, nearly one-third of all the human souls on earth to-day being whites.I also showed that white men racially occupy four-tenths of the entire habitable land-area of the globe, while nearly nine-tenths of this area is under white political control.Such a situation is unprecedented.Never before has a race acquired such combined preponderance of numbers and dominion.

This white expansion becomes doubly interesting when we realize how sudden was its inception and how rapid its evolution.A single decade before the voyage of Columbus, he would have been a bold prophet who should have predicted this high destiny.At the close of the fifteenth century the white race was confined to western and central Europe, together with Scandinavia and the northwestern parts of European Russia.The total white race-area was then not much over 2,000,000 square miles—barely one-tenth its area to-day. And in numbers the proportion was almost as unfavorable. At that moment (say, A. D. 1480) England could muster only about 2,000,000 inhabitants, the entire population of the British Isles not much exceeding 3,000,000 souls. To be sure, the continent was relatively better peopled. Still, the population of Europe in 1480 was probably not one-sixth that of 1914.

Furthermore, population had dwindled notably in the preceding one hundred and fifty years.During the fourteenth century Europe had been hideously scourged by the “Black Death” (bubonic plague), which carried off fully one-half of its inhabitants, while thereafter a series of great wars had destroyed immense numbers of people.These losses had not been repaired.Mediæval society was a static, equilibrated affair, which did not favor rapid human multiplication.In fact, European life had been intensive and recessive ever since the fall of the Roman Empire a thousand years before.Europe’s one mediæval attempt at expansion (the Crusades) had utterly failed.In fact, far from expanding, white Europe had been continuously assailed by brown and yellow Asia.Beginning with the Huns in the last days of Rome, continuing with the Arabs, and ending with the Mongols and Ottoman Turks, Europe had undergone a millennium of Asiatic aggression; and though Europe had substantially maintained its freedom, many of its outlying marches had fallen under Asiatic domination.In 1480, for example, the Turk was marching triumphantly across southeastern Europe, embryonic Russia was a Tartar dependency, while the Moor still clung to southern Spain.

The outlook for the white race at the close of the fifteenth century thus seemed gloomy rather than bright.With a stationary or declining population, exposed to the assaults of powerful external foes, and racked by internal pains betokening the demise of the mediæval order, white Europe’s future appeared a far from happy one.

Suddenly, in two short years, all was changed.In 1492 Columbus discovered America, and in 1494 Vasco da Gama, doubling Africa, found the way to India.The effect of these discoveries cannot be overestimated.We can hardly conceive how our mediæval forefathers viewed the ocean.To them the ocean was a numbing, constricting presence; the abode of darkness and horror.No wonder mediæval Europe was static, since it faced on ruthless, aggressive Asia, and backed on nowhere.Then, in the twinkling of an eye, dead-end Europe became mistress of the ocean—and thereby mistress of the world.

No such strategical opportunity had, in fact, ever been vouchsafed.From classic times down to the end of the fifteenth century, white Europe had confronted only the most martial and enterprising of Asiatics.With such peoples war and trade had alike to be conducted on practically equal terms, and by frontal assault no decisive victory could be won.But, after the great discoveries, the white man could flank his old opponents. Whole new worlds peopled by primitive races were unmasked, where the white man’s weapons made victory certain, and whence he could draw stores of wealth to quicken his home life and initiate a progress that would soon place him immeasurably above his once-dreaded assailants.

And the white man proved worthy of his opportunity.His inherent racial aptitudes had been stimulated by his past.The hard conditions of mediæval life had disciplined him to adversity and had weeded him by natural selection.The hammer of Asiatic invasion, clanging for a thousand years on the brown-yellow anvil, had tempered the iron of Europe into the finest steel.The white man could think, could create, could fight superlatively well.No wonder that redskins and negroes feared and adored him as a god, while the somnolent races of the Farther East, stunned by this strange apparition rising from the pathless ocean, offered no effective opposition.

Thus began the swarming of the whites, like bees from the hive, to the uttermost ends of the earth.And, in return, Europe was quickened to intenser vitality.Goods, tools, ideas, men: all were produced at an unprecedented rate.So, by action and reaction, white progress grew by leaps and bounds.The Spanish and Portuguese pioneers presently showed signs of lassitude, but the northern nations—even more vigorous and audacious—instantly sprang to the front and carried forward the proud oriflamme of white expansion and world-dominion.For four hundred years the pace never slackened, and at the close of the nineteenth century the white man stood the indubitable master of the world.

Now four hundred years of unbroken triumph naturally bred in the white race an instinctive belief that its expansion would continue indefinitely, leading automatically to ever higher and more splendid destinies.Before the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 the thought that white expansion could be stayed, much less reversed, never entered the head of one white man in a thousand.Why should it, since centuries of experience had taught the exact contrary?The settlement of America, Australasia, and Siberia, where the few colored aborigines vanished like smoke before the white advance; the conquest of brown Asia and the partition of Africa, where colored millions bowed with only sporadic resistance to mere handfuls of whites; both sets of phenomena combined to persuade the white man that he was invincible, and that the colored types would everywhere give way before him and his civilization.The continued existence of dense colored populations in the tropics was ascribed to climate; and even in the tropics it was assumed that whites would universally form a governing caste, directing by virtue of higher intelligence and more resolute will, and exploiting natural resources to the incalculable profit of the whole white race.Indeed, some persons believed that the tropics would become available for white settlement as soon as science had mastered tropical diseases and had prescribed an adequate hygiene.

This uncritical optimism, suggested by experience, was fortified by ill-assimilated knowledge.During the closing decades of the past century, not only were biology and economics less advanced than to-day, but they were also infinitely less widely understood, exact knowledge being confined to academic circles.The general public had only a vulgarized smattering, mostly crystallizing about catchwords into which men read their prepossessions and their prejudices.For instance: biologists had recently formulated the law of the “Survival of the Fittest.”This sounded very well.Accordingly, the public, in conformity with the prevailing optimism, promptly interpreted “fittest” as synonymous with “best,” in utter disregard of the grim truth that by “fittest” nature denotes only the type best adapted to existing conditions of environment, and that if the environment favors a low type, this low type (unless humanly prevented) will win, regardless of all other considerations.So again with economics.A generation ago relatively few persons realized that low-standard men would drive out high-standard men as inevitably as bad money drives out good, no matter what the results to society and the future of mankind.These are but two instances of that shallow, cock-sure nineteenth-century optimism, based upon ignorance and destined to be so swiftly and tragically disillusioned.

However, for the moment, ignorance was bliss. Accordingly, the fin de siècle white world, having partitioned Africa and fairly well dominated brown Asia, prepared to extend its sway over the one portion of the colored world which had hitherto escaped subjection—the yellow Far East. Men began speaking glibly of “manifest destiny” or piously of “the white man’s burden.” European publicists wrote didactically on “the break-up of China,” while Russia, bestriding Siberia, dipped behemoth paws in Pacific waters and eyed Japan.

 

CATEGORIES OF WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY

 

Such was the white world’s confident, aggressive temper at the close of the last century.To be sure, voices were occasionally raised warning that all was not well.Such were the writings of Professor Pearson and Meredith Townsend.But the white world gave these Cassandras the reception always accorded prophets of evil in joyous times—it ignored them or laughed them to scorn.In fact, few of the prophets displayed Pearson’s immediate certainty.Most of them qualified their prophecies with the comforting assurance that the ills predicted were relatively remote.

Meredith Townsend is a good case in point.The reader may recall his prophecy of white expulsion from Asia, quoted in my second chapter.[95] That prophecy occurs in the preface to the fourth edition, published in 1911, and written in the light of the Russo-Japanese War. Now, of course, Mr. Townsend’s main thesis—Europe’s inability permanently to master and assimilate Asia—had been elaborated by him long before the close of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the preface to the fourth edition speaks of Europe’s failure to conquer Asia as absolute and eviction from present holdings as probable within a relatively short time; whereas, in his original introduction, written in 1899, he foresaw a great European assault upon Asia, which would probably succeed and from which Asia would shake itself free only after the lapse of more than a century.

In fact, Mr. Townsend’s words of 1899 so exactly portray white confidence at that moment that I cannot do better than quote him.His object in publishing his book is, he says, “to make Asia stand out clearer in English eyes, because it is evident to me that the white races under the pressure of an entirely new impulse are about to renew their periodic attempt to conquer or at least to dominate that vast continent....So grand is the prize that failures will not daunt the Europeans, still less alter their conviction.If these movements follow historic lines they will recur for a time upon a constantly ascending scale, each repulse eliciting a greater effort, until at last Asia like Africa is ‘partitioned,’ that is, each section is left at the disposal of some white people.If Europe can avoid internal war, or war with a much-aggrandized America, she will by A.D.2000 be mistress in Asia, and at liberty, as her people think, to enjoy.”[96] If the reader will compare these lines with Mr. Townsend’s 1911 judgment, he will get a good idea of the momentous change wrought in white minds by Asia’s awakening during the first decade of the twentieth century as typified by the Russo-Japanese War.

1900 was, indeed, the high-water mark of the white tide which had been flooding for four hundred years.At that moment the white man stood on the pinnacle of his prestige and power.Pass four short years, and the flash of the Japanese guns across the murky waters of Port Arthur harbor revealed to a startled world—the beginning of the ebb.

 

 

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CHAPTER VII

THE BEGINNING OF THE EBB

The Russo-Japanese War is one of those landmarks in human history whose significance increases with the lapse of time.That war was momentous, not only for what it did, but even more for what it revealed.The legend of white invincibility was shattered, the veil of prestige that draped white civilization was torn aside, and the white world’s manifold ills were laid bare for candid examination.

Of course previous blindness to the trend of things had not been universal.The white world had had its Cassandras, while keen-sighted Asiatics had discerned symptoms of white weakness.Nevertheless, so imposing was the white world’s aspect and so unbroken its triumphant progress that these seers had been a small and discredited minority.The mass of mankind, white and non-white alike, remained oblivious to signs of change.

This, after all, was but natural.Not only had the white advance been continuous, but its tempo had been ever increasing.The nineteenth century, in particular, witnessed an unprecedented outburst of white activity.We have already surveyed white territorial gains, both as to area of settlement and sphere of political control.But along many other lines white expansion was equally remarkable. White race-increase—the basis of all else—was truly phenomenal. In the year 1500 the white race (then confined to Europe) could not have numbered more than 70,000,000. In 1800 the population of Europe was 150,000,000, while the whites living outside Europe numbered over 10,000,000. The white race had thus a trifle more than doubled its numbers in three centuries. But in the year 1900 the population of Europe was nearly 450,000,000, while the extra-European whites numbered fully 100,000,000. Thus the whites had increased threefold in the European homeland, while in the new areas of settlement outside Europe they had increased tenfold. The total number of whites at the end of the nineteenth century was thus nearly 550,000,000—a gain in numbers of almost 400,000,000, or over 400 per cent. This spelled an increase six times as great as that of the preceding three centuries.

