PROOF OF THE INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES (_continued_). DIFFERENT
CIVILIZATIONS ARE MUTUALLY REPULSIVE. HYBRID RACES HAVE EQUALLY HYBRID
CIVILIZATIONS
If the human races were equal, the course of history would form an
affecting, glorious, and magnificent picture. The races would all have
been equally intelligent, with a keen eye for their true interests and
the same aptitude for conquest and domination. Early in the world’s
history, they would have gladdened the face of the earth with a crowd of
civilizations, all flourishing at the same time, and all exactly alike.
At the moment when the most ancient Sanscrit peoples were founding their
empire, and, by means of religion and the sword, were covering Northern
India with harvests, towns, palaces, and temples; at the moment when the
first Assyrian Empire was crowning the plains of the Tigris and
Euphrates with its splendid buildings, and the chariots and horsemen of
Nimroud were defying the four winds, we should have seen, on the African
coast, among the tribes of the prognathous negroes, the rise of an
enlightened and cultured social state, skilful in adapting means to
ends, and in possession of great wealth and power.
The Celts, in the course of their migrations, would have carried with
them to the extreme west of Europe the necessary elements of a great
society, as well as some tincture of the ancient wisdom of the East;
they would certainly have found, among the Iberian peoples spread over
the face of Italy, in Gaul and Spain and the islands of the
Mediterranean, rivals as well schooled as themselves in the early
traditions, as expert as they in the arts and inventions required for
civilization.
Mankind, at one with itself, would have nobly walked the earth, rich in
understanding, and founding everywhere societies resembling each other.
All nations would have judged their needs in the same way, asked nature
for the same things, and viewed her from the same angle. A short time
would have been sufficient for them to get into close contact with each
other and to form the complex network of relations that is everywhere so
necessary and profitable for progress.
The tribes that were unlucky enough to live on a barren soil, at the
bottom of rocky gorges, on the shores of ice-bound seas, or on steppes
for ever swept by the north winds—these might have had to battle against
the unkindness of nature for a longer time than the more favoured
peoples. But in the end, having no less wisdom and understanding than
the others, they would not have been backward in discovering that the
rigours of a climate has its remedies. They would have shown the
intelligent activity we see to-day among the Danes, the Norwegians, and
the Icelanders. They would have tamed the rebellious soil, and forced
it, in spite of itself, to be productive. In mountainous regions, we
should have found them leading a pastoral life, like the Swiss, or
developing industries like those of Cashmere. If their climate had been
so bad, and its situation so unfavourable, that there was obviously
nothing to be done with it, then the thought would have struck them that
the world was large, and contained many valleys and kindly plains; they
would have left their ungrateful country, and soon have found a land
where they could turn their energy and intelligence to good account.
Then the nations of the earth, equally enlightened and equally rich,
some by the commerce of their seething maritime cities, some by the
agriculture of their vast and flourishing prairies, others by the
industries of a mountainous district, others again by the facilities for
transport afforded them by their central position—all these, in spite of
the temporary quarrels, civil wars, and seditions inseparable from our
condition as men, might soon have devised some system of balancing their
conflicting interests. Civilizations identical in origin would, by a
long process of give and take, have ended by being almost exactly alike;
one might then have seen established that federation of the world which
has been the dream of so many centuries, and which would inevitably be
realized if all races were actually gifted, in the same degree, with the
same powers.
But we know that such a picture is purely fantastic. The first peoples
worthy of the name came together under the inspiration of an idea of
union which the barbarians who lived more or less near them not only
failed to conceive so quickly, but never conceived at all. The early
peoples emigrated from their first home and came across other peoples,
which they conquered; but these again neither understood nor ever
adopted with any intelligence the main ideas in the civilization which
had been imposed on them. Far from showing that all the tribes of
mankind are intellectually alike, the nations capable of civilization
have always proved the contrary, first by the absolutely different
foundations on which they based their states, and secondly by the marked
antipathy which they showed to each other. The force of example has
never awakened any instinct, in any people, which did not spring from
their own nature. Spain and the Gauls saw the Phœnicians, the Greeks,
and the Carthaginians, set up flourishing towns, one after the other, on
their coasts. But both Spain and the Gauls refused to copy the manners
and the government of these great trading powers. When the Romans came
as conquerors, they only succeeded in introducing a different spirit by
filling their new dominions with Roman colonies. Thus the case of the
Celts and the Iberians shows that civilization cannot be acquired
without the crossing of blood.