White race-growth is most strikingly exemplified by the increase of its most expansive and successful branch—the Anglo-Saxons.In 1480, as already seen, the population of England proper was not much over 2,000,000.Of course this figure was abnormally low even for mediæval times, it being due to the terrible vital losses of the Wars of the Roses, then drawing to a close.A century later, under Elizabeth, the population of England had risen to 4,000,000.In 1900 the population of England was 31,000,000, and in 1910 it was 35,000,000, the population of the British Isles at the latter date being 45,500,000.But in the intervening centuries British blood had migrated to the ends of the earth, so that the total number of Anglo-Saxons in the world to-day cannot be much less than 100,000,000. This figure includes Scotch and Scotch-Irish strains (which are of course identical with English in the Anglo-Saxon sense), and adopts the current estimate that some 50,000,000 of people in the United States are predominantly of Anglo-Saxon origin. Thus, in four centuries, the Anglo-Saxons multiplied between forty and fifty fold.

The prodigious increase of the white race during the nineteenth century was due not only to territorial expansion but even more to those astounding triumphs of science and invention which gave the race unprecedented mastery over the resources of nature.This material advance is usually known as the “industrial revolution.”The industrial revolution began in the later decades of the eighteenth century, but it matured during the first half of the nineteenth century, when it swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things.

This transformation was, indeed, absolutely unprecedented in the world’s history.Hitherto man’s material progress had been a gradual evolution.With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since very ancient times.The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses’s lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature’s hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of previous generations.

When I say “Man,” I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the white man.It was the white man’s brain which had conceived all this, and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits.The two outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine industry with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation.Both these factors favored a prodigious increase in population, particularly in Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world.In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and exchange.The amount of wealth amassed by the white world in general and by Europe in particular since the beginning of the nineteenth century is simply incalculable.Some faint conception of it can be gathered from the growth of world-trade.In the year 1818 the entire volume of international commerce was valued at only $2,000,000,000.In other words, after countless millenniums of human life upon our globe, man had been able to produce only that relatively modest volume of world-exchange. In 1850 the volume of world-trade had grown to $4,000,000,000. In 1900 it had increased to $20,000,000,000, and in 1913 it swelled to the inconceivable total of $40,000,000,000—a twentyfold increase in a short hundred years.

Such were the splendid achievements of nineteenth-century civilization.But there was a seamy side to this cloth of gold.The vices of our age have been portrayed by a thousand censorious pens, and there is no need here to recapitulate them.They can mostly be summed up by the word “Materialism.”That absorption in material questions and neglect of idealistic values which characterized the nineteenth century has been variously accounted for.But, after all, was it not primarily due to the profound disturbance caused by drastic environmental change?Civilized man had just entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of his ancestors.It is a scientific truism that every living organism, in order to survive, must adapt itself to its environment.Therefore any change of environment must evoke an immediate readjustment on the part of the organism, and the more pronounced the environmental change, the more rapid and thoroughgoing the organic readjustment must be.Above all, speed is essential.Nature brooks no delay, and the disharmonic organism must attune itself or perish.

Now, is not readaptation precisely the problem with which civilized man has been increasingly confronted for the past hundred years?No one surely can deny that our present environment differs vastly from that of our ancestors.But if this be so, the necessity for profound and rapid adaptation becomes equally true.In fact, the race has instinctively sensed this necessity, and has bent its best energies to the task, particularly on the materialistic side.That was only natural.The pioneer’s preoccupation with material matters in opening up new country is self-evident, but what is not so generally recognized is the fact that nineteenth-century Europe and the eastern United States are in many respects environmentally “newer” than remote backwoods settlements.

Of course the changed character of our civilization called for idealistic adaptations no less sweeping.These were neglected, because their necessity was not so compellingly patent.Indeed, man was distinctly attached to his existing idealistic outfit, to the elaboration of which he had so assiduously devoted himself in former days, and which had fairly served the requirements of his simpler past.Therefore nineteenth-century man concentrated intensively, exclusively upon materialistic problems, feeling that he could thus concentrate because he believed that the idealistic conquests of preceding epochs had given him sound moral bases upon which to build the new material edifice.

Unfortunately, that which had at first been merely a means to an end presently became an end in itself. Losing sight of his idealisms, nineteenth-century man evolved a thoroughly materialistic philosophy. The upshot was a warped, one-sided development which quickly revealed its unsoundness. The fact that man was much less culpable for his errors than many moralists aver is quite beside the point, so far as consequences are concerned. Nature takes no excuses. She demands results, and when these are not forthcoming she inexorably inflicts her penalties.

As the nineteenth century drew toward its close the symptoms of a profound malaise appeared on every side. Even those most fundamental of all factors, the vitality and quality of the race, were not immune. Vital statistics began to display features highly disquieting to thoughtful minds. The most striking of these phenomena was the declining birth-rate which affected nearly all the white nations toward the close of the nineteenth century and which in France resulted in a virtually stationary population.

Of course the mere fact of a lessened birth-rate, taken by itself, is not the unmixed evil which many persons assume.Man’s potential reproductive capacity, like that of all other species, is very great.In fact, the whole course of biological progress has been marked by a steady checking of that reproductive exuberance which ran riot at the beginning of life on earth.As Havelock Ellis well says: “Of one minute organism it is estimated that, if its reproduction were not checked by death or destruction, in thirty days it would form a mass a million times larger than the sun. The conger-eel lays 15,000,000 eggs, and if they all grew up, and reproduced themselves on the same scale, in two years the whole sea would become a wriggling mass of fish. As we approach the higher forms of life reproduction gradually dies down. The animals nearest to man produce few offspring, but they surround them with parental care, until they are able to lead independent lives with a fair chance of surviving. The whole process may be regarded as a mechanism for slowly subordinating quantity to quality, and so promoting the evolution of life to ever higher stages.”[97]

While man’s reproductive power is slight from the standpoint of bacteria and conger-eels, it is yet far from negligible, as is shown by the birth-rate of the less-advanced human types at all times, and by the birth-rate of the higher types under exceptionally favorable circumstances.The nineteenth century was one of these favorable occasions.In the new areas of settlement outside Europe, vast regions practically untenanted by colored competitors invited the white colonists to increase and multiply; while Europe itself, though historically “old country,” was so transformed environmentally by the industrial revolution that it suddenly became capable of supporting a much larger population than heretofore.By the close of the century, however, the most pressing economic stimuli to rapid multiplication had waned in Europe and in many of the race dependencies. Therefore the rate of increase, even under the most favorable biological circumstances, should have shown a decline.

The trouble was that this diminishing human output was of less and less biological value.Wherever one looked in the white world, it was precisely those peoples of highest genetic worth whose birth-rate fell off most sharply, while within the ranks of the several peoples it was those social classes containing the highest proportion of able strains which were contributing the smallest quotas to the population.Everywhere the better types (on which the future of the race depends) were numerically stationary or dwindling, while conversely, the lower types were gaining ground, their birth-rate showing relatively slight diminution.

This “disgenic” trend, so ominous for the future of the race, is a melancholy commonplace of our time, and many efforts have been made to measure its progress in economic or social terms. One of the most striking and easily measured examples, however, is furnished by the category of race.As explained in the Introduction, the white race divides into three main sub-species—the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans.All three are good stocks, ranking in genetic worth well above the various colored races.However, there seems to be no question that the Nordic is far and away the most valuable type; standing, indeed, at the head of the whole human genus.As Madison Grant well expresses it, the Nordic is “The Great Race.”

Now it is the Nordics who are most affected by the disgenic aspects of our civilization.In the newer areas of white settlement like our Pacific coast or the Canadian Northwest, to be sure, the Nordics even now thrive and multiply.But in all those regions which typify the transformation of the industrial revolution, the Nordics do not fit into the altered environment as well as either Alpines or Mediterraneans, and hence tend to disappear.Before the industrial revolution the Nordic’s chief eliminator was war.His pre-eminent fighting ability, together with the position of leadership which he had generally acquired, threw on his shoulders the brunt of battle and exposed him to the greatest losses, whereas the more stolid Alpine and the less robust Mediterranean stayed at home and reproduced their kind.The chronic turmoil of both the mediæval and modern periods imposed a perpetual drain on the Nordic stock, while the era of discovery and colonization which began with the sixteenth century further depleted the Nordic ranks in Europe, since it was adventurous Nordics who formed the overwhelming majority of explorers and pioneers to new lands.Thus, even at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was much less Nordic than it had been a thousand years before.

Nevertheless, down to the close of the eighteenth century, the Nordics suffered from no other notable handicaps than war and migration, and even enjoyed some marked advantages.Being a high type, the Nordic is naturally a “high standard” man.He requires healthful living conditions, and quickly pines when deprived of good food, fresh air, and exercise. Down to the close of the eighteenth century, Europe was predominantly agricultural. In cool northern and central Europe, therefore, environment actually favored the big, blond Nordics, especially as against the slighter, less muscular Mediterranean; while in the hotter south the Nordic upper class, being the rulers, were protected from field labor, and thus survived as an aristocracy. In peaceful times, therefore, the Nordics multiplied and repaired the gaps wrought by proscription and war.

The industrial revolution, however, profoundly modified this state of things.Europe was transformed from an agricultural to an urbanized, industrial area.Numberless cities and manufacturing centres grew up, where men were close packed and were subjected to all the evils of congested living.Of course such conditions are not ideal for any stock.Nevertheless, the Nordic suffered more than any one else.The cramped factory and the crowded city weeded out the big, blond Nordic with portentous rapidity, whereas the little brunet Mediterranean, in particular, adapted himself to the operative’s bench or the clerk’s stool, prospered—and reproduced his kind.

The result of these new handicaps, combined with the continuance of the traditional handicaps (war and migration), has been a startling decrease of Nordics all over Europe throughout the nineteenth century, with a corresponding resurgence of the Alpine, and still more of the Mediterranean, elements. In the United States it has been the same story. Our country, originally settled almost exclusively by Nordics, was toward the close of the nineteenth century invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews. As a result, the Nordic native American has been crowded out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens, and after two short generations he has in many of our urban areas become almost extinct.

The racial displacements induced by a changed economic or social environment are, indeed, almost incalculable. Contrary to the popular belief, nothing is more unstable than the ethnic make-up of a people. Above all, there is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of the “melting-pot.” As a matter of fact, the melting-pot may mix but does not melt. Each race-type, formed ages ago, and “set” by millenniums of isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity. Each type possesses a special set of characters: not merely the physical characters visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual characters as well. All these characters are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation. To be sure, where members of the same race-stock intermarry (as English and Swedish Nordics, or French and British Mediterraneans), there seems to be genuine amalgamation. In most other cases, however, the result is not a blend but a mechanical mixture. Where the parent stocks are very diverse, as in matings between whites, negroes, and Amerindians, the offspring is a mongrel—a walking chaos, so consumed by his jarring heredities that he is quite worthless. We have already viewed the mongrel and his works in Latin America.

Such are the two extremes.Where intermarriage takes place between stocks relatively near together, as in crossings between the main divisions of the white species, the result may not be bad, and is sometimes distinctly good.Nevertheless, there is no true amalgamation.The different race-characters remain distinct in the mixed offspring.If the race-types have generally intermarried, the country is really occupied by two or more races, the races always tending to sort themselves out again as pure types by Mendelian inheritance.Now one of these race-types will be favored by the environment, and it will accordingly tend to gain at the other’s expense, while conversely the other types will tend to be bred out and to disappear.Sometimes a modification of the environment through social changes will suddenly reverse this process and will penalize a hitherto favored type.We then witness a “resurgence,” or increase, of the previously submerged element.

A striking instance of this is going on in England.England is inhabited by two race-stocks—Nordics and Mediterraneans.Down to the eighteenth century, England, being an agricultural country with a cool climate, favored the Nordics, and but for the Nordic handicaps of war and migration the Mediterraneans might have been entirely eliminated. Two hundred years ago the Mediterranean element in England was probably very small. The industrial revolution, however, reversed the selective process, and to-day the small, dark types in England increase noticeably with every generation. The swart “cockney” is a resurgence of the primitive Mediterranean stock, and is probably a faithful replica of his ancestors of Neolithic times.

Such was the ominous “seamy side” of nineteenth-century civilization.The regressive trend was, in fact, a vicious circle.An ill-balanced, faulty environment penalized the superior strains and favored the inferior types; while, conversely, the impoverishing race-stocks, drained of their geniuses and overloading with dullards and degenerates, were increasingly unable to evolve environmental remedies.

Thus, by action and reaction, the situation grew steadily worse, disclosing its parlous state by numberless symptoms of social ill-health. All the unlovely fin de siècle phenomena, such as the decay of ideals, rampant materialism, political disruption, social unrest, and the “decadence” of art and literature, were merely manifestations of the same basic ills.

Of course a thoughtful minority, undazzled by the prevalent optimism, pointed out evils and suggested remedies.Unfortunately these “remedies” were superficial, because the reformers confused manifestations with causes and combated symptoms instead of fighting the disease. For example: the white world’s troubles were widely ascribed to the loss of its traditional ideals, especially the decay of religious faith. But, as the Belgian sociologist Réné Gérard acutely remarks, “to reason in this manner is, we think, to mistake the effect for the cause. To believe that philosophic and religious doctrines create morals and civilizations is a seductive error, but a fatal one. To transplant the beliefs and the institutions of a people to new regions in the hope of transplanting thither their virtues and their civilization as well is the vainest of follies.... The greater or less degree of vigor in a people depends on the power of its vital instinct, of its greater or less faculty for adapting itself to and dominating the conditions of the moment. When the vital instinct of a people is healthy, it readily suggests to the people the religious and moral doctrines which assure its survival. It is not, therefore, because a people possesses a definite belief that it is healthy and vigorous, but rather because the people is healthy and vigorous that it adopts or invents the belief which is useful to itself. In this way, it is not because it ceases to believe that it falls into decay, it is because it is in decay that it abandons the fertile dream of its ancestors without replacing this by a new dream, equally fortifying and creative of energy.”[98]

Thus we return once more to the basic principle of race.For what is “vital instinct” but the imperious urge of superior heredity? As Madison Grant well says: “The lesson is always the same, namely, that race is everything. Without race there can be nothing except the slave wearing his master’s clothes, stealing his master’s proud name, adopting his master’s tongue, and living in the crumbling ruins of his master’s palace.”[99]

The disastrous consequences of failure to realize this basic truth is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in the field of white world-politics during the half-century preceding the Great War.That period was dominated by two antithetical schools of political thinking: national-imperialism and internationalism.Swayed by the ill-balanced spirit of the times, both schools developed extremist tendencies; the former producing such monstrous aberrations as Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, the latter evolving almost equally vicious concepts like cosmopolitanism and proletarianism.The adherents of these rival schools combated one another and wrangled among themselves.They both disregarded the basic significance of race, together with its immediate corollary, the essential solidarity of the white world.

As a matter of fact, white solidarity has been one of the great constants of history. For ages the white peoples have possessed a true “symbiosis” or common life, ceaselessly mingling their bloods and exchanging their ideas. Accordingly, the various white nations which are the race’s political expression may be regarded as so many planets gravitating about the sun of a common civilization.No such sustained and intimate race-solidarity has ever before been recorded in human annals.Not even the solidarity of the yellow peoples is comparable in scope.

Of course the white world’s internal frictions have been legion, and at certain times these frictions have become so acute that white men have been led to disregard or even to deny their fundamental unity. This is perhaps also because white solidarity is so pervasive that we live in it, and thus ordinarily do not perceive it any more than we do the air we breathe.Should white men ever really lose their instinct of race-solidarity, they would asphyxiate racially as swiftly and surely as they would asphyxiate physically if the atmospheric oxygen should suddenly be withdrawn.However, down to 1914 at least, the white world never came within measurable distance of this fatal possibility.On the contrary, the white peoples were continually expressing their fundamental solidarity by various unifying concepts like the “Pax Romana” of antiquity, the “Civitas Dei” or Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages, and the “European Concert” of nineteenth-century diplomacy.

It was typical of the malaise which was overtaking the white world that the close of the nineteenth century should have witnessed an ominous ignoring of white solidarity; that national-imperialists should have breathed mutual slaughter while internationalists caressed visions of “human solidarity” culminating in universal race-amalgamation; lastly, that Asia’s incipient revolt against white supremacy, typified by the Russo-Japanese War, should have found zealous white sponsors and abetters.

Nothing, indeed, better illustrates the white world’s unsoundness at the beginning of the present century than its reaction to the Russo-Japanese conflict.The tremendous significance of that event was no more lost upon the whites than it was upon the colored peoples.Most far-seeing white men recognized it as an omen of evil import for their race-future.And yet, even in the first access of apprehension, these same persons generally admitted that they saw no prospect of healing, constructive action to remedy the ills which were driving the white world along the downward path.Analyzing the possibility of Europe’s presenting a common front to the perils disclosed by the Japanese victories, the French publicist Réné Pinon sadly concluded in the negative, believing that political passions, social hates, and national rivalries would speak louder than the general interest.“Contemporary Europe,” he wrote, in 1905, “is probably not ready to receive and understand the lesson of the war.What are the examples of history to those gigantic commercial houses, uneasy for their New Year’s balances, which are our modern nations?It is in the nature of States founded on mercantilism to content themselves with a hand-to-mouth policy, without general views or idealism, satisfied with immediate gains and unable to prepare against a distant future.

“Whence, in the Europe of to-day, could come the principle of an entente, and on what could it be based?Too many divergent interests, too many rival ambitions, too many festering hates, too many ‘dead who speak,’ are present to stifle the voice of Europe’s conscience.

“However menacing the external danger, we fear that political rancors would not down; that the enemy from without would find accomplices, or at least unconscious auxiliaries, within.Far more than in its regiments and battleships, the power of Japan lies in our discords, in the absence of an ideal capable of lifting the European peoples above the daily pursuit of immediate interests, capable of stirring their hearts with the thrill of a common emotion.The true ‘Yellow Peril’ lies within us.”[100]

Réné Pinon was a true prophet.Not only was the “writing on the wall” not taken to heart, the decade following the Russo-Japanese conflict witnessed a prodigious aggravation of all the ills which had afflicted white civilization during the nineteenth century.As if scourged by a tragic fate, the white world hurtled along the downward path, until it entered the fell shadow of—the modern Peloponnesian War.

 

 

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CHAPTER VIII

THE MODERN PELOPONNESIAN WAR

The Peloponnesian War was the suicide of Greek civilization.It is the saddest page of history.In the brief Periclean epoch preceding the catastrophe Hellas had shone forth with unparalleled splendor, and even those wonderful achievements seemed but the prelude to still loftier heights of glory.On the eve of its self-immolation the Greek race, far from being exhausted, was bubbling over with exuberant vitality and creative genius.

But the half-blown rose was nipped by the canker of discord.Jealous rivalries and mad ambitions smouldered till they burst into a consuming flame.For a generation Hellas tore itself to pieces in a delirium of fratricidal strife.And even this was not the worst.The “peace” which closed the Peloponnesian War was no peace.It was a mere truce, dictated by the victors of the moment to sullen and vengeful enemies.Imposed by the sword and infused with no healing or constructive virtue, the Peloponnesian War was but the first of a war cycle which completed Hellas’s ruin.

The irreparable disaster had, indeed, occurred: the gulfs of sundering hatred had become fixed, and the sentiment of Greek race-unity was destroyed.Having lost its soul, the Greek race soon lost its body as well. Drained of its best strains, the diminished remnant bowed to foreign masters and bastardized its blood with the hordes of inferior aliens who swarmed into the land. By the time of the Roman conquest the Greeks were degenerate, and the Roman epithet “Græculus” was a term of deserved contempt.

Thus perished the Greeks—the fairest slip that ever budded on the tree of life.They perished by their own hands, in the flower of their youth, carrying with them to the grave, unborn, potencies which might have blessed and brightened the world for ages.Nature is inexorable.No living being stands above her law; and protozoön or demigod, if they transgress, alike must die.

The Greek tragedy should be a warning to our own day.Despite many unlikenesses, the nineteenth century was strangely reminiscent of the Periclean age.In creative energy and fecund achievement, surely, its like had not been seen since “the glory that was Greece,” and the way seemed opening to yet higher destinies.

But the brilliant sunrise was presently dimmed by gathering clouds.The birth of the twentieth century was attended with disquieting omens.The ills which had afflicted the preceding epoch grew more acute, synchronizing into an all-pervading, militant unrest.The spirit of change was in the air.Ancient ideals and shibboleths withered before the fiery breath of a destructive criticism, while the solid crust of tradition cracked and heaved under the premonitory tremors of volcanic forces working far below. Everywhere were seen bursting forth increasingly acute eruptions of human energy: a triumph of the dynamic over the static elements of life; a growing preference for violent and revolutionary, as contrasted with peaceful and evolutionary, solutions, running the whole politico-social gamut from “Imperialism” to “Syndicalism.” Everywhere could be discerned the spirit of unrest setting the stage for the great catastrophe.

Grave disorders were simply inevitable.They might perhaps have been localized.They might even have taken other forms. But the ills of our civilization were too deep-seated to have avoided grave disturbances.The Prussian plotters of “Weltmacht” did, indeed, precipitate the impending crisis in its most virulent and concentrated form, yet after all they were but sublimations of the abnormal trend of the times.

The best proof of this is the white world’s acutely pathological condition during the entire decade previous to the Great War.That fierce quest after alliances and mad piling-up of armaments; those paroxysmal “crises” which racked diplomacy’s feverish frame; those ferocious struggles which desolated the Balkans: what were all these but symptoms denoting a consuming disease?To-day, by contrast, we think of the Great War as having smitten a world basking in profound peace.What a delusion!Cast back the mind’s eye, and recall how hectic was the eve of the Great War, not merely in politics but in most other fields as well.Those opening months of 1914!Why, Europe seethed from end to end! When the Great War began, England was on the verge of civil strife, Russia was in the throes of an acute social revolt, Italy had just passed through a “red week” threatening anarchy, and every European country was suffering from grave internal disorders. It was a strange, nightmarish time, that early summer of 1914, to-day quite overshadowed by subsequent events, but which later generations will assign a proper place in the chain of world-history.