Consider the position of the American Indians at the present day. They
live side by side with a people which always wishes to increase in
numbers, to strengthen its power. They see thousands of ships passing up
and down their waterways. They know that the strength of their masters
is irresistible. They have no hope whatever of seeing their native land
one day delivered from the conqueror; their whole continent is
henceforth, as they all know, the inheritance of the European. A glance
is enough to convince them of the tenacity of those foreign institutions
under which human life ceases to depend, for its continuance, on the
abundance of game or fish. From their purchases of brandy, guns, and
blankets, they know that even their own coarse tastes would be more
easily satisfied in the midst of such a society, which is always
inviting them to come in, and which seeks, by bribes and flattery, to
obtain their consent. It is always refused. They prefer to flee from one
lonely spot to another; they bury themselves more and more in the heart
of the country, abandoning all, even the bones of their fathers. They
will die out, as they know well; but they are kept, by a mysterious
feeling of horror, under the yoke of their unconquerable repulsion from
the white race, and although they admire its strength and general
superiority, their conscience and their whole nature, in a word, their
blood, revolts from the mere thought of having anything in common with
it.
In Spanish America less aversion is felt by the natives towards their
masters. The reason is that they were formerly left by the central
Government under the rule of their Caciques. The Government did not try
to civilize them; it allowed them to keep their own laws and customs,
and, provided they became Christians, merely required them to pay
tribute. There was no question of colonization. Once the conquest was
made, the Spaniards showed a lazy tolerance to the conquered, and only
oppressed them spasmodically. This is why the Indians of South America
are less unhappy than those of the north, and continue to live on,
whereas the neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons will be pitilessly driven
down into the abyss.
Civilization is incommunicable, not only to savages, but also to more
enlightened nations. This is shown by the efforts of French goodwill and
conciliation in the ancient kingdom of Algiers at the present day, as
well as by the experience of the English in India, and the Dutch in
Java. There are no more striking and conclusive proofs of the unlikeness
and inequality of races.
We should be wrong to conclude that the barbarism of certain tribes is
so innate that no kind of culture is possible for them. Traces may be
seen, among many savage peoples, of a state of things better than that
obtaining now. Some tribes, otherwise sunk in brutishness, hold to
traditional rules, of a curious complexity, in the matter of marriage,
inheritance, and government. Their rites are unmeaning to-day, but they
evidently go back to a higher order of ideas. The Red Indians are
brought forward as an example; the vast deserts over which they roam are
supposed to have been once the settlements of the Alleghanians.[107]
Others, such as the natives of the Marianne Islands, have methods of
manufacture which they cannot have invented themselves. They hand them
down, without thought, from father to son, and employ them quite
mechanically.
When we see a people in a state of barbarism, we must look more closely
before concluding that this has always been their condition. We must
take many other facts into account, if we would avoid error.
Some peoples are caught in the sweep of a kindred race; they submit to
it more or less, taking over certain customs, and following them out as
far as possible. On the disappearance of the dominant race, either by
expulsion, or by a complete absorption in the conquered people, the
latter allows the culture, especially its root principles, to die out
almost entirely, and retains only the small part it has been able to
understand. Even this cannot happen except among nations related by
blood. This was the attitude of the Assyrians towards the Chaldean
culture, of the Syrian and Egyptian Greeks towards the Greeks of Europe,
of the Iberians, Celts, and Illyrians in face of the Roman ideas. If the
Cherokees, the Catawhas, the Muskhogees, the Seminoles, the Natchez, and
the like, still show some traces of the Alleghanian intelligence, I
cannot indeed infer that they are of pure blood, and directly descended
from the originating stock—this would mean that a race that was once
civilized can lose its civilization;—I merely say that if any of them
derives from the ancient conquering type as its source, the stream is a
muddy one, and has been mingled with many tributaries on the way. If it
were otherwise, the Cherokees would never have fallen into barbarism. As
for the other and less gifted tribes, they seem to represent merely the
dregs of the indigenous population, which was forced by the foreign
conquerors to combine together to form the basic elements of a new
social state. It is not surprising that these remnants of civilization
should have preserved, without understanding them, laws, rites, and
customs invented by men cleverer than themselves; they never knew their
meaning or theoretical principles, or regarded them as anything but
objects of superstitious veneration. The same argument applies to the
traces of mechanical skill found among them. The methods so admired by
travellers may well have been ultimately derived from a finer race that
has long disappeared. Sometimes we must look even further for their
origin. Thus, the working of mines was known to the Iberians,
Aquitanians, and the Bretons of the Scilly Isles; but the secret was
first discovered in Upper Asia, and thence brought long ago by the
ancestors of the Western peoples in the course of their migration.