Well, Armageddon began and ran its horrid course.With the grim chronology of those dreary years this book is not concerned.It is with the aftermath that we here deal.And that is a sufficiently gloomy theme.The material losses are prodigious, the vital losses appalling, while the spiritual losses have well-nigh bankrupted the human soul.

Turning first to the material losses, they are of course in the broadest sense incalculable, but approximate estimates have been made.Perhaps the best of them is the analysis made by Professor Ernest L.Bogert, who places the direct costs of the war at $186,000,000,000 and the indirect costs at $151,000,000,000, thus arriving at the stupendous total of $337,000,000,000.These well-nigh inconceivable estimates still do not adequately represent the total losses, figured even in monetary terms, for, as Professor Bogert remarks: “The figures presented in this summary are both incomprehensible and appalling, yet even these do not take into account the effect of the war on life, human vitality, economic well-being, ethics, morality, or other phases of human relationships and activities which have been disorganized and injured. It is evident from the present disturbances in Europe that the real costs of the war cannot be measured by the direct money outlays of the belligerents during the five years of its duration, but that the very breakdown of modern economic society might be the price exacted.”[101]

Yet prodigious as has been the destruction of wealth, the destruction of life is even more serious.Wealth can sooner or later be replaced, while vital losses are, by their very nature, irreparable.Never before were such masses of men arrayed for mutual slaughter.During the late war nearly 60,000,000 soldiers were mobilized, and the combatants suffered 33,000,000 casualties, of whom nearly 8,000,000 were killed or died of disease, nearly 19,000,000 were wounded, and 7,000,000 taken prisoners.The greatest sufferer was Russia, which had over 9,000,000 casualties, while next in order came Germany with 6,000,000 and France with 4,500,000 casualties.The British Empire had 3,000,000 casualties.America’s losses were relatively slight, our total casualties being a trifle under 300,000.

And this is only the beginning of the story. The figures just quoted refer only to fighting men. They take no account of the civilian population. But the civilian losses were simply incalculable, especially in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. It is estimated that for every soldier killed, five civilians perished by hunger, exposure, disease, massacre, or heightened infant mortality.The civilian deaths in Poland and Russia are placed at many millions, while other millions died in Turkey and Serbia through massacre and starvation.One item alone will give some idea of the wastage of human life during the war.The deaths beyond the normal mortality due to influenza and pneumonia induced by the war are estimated at 4,000,000.The total loss of life directly attributable to the war is probably fully 40,000,000, while if decreased birth-rates be added the total would rise to nearly 50,000,000.Furthermore, so far as civilian deaths are concerned, the terrible conditions prevailing over a great part of Europe since the close of 1918 have caused additional losses relatively as severe as those during the war years.

The way in which Europe’s population has been literally decimated by the late war is shown by the example of France.In 1914 the population of France was 39,700,000.From this relatively moderate population nearly 8,000,000 men were mobilized during the war.Of these, nearly 1,400,000 were killed, 3,000,000 were wounded, and more than 400,000 were made prisoners.Of the wounded, between 800,000 and 900,000 were left permanent physical wrecks.Thus fully 2,000,000 men—mostly drawn from the flower of French manhood—were dead or hopelessly incapacitated.

Meanwhile, the civilian population was also shrinking. Omitting the civilian deaths in the northern departments under German occupation, the excess of deaths over births was more than 50,000 for 1914, and averaged nearly 300,000 for the four succeeding war years.And the most alarming feature was that these losses were mainly due, not to deaths of adults, but to a slump in the birth-rate.French births, which had been 600,000 in 1913, dropped to 315,000 in 1916 and 343,000 in 1917.All told, it seems probable that between 1913 and 1919 the population of France diminished by almost 3,000,000—nearly one-tenth of the entire population.

France’s vital losses are only typical of what has to a greater or less extent occurred all over Europe.The disgenic effect of the Great War is simply appalling.The war was nothing short of a headlong plunge into white race-suicide.It was essentially a civil war between closely related white stocks; a war wherein every physical and mental effective was gathered up and hurled into a hell of lethal machinery which killed out unerringly the youngest, the bravest, and the best.

Even in the first frenzied hours of August, 1914, wise men realized the horror that stood upon the threshold.The crowd might cheer, but the reflective already mourned in prospect the losses which were in store.As the English writer Harold Begbie then said: “Remember this.Among the young conscript soldiers of Europe who will die in thousands, and perhaps millions, are the very flower of civilization; we shall destroy brains which might have discovered for us in ten or twenty years easements for the worst of human pains and solutions for the worst of social dangers. We shall blot those souls out of our common existence. We shall destroy utterly those splendid burning spirits reaching out to enlighten our darkness. Our fathers destroyed those strange and valuable creatures whom they called ‘witches.’ We are destroying the brightest of our angels.”[102]

But it is doubtful if any of these seers realized the full price which the race was destined to pay during more than four long, agonizing years.Never before had war shown itself such an unerring gleaner of the best racial values.As early as the summer of 1915 Mr. Will Irwin, an American war correspondent, remarked the growing convictions among all classes, soldiers as well as civilians, that the war was fatally impoverishing the race.“I have talked,” he wrote, “with British officers and British Tommies, with English ladies of fashion and English housewives, with French deputies and French cabmen, and in all minds alike I find the same idea fixed—what is to become of the French race and the British race, yes, and the German race, if this thing keeps up?”

Mr. Irwin then goes on to describe the cumulative process by which the fittest were selected—for death.

“I take it for granted,” he says, “that, in a general way, the bravest are the best, physically and spiritually.Now, in this war of machinery, this meat-mill, it is the bravest who lead the charges and attempt the daring feats, and, correspondingly, the loss is greatest among those bravest.

“So much when the army gets into line.But in the conscript countries, like France and Germany, there is a process of selection in picking the army by which the best—speaking in general terms—go out to die, while the weakest remain.The undersized, the undermuscled, the underbrained, the men twisted by hereditary deformity or devitalized by hereditary disease—they remain at home to propagate the breed.The rest—all the rest—go out to take chances.

“Furthermore, as modern conscript armies are organized, it is the youngest men who sustain the heaviest losses—the men who are not yet fathers.And from the point of view of the race, that is, perhaps, the most melancholy fact of all.

“All the able-bodied men between the ages of nineteen and forty-five are in the ranks. But the older men do not take many chances with death.... These European conscript armies are arranged in classes according to age, and the younger classes are the men who do most of the actual fighting. The men in their late thirties or their forties, the ‘territorials,’ guard the lines, garrison the towns, generally attend to the business of running up the supplies. When we come to gather the statistics of this war we shall find that an overwhelming majority of the dead were less than thirty years old, and probably that the majority were under twenty-five. Now, the territorial of forty or forty-five has usually given to the state as many children as he is going to give, while the man of twenty-five or under has usually given the state no children at all.”[103]

Mr. Irwin was gauging the racial cost by the criterion of youth.A leading English scholar, Mr. H.A.L.Fisher, obtained equally alarming results by applying the test of genius.He analyzed the casualty lists “filled with names which, but for the fatal accidents of war, would certainly have been made illustrious for splendid service to the great cause of life....A government actuated by a cold calculus of economic efficiency would have made some provision for sheltering from the hazards of war young men on whose exceptional intellectual powers our future progress might be thought to depend.But this has not been done, and it is impossible to estimate the extent to which the world will be impoverished in quality by the disappearance of so much youthful genius and talent....The spiritual loss to the universe cannot be computed, and probably will exceed the injury inflicted on the world by the wide and protracted prevalence of the celibate orders in the Middle Ages.”[104]

The American biologist S. K. Humphrey did not underestimate the extent of the slaughter of genius-bearing strains when he wrote: “It is safe to say that among the millions killed will be a million who are carrying superlatively effective inheritances—the dependence of the race’s future. Nothing is more absurd than the notion that these inheritances can be replaced in a few generations by encouraging the fecundity of the survivors. They are gone forever. The survivors are going to reproduce their own less-valuable kind. Words fail to convey the appalling nature of the loss.”[105]

It is the same melancholy tale when we apply the test of race.Of course the war bore heavily on all the white race-stocks, but it was the Nordics—the best of all human breeds—who suffered far and away the greatest losses.War, as we have seen, was always the Nordic’s deadliest scourge, and never was this truer than in the late struggle.From the racial standpoint, indeed, Armageddon was a Nordic civil war, most of the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides belonging to the Nordic race.Everywhere it was the same story: the Nordic went forth eagerly to battle, while the more stolid Alpine and, above all, the little brunet Mediterranean either stayed at home or even when at the front showed less fighting spirit, took fewer chances, and oftener saved their skins.

The Great War has thus unquestionably left Europe much poorer in Nordic blood, while conversely it has relatively favored the Mediterraneans.Madison Grant well says: “As in all wars since Roman times, from the breeding point of view the little dark man is the final winner.”[106]

Furthermore, it must be remembered that those disgenic effects which I have been discussing refer solely to losses inflicted upon the actual combatants.But we have already seen that for every soldier killed the war took five civilian lives.In fact, the war’s profoundly devitalizing effects upon the general population can hardly be overestimated.Those effects include not merely such obvious matters as privation and disease, but also obscurer yet highly destructive factors like nervous shock and prolonged overstrain.To take merely one instance, consider Havelock Ellis’s remarks concerning “the ever-widening circles of anguish and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity.”He concludes: “It is probable that for every 10,000,000 soldiers who fall on the field, 50,000,000 other persons at home are plunged into grief, or poverty, or some form of life-diminishing trouble.”[107]

Most serious has been the war’s effect upon the children.At home, as at the front, it is the young who have been sacrificed.The heaviest civilian losses have come through increased infant mortality and decreased birth-rates.The “slaughter of the innocents” has thus been twofold: it has slain millions of those already alive, and it has prevented millions more from being born or conceived.The decreased fecundity of women during the war even under good material conditions apparently shows that war’s psychological reflexes tend to induce sterility.

An Italian savant, Professor Sergi, has elaborated this hypothesis in considerable detail.He contends that “war continued for a long time is the origin of this phenomenon (relative sterility), not only in the absolute sense of the loss of men in battle, but also through a series of special conditions which arise simultaneously with an unbalancing of vital processes and which create in the latter a complex phenomenon difficult to examine in every one of its elements.