The natives of the Caroline Islands are almost the most interesting in
Polynesia. Their looms, their carved canoes, their taste for trade and
navigation put a deep barrier between them and the other negroes. It is
not hard to see how they come to have these powers. They owe them to the
Malay blood in their veins; and as, at the same time, their blood is far
from being pure, their racial gifts have survived only in a stunted and
degraded form.
We must not therefore infer, from the traces of civilization existing
among a barbarous people, that it has ever been really civilized. It has
lived under the dominion of another tribe, of kindred blood but superior
to it; or perhaps, by merely living close to the other tribe, it has,
feebly and humbly, imitated its customs. The savage races of to-day have
always been savage, and we are right in concluding, by analogy, that
they will continue to be so, until the day when they disappear.
Their disappearance is inevitable as soon as two entirely unconnected
races come into active contact; and the best proof is the fate of the
Polynesians and the American Indians.
The preceding argument has established the following facts:
(i) The tribes which are savage at the present day have always been so,
and always will be, however high the civilizations with which they are
brought into contact.
(ii) For a savage people even to go on living in the midst of
civilization, the nation which created the civilization must be a nobler
branch of the same race.
(iii) This is also necessary if two distinct civilizations are to affect
each other to any extent, by an exchange of qualities, and give birth to
other civilizations compounded from their elements. That they should
ever be fused together is of course out of the question.
(iv) The civilizations that proceed from two completely foreign races
can only touch on the surface. They never coalesce, and the one will
always exclude the other. I will say more about this last point, as it
has not been sufficiently illustrated.
The fortune of war brought the Persian civilization face to face with
the Greek, the Greek with the Roman, the Egyptian with both Roman and
Greek; similarly the modern European civilization has confronted all
those existing to-day in the world, especially the Arabian.
The relations of Greek with Persian culture were manifold and
inevitable. A large part of the Hellenic population—the richest, if not
the most independent—was concentrated in the towns of the Syrian
littoral, and in the colonies of Asia Minor and the Euxine. These were,
soon after their foundation, absorbed in the dominions of the Great
King; the inhabitants lived under the eye of the satrap, though to a
certain extent they retained their democratic institutions. Again,
Greece proper, the Greece that was free, was always in close contact
with the cities of the Asiatic coast.
Were the civilizations of the two countries ever fused into one? We know
they were not. The Greeks regarded their powerful enemies as barbarians,
and their contempt was probably returned with interest. The two nations
were continually coming into contact, but their political ideas, their
private habits, the inner meaning of their public rites, the scope of
their art, and the forms of their government, remained quite distinct.
At Ecbatana only one authority was recognized; it was hereditary, and
limited in certain traditional ways, but was otherwise absolute. In
Hellas the power was subdivided among a crowd of different sovereigns.
The government was monarchical at Sparta, democratic at Athens,
aristocratic at Sicyon, tyrannic in Macedonia—a strange medley! Among
the Persians, the State religion was far nearer to the primitive idea of
_emanation_; it showed the same tendency to unity as the government
itself did, and had a moral and metaphysical significance that was not
without a certain philosophic depth. The Greek symbolism, on the other
hand, was concerned merely with the various outward appearances of
nature, and issued in a glorification of the human form. Religion left
the business of controlling a man’s conscience to the laws of the State;
as soon as the due rites were performed, and his meed of honour paid to
the local god or hero, the office of faith was complete. Further, the
rites themselves, the gods, and the heroes, were different in places a
few miles apart. If, in some sanctuaries like Olympia or Dodona, we seem
to find the worship, not of some special force of nature, but of the
cosmic principle itself, such a unity only makes the diversity of the
rest more remarkable; for this kind of worship was confined to a few
isolated places. Besides, the oracle of Dodona and the cult of the
Olympian Zeus were foreign importations.