“The biological disturbance does not derive solely from the destruction of young lives, the ones best adapted to fecundity, but also from the unfavorable conditions into which a nation is unexpectedly thrown; from these come disorders of a mental and sentimental nature, nervousness, anxiety, grief, and pain of all kinds, to which the serious economic conditions of war-time also contribute; all these things have a harmful effect on the general organic economy of nations.”[108]

From the combination of these losses on the battle-field and in the cradle arises what the biologist Doctor Saleeby terms “the menace of the dearth of youth.”The European populations to-day contain an undue proportion of adults and the aged, while “the younger generation is no longer knocking at the door.We senescents may grow old in peace; but the facts bode ill for our national future.”[109]

Furthermore, this “dearth of youth” will not be easily repaired. The war may be over, but its aftermath is only a degree less unfavorable to human multiplication, especially of the better kinds. Bad industrial conditions and the fearfully high cost of living continue to depress the birth-rate of all save the most reckless and improvident elements, whose increase is a curse rather than a blessing.

To show only one of the many causes that to-day keep down the birth-rate, take the crushing burden of taxation, which hits especially the increase of the upper classes. The London Saturday Review recently explained this very clearly when it wrote: “From a man with £2,000 a year the tax-gatherer takes £600. The remaining £1,400, owing to the decreased value of money, has a purchasing power about equal to £700 a year before the war. No young man will therefore think of marrying on less than £2,000 a year. We are thinking of the young man in the upper and middle classes. The man who starts with nothing does not, as a rule, arrive at £2,000 a year until he is past the marrying age. So the continuance of the species will be carried on almost exclusively by the class of manual workers of a low average caliber of brain. The matter is very serious. Reading the letters and memoirs of a hundred years ago, one is struck by the size of the families of the aristocracy. One smiles at reading of the overflowing nurseries of Edens, and Cokes, and Fitzgeralds. Fourteen or fifteen children were not at all unusual amongst the county families.”[110]

Europe’s convalescence must, at the very best, be a slow and difficult one.Both materially and spiritually the situation is the reverse of bright.To begin with, the political situation is highly unsatisfactory.The diplomatic arrangements made by the Versailles Peace Conference offer neither stability nor permanence.In the next chapter I shall have more to say about the Versailles Conference.For the moment, let me quote the observations of the well-known British publicist J.L.Garvin, who adequately summarizes the situation when he says: “As matters stand, no great war ever was followed by a more disquieting and limited peace.Everywhere the democratic atmosphere is charged with agitation.There is still war or anarchy, or both, between the Baltic and the Pacific across a sixth part of the whole earth.Without a restored Russia no outlook can be confident.Either a Bolshevist or reactionary or even a patriotic junction between Germany and Russia might disrupt civilization as violently as before or to even worse effect.”[111]

Political uncertainty is a poor basis on which to rebuild Europe’s shattered economic life.And this economic reconstruction would, under the most favorable circumstances, be very difficult.We have already seen how, owing to the industrial revolution, Europe became the world’s chief workshop, exporting manufactured products in return for foodstuffs to feed its workers and raw materials to feed its machines, these imports being drawn from the four quarters of the globe. In other words, Europe had ceased to be self-sufficing, the very life of its industries and its urban populations being dependent upon foreign importations from the most distant regions. Europe’s prosperity before the war was due to the development of a marvellous system of world-trade; intricate, nicely adjusted, functioning with great efficiency, and running at high speed.

Then down upon this delicately organized mechanism crashed the trip-hammer of the Great War, literally smashing it to pieces.To reconstruct so intricate a fabric takes time.Meanwhile, how are the huge urban masses to live, unfitted and unable as they are to draw their sustenance from their native soil?If their sufferings become too great there is a real danger that all Europe may collapse into hopeless chaos.Mr. Frank A.Vanderlip did not overstate the danger when he wrote: “I believe it is possible that there may be let loose in Europe forces that will be more terribly destructive than have been the forces of the Great War.”[112]

The best description of Europe’s economic situation is undoubtedly that of Mr. Herbert Hoover, who, from his experience as inter-Allied food controller, is peculiarly qualified to pass authoritative judgment.Says Mr. Hoover:

“The economic difficulties of Europe as a whole at the signature of peace may be almost summarized in the phrase ‘demoralized productivity.’ The production of necessaries for this 450,000,000 population (including Russia) has never been at so low an ebb as at this day.

“A summary of the unemployment bureaus in Europe will show that 15,000,000 families are receiving unemployment allowances in one form or another, and are, in the main, being paid by constant inflation of currency.A rough estimate would indicate that the population of Europe is at least 100,000,000 greater than can be supported without imports, and must live by the production and distribution of exports; and their situation is aggravated not only by lack of raw materials, and imports, but also by low production of European raw materials.Due to the same low production, Europe is to-day importing vast quantities of certain commodities which she formerly produced for herself and can again produce.Generally, in production, she is not only far below even the level of the time of the signing of the armistice, but far below the maintenance of life and health without an unparalleled rate of import....

“From all these causes, accumulated to different intensity in different localities, there is the essential fact that, unless productivity can be rapidly increased, there can be nothing but political, moral, and economic chaos, finally interpreting itself in loss of life on a scale hitherto undreamed of.”[113]

Such are the material and vital losses inflicted by the Great War. They are prodigious, and they will not easily be repaired. Europe starts its reconstruction under heavy handicaps, not the least of these being the drain upon its superior stocks, which has deprived it of much of the creative energy that it so desperately needs. Those 16,000,000 or more dead or incapacitated soldiers represented the flower of Europe’s young manhood—the very men who are especially needed to-day. It is young men who normally alone possess both maximum driving power and maximum plasticity of mind. All the European belligerents are dangerously impoverished in their stock of youth. The resultant handicap both to Europe’s working ability and Europe’s brain-activity is only too plain.

Moreover, material and even vital losses do not tell the whole story.The moral and spiritual losses, though not easily measured, are perhaps even more appalling.In fact, the darkest cloud on the horizon is possibly the danger that reconstruction will be primarily material at the expense of moral and spiritual values, thus leading to a warped development even more pronounced than that of the nineteenth century and leading inevitably to yet more disastrous consequences.

The danger of purely material reconstruction is of course the peril which lurks behind every great war, and which in the past has wrought such tragic havoc.At the beginning of the late war we heard much talk of its morally “regenerative” effects, but as the grim holocaust went on year after year, far-sighted moralists warned against a fatal drain of Europe’s idealistic forces which might break the thin crust of European civilization so painfully wrought since the Dark Ages.

That these warning voices were not without reason is proved by the chaos of spiritual, moral, and even intellectual values which exists in Europe to-day, giving play to such monstrous insanities as Bolshevism.The danger is that this chaos may be prolonged and deepened by the complex of two concurrent factors: spiritual drain during the war, and spiritual neglect in the immediate future due to overconcentration upon material reconstruction.

Many of the world’s best minds are seriously concerned at the outlook.For example, Doctor Gore, the Bishop of Oxford, writes: “There is the usual depression and lowering of moral aims which always follows times of war.For the real terror of the time of war is not during the war; then war has certain very ennobling powers.It is after-war periods which are the curse of the world, and it looks as if the same were going to prove true of this war.I own that I never felt anxiety such as I do now.I think the aspect of things has never been so dark as at this moment.I think the temper of the nations has degraded since the declaration of the armistice to a degree that is almost terrifying.”[114]

The intellectual impoverishment wrought by the war is well summarized by Professor C.G.Shaw.“We did more before the war than we shall do after it,” he writes. “War will have so exhausted man’s powers of action and thought that he will have little wit or will left for the promotion of anything over and above necessary repair.”[115]

Europe’s general impoverishment in all respects was vividly portrayed by a leading article of the London Saturday Review entitled “The True Destructiveness of War.” Pointing to the devastated areas of northern France as merely symptomatic of the devastation wrought in spiritual as well as material fields, it said:

“Reflection only adds to the effect upon us of these miles of wasted country and ruined towns.All this represents not a thousandth part of the desolation which the war has brought upon our civilization.These devastated areas scarring the face of Europe are but a symbol of the desolation which will shadow the life of the world for at least a generation.The coming years will be bleak, in respect of all the generous and gracious things which are the products of leisure and of minds not wholly taken up by the necessity to live by bread alone.For a generation the world will have to concentrate upon material problems.

“The tragedy of the Great War—a tragedy which enhances the desolation of Rheims—is that it should have killed almost everything which the best of our soldiers died to preserve, and that it should have raised more problems than it has solved.

“We would sacrifice a dozen cathedrals to preserve what the war has destroyed in England....We would readily surrender our ten best cathedrals to be battered by the artillery of Hindenburg as a ransom. Surely it would be better to lose Westminster Abbey than never again to have anybody worthy to be buried there.”[116]

Europe is, indeed, passing through the most critical spiritual phase of the war’s aftermath—what I may term the zero hour of the spirit. When the trenches used to fill with infantry waiting in the first cold flicker of the dawn for the signal to go “over the top,” they called it the “zero hour.” Well, Europe now faces the zero hour of peace. It is neither a pleasant nor a stimulating moment. The “tumult and the shouting” have died. The captains, kings—and presidents—have departed. War’s hectic urge wanes, losses are counted, the heroic pose is dropped. Such is the moment when the peoples are bidden to go “over the top” once more, this time toward peace objectives no less difficult than those of the battle-field. Weakened, tired Europe knows this, feels this—and dreads the plunge into the unknown. Hence the malaise of the zero hour.

The extraordinary turmoil of the European soul is strikingly set forth by the French thinker Paul Valéry.

“We civilizations,” he writes, “now know that we are mortal.We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires gone to the bottom with all their engines; sunk to the inexplorable bottom of the centuries with their gods and their laws, their academies, their science, pure and applied; their grammars, their dictionaries, their classics, their romantics and their symbolists, their critics and their critics’ critics. We knew well that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the mists of history, phantoms and huge ships laden with riches and spiritual things. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours.

“Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and lovely names, and the total ruin of these worlds meant as little to us as their very existence.But France, England, Russia—these would also be lovely names.Lusitania also is a lovely name.And now we see that the abyss of history is large enough for every one.We feel that a civilization is as fragile as a life.Circumstances which would send the works of Baudelaire and Keats to rejoin the works of Menander are no longer in the least inconceivable; they are in all the newspapers....

“Thus the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa.All is not lost, but everything has felt itself perish.

“An extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe.It has felt, in all its thinking substance, that it recognized itself no longer, that it no longer resembled itself, that it was about to lose consciousness—a consciousness acquired by centuries of tolerable disasters, by thousands of men of the first rank, by geographical, racial, historical chances innumerable....

“The military crisis is perhaps at an end; the economic crisis is visibly at its zenith; but the intellectual crisis—it is with difficulty that we can seize its true centre, its exact phase.The facts, however, are clear and pitiless: there are thousands of young writers and young artists who are dead.There is the lost illusion of a European culture, and the demonstration of the impotence of knowledge to save anything whatever; there is science, mortally wounded in its moral ambitions, and, as it were, dishonored by its applications; there is idealism, victor with difficulty, grievously mutilated, responsible for its dreams; realism, deceived, beaten, with crimes and misdeeds heaped upon it; covetousness and renunciation equally put out; religions confused among the armies, cross against cross, crescent against crescent; there are the sceptics themselves, disconcerted by events so sudden, so violent, and so moving, which play with our thoughts as a cat with a mouse—the sceptics lose their doubts, rediscover them, lose them again, and can no longer make use of the movements of their minds.

“The rolling of the ship has been so heavy that at the last the best-hung lamps have been upset.

“From an immense terrace of Elsinore which extends from Basle to Cologne, and touches the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the chalk of Champagne, and the granite of Alsace, the Hamlet of Europe now looks upon millions of ghosts.”[117]

Such is Europe’s deplorable condition as she staggers forth from the hideous ordeal of the Great War; her fluid capital dissipated, her fixed capital impaired, her industrial fabric rent and tattered, her finances threatened with bankruptcy, the flower of her manhood dead on the battle-field, her populations devitalized and discouraged, her children stunted by malnutrition. A sombre picture.

And Europe is the white homeland, the heart of the white world.It is Europe that has suffered practically all the losses of Armageddon, which may be considered the white civil war.The colored world remains virtually unscathed.

Here is the truth of the matter: The white world to-day stands at the crossroads of life and death.It stands where the Greek world stood at the close of the Peloponnesian War.A fever has racked the white frame and undermined its constitution.The unsound therapeutics of its diplomatic practitioners retard convalescence and endanger real recovery.Worst of all, the instinct of race-solidarity has partially atrophied.

Grave as is the situation, it is not yet irreparable, any more than Greece’s condition was hopeless after Ægospotami.It was not the Peloponnesian War which sealed Hellas’s doom, but the cycle of political anarchy and moral chaos of which the Peloponnesian War was merely the opening phase.Our world is too vigorous for even the Great War, of itself, to prove a mortal wound.

The white world thus still has its choice.But it must be a positive choice. Decisions—firm decisions—must be made. Constructive measures—drastic measures—must be taken. Above all: time presses, and drift is fatal. The tide ebbs. The swimmer must put forth strong strokes to reach the shore. Else—swift oblivion in the dark ocean.

 

 

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CHAPTER IX

THE SHATTERING OF WHITE SOLIDARITY

The instinctive comity of the white peoples is, as I have already said, perhaps the greatest constant of history.It is the psychological basis of white civilization.Cohesive instinct is as vital to race as gravitation is to matter.Without them, atomic disintegration would alike result.In speaking of race-instinct, I am not referring merely to the ethnic theories that have been elaborated at various times.Those theories were, after all, but attempts to explain intellectually the urge of that profound emotion known to sociologists as the “consciousness of kind.”

White race-consciousness has been of course perturbed by numberless internal frictions, which have at times produced partial inhibitions of unitary feeling.Nevertheless, when really faced by non-white opposition, white men have in the past instinctively tended to close their ranks against the common foe.One of the Great War’s most deplorable results has been an unprecedented weakening of white solidarity which, if not repaired, may produce the most disastrous consequences.

During the nineteenth century the sentiment of white solidarity was strong.The great explorers and empire-builders who spread white ascendancy to the ends of the earth felt that they were apostles of their race and civilization as well as of a particular country. Rivalries might be keen and colonial boundary questions acute; nevertheless, in their calmer moments, the white peoples felt that the expansion of one white nation buttressed the expansion of all.

Professor Pearson undoubtedly voiced the spirit of the day when he wrote (about 1890) that it would be well “if European statesmen could understand that the wars which carry desolation into civilized countries are allowing the lower races to recruit their numbers and strength.Two centuries hence it may be matter of serious concern to the world if Russia has been displaced by China on the Amoor, if France has not been able to colonize North Africa, or if England is not holding India.For civilized men there can be only one fatherland, and whatever extends the influence of those races that have taken their faith from Palestine, their laws of beauty from Greece, and their civil law from Rome, ought to be matter of rejoicing to Russian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Frenchman alike.”[118]

The progress of science also fortified white race-consciousness with its sanctions.The researches of European scholars identified the founders of our civilization with a race of tall, white-skinned barbarians, possessing regular features, brown or blond hair, and light eyes.This was, of course, what we now know as the Nordic type.At first the problem was ill understood, the tests applied being language and culture rather than physical characteristics. For these reasons the early “Caucasian” and “Aryan” hypotheses were self-contradictory and inadequate. Nevertheless, the basis was sound, and the effects on white popular psychology were excellent.

Particularly good were the effects upon the peoples predominantly of Nordic blood.Obviously typifying as they did the prehistoric creators of white civilization, Nordics everywhere were strengthened in consciousness of genetic worth, feeling of responsibility for world-progress, and urge toward fraternal collaboration.The supreme value of Nordic blood was clearly analyzed by the French thinker Count Arthur de Gobineau as early as 1854[119] (albeit Gobineau employed the misleading “Aryan” terminology), and his thesis was subsequently elaborated by many other writers, notably by Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians.

The results of all this were plainly apparent by the closing years of the nineteenth century. Quickened Nordic race-consciousness played an important part in stimulating Anglo-American fraternization, and induced acts like the Oxford Scholarship legacy of Cecil Rhodes. The trend of this movement, though cross-cut by nationalistic considerations, was clearly in the direction of a Nordic entente—a Pan-Nordic syndication of power for the safeguarding of the race-heritage and the harmonious evolution of the whole white world. It was a glorious aspiration, which, had it been realized, would have averted Armageddon.

Unfortunately the aspiration remained a dream.The ill-balanced tendencies of the late nineteenth century were against it, and they ultimately prevailed.The abnormal growth of national-imperialism, in particular, wrought fatal havoc.The exponents of imperialistic propagandas like Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism put forth literally boundless pretensions, planning the domination of the entire planet by their special brand of national-imperialism.Such men had scant regard for race-lines.All who stood outside their particular nationalistic group were vowed to the same subjection.

Indeed, the national-imperialists presently seized upon race teachings, and prostituted them to their own ends.A notable example of this is the extreme Pan-German propaganda of Houston Stewart Chamberlain[120] and his fellows. Chamberlain makes two cardinal assumptions: he conceives modern Germany as racially almost purely Nordic; and he regards all Nordics outside the German linguistic-cultural group as either unconscious or renegade Teutons who must at all costs be brought into the German fold. To any one who understands the scientific realities of race, the monstrous absurdity of these assumptions is instantly apparent. The fact is that modern Germany, far from being purely Nordic, is mainly Alpine in race. Nordic blood preponderates only in the northwest, and is merely veneered over the rest of Germany, especially in the upper classes. While the Germania of Roman days was unquestionably a Nordic land, it has been computed that of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire in 1914, only 9,000,000 were purely Nordic in character. This displacement of the German Nordics since classic times is chiefly due to Germany’s troubled history, especially to the horrible Thirty Years’ War which virtually annihilated the Nordics of south Germany. This racial displacement has wrought correspondingly profound changes in the character of the German people.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that the Pan-Germans were thinking in terms of nationality instead of race, and that they were using pseudo-racial arguments as camouflage for essentially political ends.The pity of it is that these arguments have had such disastrous repercussions in the genuine racial sphere.The late war has not only exploded Pan-Germanism, it has also discredited Nordic race-feeling, so unjustly confused by many persons with Pan-German nationalistic propaganda.Such persons should remember that the overwhelming majority of Nordics live outside of Germany, being mainly found in Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon countries, northern France, the Netherlands, and Baltic Russia.To let Teuton propaganda gull us into thinking of Germany as the Nordic fatherland is both a danger and an absurdity.

While Pan-Germanism was mainly responsible for precipitating Armageddon with all its disastrous consequences, it was Russian Pan-Slavism which dealt the first shrewd blow to white solidarity.Toward the close of the nineteenth century, Pan-Slavism’s “Eastern” wing, led by Prince Ukhtomsky and other chauvinists of his ilk, went so far in its imperialistic obsession as actually to deny Russia’s white blood.These Pan-Slavists boldly proclaimed the morbid, mystical dogma that Russia was Asiatic, not European, and thereupon attempted to seize China as a lever for upsetting, first the rest of Asia, and then the non-Russian white world—elegantly described as “the rotten west.”The white Power immediately menaced was, of course, England, who in acute fear for her Indian Empire, promptly riposted by allying herself with Japan.Russia was diplomatically isolated and militarily beaten in the Russo-Japanese War.Thus the Russo-Japanese War, that destroyer of white prestige whose ominous results we have already noted, was precipitated mainly by the reckless short-sightedness of white men themselves.

A second blow to white solidarity was presently administered—this time by England in concluding her second alliance-treaty with Japan.The original alliance, signed in 1902, was negotiated for a definite, limited objective—the checkmating of Russia’s over-weening imperialism.Even that instrument was dangerous, but under the circumstances it was justifiable and inevitable.The second alliance-treaty, however, was so general and far-reaching in character that practically all white men in the Far East, including most emphatically Englishmen themselves, pronounced it a great disaster.

Meanwhile, German imperialism was plotting even deadlier strokes at white race-comity, not merely by preparing war against white neighbors in Europe, but also by ingratiating itself with the Moslem East and by toying with schemes for building up a black military empire in central Africa.

Lastly, France was actually recruiting black, brown, and yellow hordes for use on European battle-fields; while Italy, by her buccaneering raid on Tripoli, outraged Islam’s sense of justice and strained its patience to the breaking-point.

Thus, in the years preceding Armageddon, all the European Powers displayed a reckless absorption in particularistic ambitions and showed a callous indifference to larger race-interests.The rapid weakening of white solidarity was clearly apparent.

However, white solidarity, though diplomatically compromised, was emotionally not yet really undermined. Those dangerous games above mentioned were largely the work of cynical chancelleries and ultra-imperialist propagandas. The average European, whatever his nationality, still tended to react instinctively against such practices. This was shown by the sharp criticism which arose from the most varied quarters. For example: Russia and Britain were alike sternly taken to task both at home and abroad for their respective Far Eastern policies; proposed German alliances with Pan-Islamism and Japan preached by disciples of Machtpolitik were strenuously opposed as race-treason by powerful sections of German thought; while Italy’s Tripolitan imbroglio was generally denounced as the most foolhardy trifling with the common European interest.

A good illustration of instinctive white solidarity in the early years of the twentieth century is a French journalist’s description of the attitude of the white spectators (of various nationalities) gathered to watch the landing in Japan of the first Russian prisoners taken in the Russo-Japanese War.This writer depicts in moving language the literally horrifying effect of the spectacle upon himself and his fellows.“What a triumph,” he exclaims, “what a revenge for the little Nippons to see thus humiliated these big, splendid men who, for them, represented, not only Russians, but those Europeans whom they so detest!This scene tragic in its simplicity, this grief passing amid joy, these whites, vanquished and captives, defiling before those free and triumphant yellows—this was not Russia beaten by Japan, not the defeat of one nation by another; it was something new, enormous, prodigious; it was the victory of one world over another; it was the revenge which effaced the centuries of humiliations borne by Asia; it was the awakening hope of the Oriental peoples; it was the first blow given to the other race, to that accursed race of the West, which, for so many years, had triumphed without even having to struggle. And the Japanese crowd felt all this, and the few other Asiatics who found themselves there shared in this triumph. The humiliation of these whites was solemn, frightful. I completely forgot that these captives were Russians, and I would add that the other Europeans there, though anti-Russian, felt the same malaise: they also were forced to feel that these captives were their own kind.When we took the train for Kobè, an instinctive solidarity drove us huddling into the same compartment.”[121]

Thus white solidarity, while unquestionably weakened, was still a weighty factor down to August, 1914. But the first shots of Armageddon saw white solidarity literally blown from the muzzles of the guns. An explosion of internecine hatred burst forth more intense and general than any ever known before. Both sets of combatants proclaimed a duel to the death; both sides vowed the enemy to something near annihilation; while even scientists and littérateurs, disrupting the ancient commonwealths of wisdom and beauty, put one another furiously to the ban.