As for the private customs of the Greeks, it is hardly necessary to show
how much they differed from those of the Persians. For a rich,
pleasure-loving, and cosmopolitan youth to imitate the habits of rivals
far more luxurious and outwardly refined than the Greeks, was to bring
himself into public contempt. Until the time of Alexander—in other
words, during the great, fruitful and glorious period of
Hellenism—Persia, in spite of its continual pressure, could not convert
Greece to its civilization.
With the coming of Alexander, this was curiously confirmed. Men believed
for a moment, when they saw Hellas conquering the kingdom of Darius,
that Asia was about to become Greek, or, still better, that the acts of
violence wrought in the madness of a single night by the conqueror
against the monuments of the country were, in their very excess, a proof
of contempt as well as hatred. But the burner of Persepolis soon changed
his mind. The change was so complete that his design at last became
apparent; it was to substitute himself purely and simply for the dynasty
of the Achaemenidae, and to rule like his predecessor or the great
Xerxes, with Greece as an appanage of his empire. In this way, the
Persian social system might have absorbed that of the Greeks.
In spite, however, of all Alexander’s authority, nothing of the kind
happened. His generals and soldiers never became used to seeing him in
his long clinging robe, wearing a turban on his head, surrounded by
eunuchs and denying his country. After his death, his system was
continued by some of his successors; they were, however, forced to
mitigate it. And why, as a fact, were they able to find the middle term
which became the normal condition of the Asiatics of the coast and the
Græco-Egyptians? Simply because their subjects consisted of a mixed
population of Greeks, Syrians, and Arabs, who had no reason to refuse
the compromise. Where, however, the races remained distinct, all terms
of union were impossible, and each country held to its national culture.
Similarly, right up to the last days of the Roman Empire, the hybrid
civilization that was dominant all over the East, including Greece
proper, had become much more Asiatic than Greek, owing to the great
preponderance of Asiatic blood in the mass of the people. The
intellectual life, it is true, took pride in being Hellenic. But it is
not hard to find, in the thought of the time, an Oriental strain
vitalizing all the products of the Alexandrian school, such as the
“centralized state” idea of the Græco-Syrian jurists. We see how the
different racial elements were balanced, and to which side the scale
inclined.
Other civilizations may be compared in the same way; and before ending
this chapter, I will say a few words about the relation between Arab
culture and our own.
No one can doubt their mutual repulsion. Our mediæval ancestors had
opportunities of seeing at close quarters the marvels of the Mussulman
State, when they willingly sent their sons to study in the schools of
Cordova. Yet nothing Arabian remains in Europe outside the nations that
have a tinge of Ishmaelitish blood. Brahmanic India showed no more
eagerness than ourselves to come to terms with Islam, and has, like us,
resisted all the efforts of its Mohammedan masters.
To-day, it is our turn to deal with the remains of Arab civilization. We
harry and destroy the Arabs, but we do not succeed in changing them,
although their civilization is not itself original, and so should have
less power of resistance. It is notorious that the Arabian people,
itself weak in numbers, continually incorporated the remnants of the
races it had conquered by the sword. The Mussulmans form a very mixed
population, with an equally hybrid culture, of which it is easy to
disentangle the elements. The conquering nucleus did not, before
Mohammed, consist of a new or unknown people. Its traditions were held
in common with the Semite and Hamite families from which it was
originally derived. It was brought into conflict with the Phœnicians and
the Jews, and had the blood of both in its veins. It played a
middleman’s part in their Red Sea trade, and on the eastern coasts of
India and Africa. It did the same, later, for the Persians and the
Romans. Many Arab tribes took part in the political life of Persia under
the Arsacidæ and Sassanidæ, while some of their princes, like
Odenathus,[108] were proclaimed Cæsar, some of their princesses, like
Zenobia, daughter of Amru and Queen of Palmyra, won a glory that was
distinctively Roman, and some of their adventurers, like Philip, even
raised themselves to the Imperial purple. Thus this hybrid nation had
never ceased, from the most ancient times, to make itself felt among the
powerful societies among which it lived. It had associated itself with
their work, and like a body half sunk in water, half exposed to the sun,
contained at one and the same time elements of barbarism and of an
advanced civilization.