In their savage death-grapple neither side hesitated for an instant to grasp at any weapon, whatever the ultimate consequences to the race.The Allies poured into white Europe colored hordes of every pigment under the sun; the Teutonic Powers wielded Pan-Islam as a besom of wrath to sweep clean every white foothold in Hither Asia and North Africa; while far and wide over the Dark Continent black armies fought for their respective masters—and learned the hidden weakness of the white man’s power. In the Far East, Japan, left to her own devices, bent amorphous China to her imperious will, thereby raising up a potential menace for the entire earth. Every day the tide of intestine hatred within the white world rose higher, until the very concept of a common blood and cultural past seemed in danger of being blotted out.

A symposium of the “hate literature” of the Great War is fortunately no part of my task, but the reader will readily recall both its abysmal fury and its irreconcilable implications. The most appalling feature was the way in which many writers assumed that this state of mind would be permanent; that the end of the Great War might be only the beginning of a war-cycle leading to the utter disruption of white solidarity and civilization. In the spring of 1916, the London Nation remarked gloomily: “Europe is now being mentally conceived as inevitably and permanently dual. We are ceasing to think of Europe. The normal end of war (which is peace) is to be submerged in the idea of a war-series indefinitely prolonged. Soon the entire Continent will have but one longing—the longing for rest. The cup is to be dashed from its lips! For a world steeped in fear and ruled by the barren logomachy of hate, diplomatic intercourse would almost cease to be possible.... In the matter of culture, modern Europe would tend to relapse to a state inferior even to that of mediæval Europe, and to sink far below that of the Renaissance.”[122]

In similar vein, the noted German historian Eduard Meyer[123] predicted that Armageddon was only the first of a long series of Anglo-German “Punic Wars” in which modern civilization would retrograde to a condition of semi-barbarism. Germany, according to this prophecy, would be the victor—but a Pyrrhic victor, for the colored races, taking advantage of white decadence, would destroy European supremacy and involve all the white nations in a common ruin.

The ulcerated state of European war-psychology did, in fact, lend ominous emphasis to these gloomy prognostications.Before 1914, as we have seen, imperialistic trafficking with common race-interests usually roused wide-spread criticism, while even more, the use of colored troops in white quarrels always roused bitter popular condemnation.In the darkest hours of the Boer War, English public opinion had refused to sanction the use of either black African or brown Indian troops against the white foe, while French plans for raising black armies of African savages for use in Europe were almost universally reprobated.Before Armageddon there thus existed a genuine moral repugnance against settling domestic differences by calling in the alien without the gates.

The Great War, however, sent all such scruples promptly into the discard.Not only did the belligerent governments use all the colored troops they could equip, but the belligerent peoples hailed this action with unqualified approval. The Allies were of course the more successful in practice, but the Germans were just as eager, and the exertions of the Prussian General Liman von Sanders actually got Turkish divisions to the European battle-fronts.

The psychological effect of these colored auxiliaries in deepening the hatred of the white combatants was deplorable.Germany’s use of Turks raised among the Allies wrathful emotions reminiscent of the Crusades, while the havoc wrought in the Teutonic ranks by black Senegalese and yellow Gurkhas, together with Allied utterances like Lord Curzon’s wish to see Bengal lancers on the Unter den Linden and Gurkhas camping at Sans Souci, so maddened the German people that the very suggestion of white solidarity was jeeringly scoffed at as the most idiotic sentimentality.

Here is a German officer’s account of a Senegalese attack on his position, which vividly depicts the mingled horror and fury awakened in German hearts by these black opponents: “They came.First singly, at wide intervals.Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish.Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster.Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in the cloud.Entire bodies and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare, now sinking in the shadows, came nearer and nearer.Strong, wild fellows, their log-like, fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags.Showing their grinning teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and their necks stretched forward.Some with bayonets on their rifles. Many only armed with knives. Monsters all, in their confused hatred. Frightful their distorted, dark grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes. Eyes that seem like terrible beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born beings. Eyes that seemed to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained, no longer to be restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats spitting and yowling, with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel dissemblance of their beastly malice. Behind them came the first wave of the attackers, in close order, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless.”[124]

Here, again, is the proposal of a British officer, to raise a million black savages from England’s African colonies for use on the Western Front. Major Stuart-Stephens exults in Britain’s “almost unlimited reservoir of African man-power.” In northern Nigeria alone, he remarks, there are to-day more than 700,000 warlike tribesmen. “Let them be used!” says the major. “These ‘bonny fechters’ are now engaged in the pastoral arts of peace. But I would make bold to assert that a couple of hundred thousand could, after six months’ training, be usefully employed in daredevil charges into German trenches.” Major Stuart-Stephens hopes that at least the Sudanese battalions will be transferred en masse to the Western Front. “This,” he concludes, “would mean the placing at once in the trenches of, say, 70,000 big, lusty coal-black devils, the time of whose life is the wielding of the bayonet, and whose advent would not be regarded by the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort.”[125]

The military possibilities are truly engaging!There are literally tens of millions of fighting blacks and scores of millions of fighting Asiatics now living under white rule who could conceivably be armed and shipped to European battle-fields.After which, of course, Europe, the white homeland, would be—a queer place.

Fortunately for our race, the late war did not see this sort of thing carried to its logical conclusion.But the harm done was bad enough.The white world grew accustomed to the use of colored mercenaries and to the contracting of alliances with colored peoples against white opponents as a mere matter of course.

The German war-mind, in particular, teemed with colored alliance-projects.Unable to compete with the Allies in getting colored troops to Europe, Germans planned to revenge themselves in other fields.The Turkish alliance and the resulting “Holy War” proclamation were hailed with delight.“Over there in Turkey,” wrote the well-known German publicist Ernst Jaeckh, “stretch Anatolia and Mesopotamia: Anatolia, the ‘Land of the Sunrise’; Mesopotamia, the region of ancient paradise.May these names be to us a sign: may this World War bring to Germany and Turkey the sunrise and the paradise of a new time; may it confer upon an assured Turkey and a Greater Germany the blessing of a fruitful Turco-Teutonic collaboration in peace after a victorious Turco-Teutonic collaboration in war.”[126]

The scope of Germany’s Asiatic aspirations during the war is exemplified by an article from the pen of the learned Orientalist Professor Bernhardt Molden.[127] Germany’s aid to Turkey, contends Professor Molden, is merely symptomatic of her policy to raise the other Asiatic peoples now crushed beneath English and Russian domination. Thus Germany will create puissant allies for the “Second Punic War.” Germany must therefore strive to solidify the great Central Asian bloc—Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China.Professor Molden urges a “Pan-Asian railroad” from Constantinople to Peking.This should be especially alluring to Afghanistan, which would thereby become one of the great pivots of world-politics and trade.In fine: “Germany must free Asia.”As another prominent German writer, Friedrich Delitzsch, wrote in similar vein: “To renovate the East—such is Germany’s mission.”[128]

In such a mood, Germans hailed Japan’s absence of genuine hostility with the greatest satisfaction.The gust of rage which swept Germany at Japan’s seizure of Kiao-chao was soon allayed by numerous writers preaching reconciliation and eventual alliance with the mistress of the Far East. Typical of this pro-Japanese propaganda is an article by Herr J. Witte, a former official in the Far East, which appeared in 1915. Herr Witte chides his countrymen for their talk about the Yellow Peril. Such a peril may exist in the future, but it is not pressing at this moment, “at any rate for us Germans, who have no great territorial possessions in the Far East.... We might permit ourselves to speak of a Yellow Peril if there was a white solidarity. This, however, does not exist. We are learning this just now by bitter experience on our own flesh and blood. Our foes have marshalled peoples of all races against us in battle. So long as this helps them, all race-antipathies and race-interests are to them matters of supreme indifference. Under these circumstances, in the midst of a life-and-death struggle against the peoples of the white race, shall we play the rôle of guardian angel of these peoples against the yellow peoples? For us, as Germans, there is now only one supreme life-interest, to which all other interests must be subordinated: the safety and advancement of Germany and of Deutschtum in the world.” Herr Witte therefore advocates a “close political understanding between Germany and Japan. In future we can accomplish nothing in the teeth of Japan. Therefore we must get on good terms with Japan. And we can do it, too. Germany is, in fact, the country above all others who in the future has the best prospect of allying herself advantageously with the Far Eastern peoples.”[129]

And so it went throughout the war-years: both sides using all possible colored aid to down the white foe; both sides alike reckless of the ultimate racial consequences.

In fact, leaving ultimate consequences aside, many persons feared during the later phases of the war that Europe might be headed for immediate dissolution.As early as mid-1916, Lord Loreburn expressed apprehension lest the war was entailing general bankruptcy and “such a destruction of the male youth of Europe as will break the thin crust of civilization which has been built up since the Dark Ages.”[130] These fears were intensified by the Russian revolution of 1917, with its hideous corollary of Bolshevism which definitely triumphed before the close of that year. The Bolshevik triumph evoked despairing predictions like Lord Lansdowne’s: “We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilized world.”[131]

Well, the war was prolonged for another year, ending in the triumph of the Allies and America, though leaving Europe in the deplorable condition reviewed in the preceding chapter.The hopes of mankind were now centred on the Peace Conference, but these hopes were oversanguine, for the Versailles “settlement” was riddled with political and economic imperfections from the Saar to Shantung.

This was what a sceptical minority had feared from the first.At the very beginning of the war, for instance, the French publicist Urbain Gohier had predicted that when the diplomats gathered at the end of the conflict they would find the problem of constructive settlement insoluble.[132]

Most persons, however, had been more hopeful.Disappointment and disillusionment were therefore correspondingly intense.The majority of liberal-minded, forward-looking men and women throughout the world deplored the Versailles settlement’s faulty character, some, however, accepting the situation as the best of a bad business, others entirely repudiating it on the ground that by crystallizing an intolerable status it would entail worse disasters in the near future.

General Smuts, the South African delegate to the Conference, well represents the first attitude.In a formal protest against the Versailles settlement, General Smuts stated: “I have signed the peace treaty, not because I consider it a satisfactory document, but because it is imperatively necessary to close the war; because the world needs peace above all, and nothing could be more fatal than the continuance of the state of suspense between war and peace.The six months since the armistice was signed have, perhaps, been as upsetting, unsettling, and ruinous to Europe as the previous four years of war. I look upon the peace treaty as the close of these two chapters of war and armistice, and only on that ground do I agree to it. I say this now, not in criticism, but in faith; not because I wish to find fault with the work done, but rather because I feel that in the treaty we have not yet achieved the real peace to which our peoples were looking, and because I feel that the real work of making peace will only begin after this treaty has been signed, and a definite halt has thereby been called to the destructive passions that have been desolating Europe for nearly five years.”[133]

The English economist J. L. Garvin, who, like General Smuts, accepted the treaty faute de mieux, makes these trenchant comments upon the settlement itself: “Derisive human genius surveying with pity and laughter the present state of mankind and some of the obsolete means adopted at Paris to remedy it, might do most good by another satire like Rabelais, Gulliver, or Candide.But let us put from us here the temptation to conjure up vistas of the grotesque.Let us pursue these plain studies in common sense.A treaty even when signed is paper.It is in itself inoperative without the action or control of living forces which it seeks to express or repress.Treaties not drawn against sound and certain assets may be dishonored in the sequel like bad checks or bills.You do not get peace merely by putting it on paper.And, much more to the point, all that is called peace does not necessarily spell prosperity any more than all that glitters is gold. You can ‘make a solitude and call it peace.’ The quintessence of death or stupefaction resembles a kind of peace. You can prolong relative stagnation and depression and yet say that it is peace. But that would not be the reconciling and lasting, the constructive and the creative peace, as it was visioned by the Allied peoples in their greatest moments of insight and inspiration during the war. For that higher and wiser thing we lavished our pent-up energies and the accumulated treasure of a hundred years, and sent so many of our best to die.”[134]

That veteran student of world-politics Doctor E.J.Dillon put the matter succinctly when he wrote: “The peace is being made not, as originally projected, on the basis of the fourteen points, nor on the lines of territorial equilibrium, but by a compromise which misses the advantage of either, and combines certain evils of both.The treaty has failed to lay the axe to the roots of war, has perhaps increased their number while purporting to destroy them.The germs of future conflicts, not only between the recent belligerents, but also between other groups of states, are numerous, and if present symptoms may be trusted will sprout up in the fulness of time.”[135]

The badness of the Versailles treaties is nowhere more manifest than in the way they have alienated idealistic support and enthusiasm from the inchoate League of Nations. Multitudes of persons once zealous Leaguers now feel that the League has no moral foundation. Such persons contend that even were the covenant theoretically perfect, the League could no more succeed on the basis of the present peace settlement than a flawlessly designed palace could be erected if superimposed upon a quicksand.

Europe is thus in evil case.Her statesmen have failed to formulate a constructive settlement.Old problems remain unsolved while fresh problems arise.The danger is redoubled by the fact that both Europe and the entire world are faced with a new peril—Bolshevism.The menace of Bolshevism is simply incalculable.Bolshevism is a peril in some ways unprecedented in the world’s history.It is not merely a war against a social system, not merely a war against our civilization; it is a war of the hand against the brain.For the first time since man was man there is a definite schism between the hand and the head.Every principle which mankind has thus far evolved: community of interest, the solidarity of civilization and culture, the dignity of labor, of muscle, of brawn, dominated and illumined by intellect and spirit—all these Bolshevism howls down and tramples in the mud.

Bolshevism’s cardinal tenets—the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the destruction of the “classes” by social war—are of truly hideous import.The “classes,” as conceived by Bolshevism, are very numerous. They comprise not merely the “idle rich,” but also the whole of the upper and middle social strata, the landowning country folk, the skilled working men; in short, all except those who work with their untutored hands, plus the elect few who philosophize for those who work with their untutored hands.

The effect of such ideas, if successful, not only on our civilization, but also on the very fibre of the race, can be imagined.The death or degradation of nearly all persons displaying constructive ability, and the tyranny of the ignorant and anti-social elements, would be the most gigantic triumph of disgenics ever seen.Beside it the ill effects of war would pale into insignificance.Civilization would wither like a plant stricken by blight, while the race, summarily drained of its good blood, would sink like lead into the depths of degenerate barbarism.

This is precisely what is occurring in Russia to-day.Bolshevism has ruled Russia less than three years—and Russia is ruined.She ekes out a bare existence on the remains of past accumulations, on the surviving scraps of her material and spiritual capital.Everywhere are hunger, cold, disease, terror, physical and moral death.The “proletariat” is making its “clean sweep.”The “classes” are being systematically eliminated by execution, massacre, and starvation.The racial impoverishment is simply incalculable.Meanwhile Lenine, surrounded by his Chinese executioners, sits behind the Kremlin walls, a modern Jenghiz Khan plotting the plunder of a world.

Lenine’s Chinese “braves” are merely symptomatic of the intrigues which Bolshevism is carrying on throughout the non-white world.Bolshevism is, in fact, as anti-racial as it is anti-social.To the Bolshevik mind, with its furious hatred of constructive ability and its fanatical determination to enforce levelling, proletarian equality, the very existence of superior biological values is a crime.Bolshevism has vowed the proletarianization of the world, beginning with the white peoples.To this end it not only foments social revolution within the white world itself, but it also seeks to enlist the colored races in its grand assault on civilization.The rulers of Soviet Russia are well aware of the profound ferment now going on in colored lands.They watch this ferment with the same terrible glee that they watched the Great War and the fiasco of Versailles—and they plot to turn it to the same profit.

Accordingly, in every quarter of the globe, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States, Bolshevik agitators whisper in the ears of discontented colored men their gospel of hatred and revenge.Every nationalist aspiration, every political grievance, every social discrimination, is fuel for Bolshevism’s hellish incitement to racial as well as to class war.

And this Bolshevik propaganda has not been in vain.Its results already show in the most diverse quarters, and they are ominous for the future.China, Japan, Afghanistan, India, Java, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the “black belts” of our own United States: here is a partial list of the lands where the Bolshevik leaven in color is clearly at work.

Bolshevism thus reveals itself as the arch-enemy of civilization and the race.Bolshevism is the renegade, the traitor within the gates, who would betray the citadel, degrade the very fibre of our being, and ultimately hurl a rebarbarized, racially impoverished world into the most debased and hopeless of mongrelizations.

Therefore, Bolshevism must be crushed out with iron heels, no matter what the cost.If this means more war, let it mean more war.We know only too well war’s dreadful toll, particularly on racial values.But what war-losses could compare with the losses inflicted by the living death of Bolshevism?There are some things worse than war, and Bolshevism stands foremost among those dread alternatives.

So ends our survey of the white world as it emerges from the Great War.The prospect is not a brilliant one.Weakened and impoverished by Armageddon, handicapped by an unconstructive peace, and facing internal Bolshevist disaffection which must at all costs be mastered, the white world is ill-prepared to confront—the rising tide of color.What that tide portends will be the subject of the concluding chapters.

 

 

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PART III

THE DELUGE ON THE DIKES

 

CHAPTER X

THE OUTER DIKES

In my first chapter I showed that the rising tide of color to-day finds itself confronted by dikes erected by the white race during the centuries of its expansion.The reader will also remember that white expansion has taken two forms: settlement and political control.These two phases differ profoundly in character.Areas of settlement like North America have become integral portions of the white world.On the other hand, regions of political control like India are merely white dependencies, highly valuable perhaps, yet in the last analysis held by title of the sword.

Between these clearly contrasted categories lies an intermediate class of territories typified by South Africa, where whites have settled in large numbers without displacing the native populations.Lastly, there exist certain white territories which may be called “enclaves.”These enclaves have become thoroughly white by settlement, yet they are so distant from the main body of the white world and so contiguous to colored race-areas that white tenure does not possess that security which settlement and displacement of the aborigines normally confer.Australia typifies this anomalous class of cases.

The white defenses against the colored tide can be divided into what may be termed the “outer” and the “inner” dikes. The outer dikes (the regions of white political control) contain no settled white population, so that their abandonment, whatever the political or economic loss, would not directly affect white race-integrity. The question of their retention or abandonment should therefore (save in a few exceptional cases) be judged by political, economic, or strategic considerations. The inner dikes (the areas of white settlement), however, are a very different matter. Peopled as they are wholly or largely by whites, they have become parts of the race-heritage, which should be defended to the last extremity no matter if the costs involved are greater than their mere economic value would warrant. They are the true bulwarks of the race, the patrimony of future generations who have a right to demand of us that they shall be born white in a white man’s land. Ill will it fare if ever our race should close its ears to this most elemental call of the blood. Then, indeed, would be manifest the writing on the wall.

That issue, however, is reserved for the next chapter.Let us here examine the matter of the outer dikes—the regions of white political control.There, where the white man is not settler but suzerain, his suzerainty should, in the last analysis, depend on the character of the inhabitants.

Right here, let us clear away the doctrinaire pedantry that commonly obscures discussion about the retention or abandonment of white political control over racially non-white regions. Argument usually tends to crystallize around two antitheses. On the one side are the doctrinaire liberals, who maintain the “imprescriptible right” of every human group to attain independence, and of every sovereign state to retain independence. On the opposite side are the doctrinaire imperialists, who maintain the equally imprescriptible right of their particular nation to “vital expansion” regardless of injuries thereby inflicted upon other nations.

Now I submit that both these assumptions are unwarranted.There is no “imprescriptible right” to either independence or empire.It depends on the realities of each particular case.The extreme cases at either end of the scale can be adjudged offhand by ordinary common sense.No one except a doctrinaire liberal would be likely to assert that the Andaman Islanders had an imprescriptible right to independence, or that Haiti, which owed its independence only to a turn in European politics,[136] should forever remain a sovereign—international nuisance. On the other hand, the whole world (with the exception of Teutonic imperialists) denounced Germany’s attempt to swallow highly civilized Belgium as a crime against humanity.

In other words: realities, not abstract theories, decide.That does not please the doctrinaires, who insist on setting up Procrustean beds of theory on which realities should be racked or crammed.It does, however, conform to the dictates of nature, which decree that what is attuned shall live while the disharmonic and degenerate shall pass away.And nature usually has the last word.

Surveying the regions of white political control over non-white peoples in this realistic way, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of doctrinaire theory and blind prejudice, we may arrive at a series of conclusions which, though lacking the trim symmetry of the idealogue, will correspond to the facts in the various cases.

One thing is certain: the white man will have to recognize that the practically absolute world-dominion which he exercised during the nineteenth century can no longer be maintained.Largely because of that very dominion, colored races have been drawn out of their traditional isolation and have been quickened by white ideas, while the life-conserving nature of white rule has everywhere favored colored multiplication.These factors have combined to produce a wide-spread ferment which has been clearly visible for the past two decades, and which is destined to grow more acute in the near future.

This ferment would have developed even if the Great War had never occurred. However, the white world’s weakening through Armageddon has immensely accelerated the process and has opened up the possibility of violent “short cuts” which would have mutually disastrous consequences.Especially has it evoked in bellicose and fanatical minds the vision of a “Pan-Colored” alliance for the universal overthrow of white hegemony at a single stroke—a dream which would turn into a nightmare of race-war beside which the late struggle in Europe would seem the veriest child’s play.