Mohammed invented the religion that was best fitted to the mental state
of his people, where idolatry found many followers, but where
Christianity, distorted by heretics and Judaizers, made just as many
proselytes. In the religious system of the Prophet of Koresh the
reconciliation between the law of Moses and the Christian faith was more
complete than in the doctrines of the Church. This problem had greatly
exercised the minds of the early Catholics, and was always present to
the Oriental conscience. Hence Mohammed’s gift had already an appetizing
appearance, and besides, any theological novelty had a good chance of
gaining converts among the Syrians and Egyptians. To crown all, the new
religion came forward sword in hand; this was another guarantee of
success among the masses, who had no common bond of union, other than
the strong conviction of their helplessness.
It was thus that Islam came forth from the desert. Arrogant,
uninventive, and with a civilization that was already, for the most
part, Græco-Asiatic, it found the ground prepared for it. Its recruits,
on the East and South coasts of the Mediterranean, had already been
saturated with the complex product which it was bringing to them, and
which in turn it reabsorbed. The new cult, that had borrowed its
doctrines from the Church, the Synagogue, and the garbled traditions of
the Hedjaz and the Yemen, extended from Bagdad to Montpellier; and with
the cult came its Persian and Roman laws, its Græco-Syrian[109] and
Egyptian science, and its system of administration, which was tolerant
from the first, as is natural where there is no unity in the State
organism. We need not be astonished at the rapid progress in refinement
made by the Mussulmans. The greater part of the people had merely
changed their habits for the time being. When they began to play the
part of apostles in the world, their identity was not at once
recognized; they had not been known under their old names for some time.
Another important point must be remembered. In this varied collection of
peoples, each no doubt contributed its share to the common welfare. But
which of them had given the first push to the machine, and which
directed its motion for the short time it lasted? Why, the little
nucleus of Arab tribes that had come from the interior of the peninsula,
and consisted, not of philosophers, but of fanatics, soldiers,
conquerors, and rulers.
Arab civilization was merely the old Græco-Syrian civilization, modified
by Persian admixture, and revived and rejuvenated by the new, sharp
breath of a genius. Hence, although ready to make concessions, it could
not come to terms with any form of society that had a different origin
from its own, any more than the Greek culture could with the Roman,
although these were so near to each other and lived side by side for so
many centuries within the same Empire.
The preceding paragraphs are enough to show how impossible it is that
the civilizations belonging to racially distinct groups should ever be
fused together. The irreconcilable antagonism between different races
and cultures is clearly established by history, and such innate
repulsion must imply unlikeness and inequality. If it is admitted that
the European cannot hope to civilize the negro, and manages to transmit
to the mulatto only a very few of his own characteristics; if the
children of a mulatto and a white woman cannot really understand
anything better than a hybrid culture, a little nearer than their
father’s to the ideas of the white race,—in that case, I am right in
saying that the different races are unequal in intelligence.
I will not adopt the ridiculous method that is unhappily only too dear
to our ethnologists. I will not discuss, as they do, the moral and
intellectual standing of individuals taken one by one.
I need not indeed speak of morality at all, as I have already admitted
the power of every human family to receive the light of Christianity in
its own way. As to the question of intellectual merit, I absolutely
refuse to make use of the argument, “every negro is a fool.”[110] My
main reason for avoiding it is that I should have to recognize, for the
sake of balance, that every European is intelligent; and heaven keep me
from such a paradox!
I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such
passages in books written by missionaries or sea-captains, who declare
that some Yolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that
some Kaffir dances and plays the violin, and some Bambara knows
arithmetic.
I am ready to admit without proof all the marvels of this kind that
anyone can tell me, even about the most degraded savages. I have already
denied that even the lowest tribes are absolutely stupid. I actually go
further than my opponents, as I have no doubt that a fair number of
negro chiefs are superior, in the wealth of their ideas, the synthetic
power of their minds, and the strength of their capacity for action, to
the level usually reached by our peasants, or even by the average
specimens of our half-educated middle class. But, I say again, I do not
take my stand on the narrow ground of individual capacity. It seems to
me unworthy of science to cling to such futile arguments. If Mungo Park
or Lander have given a certificate of intelligence to some negro, what
is to prevent another traveller, who meets the same phœnix, from coming
to a diametrically opposite conclusion? Let us leave these puerilities,
and compare together, not men, but groups. When, as may happen some day,
we have carefully investigated what the different groups can and cannot
do, what is the limit of their faculties and the utmost reach of their
intelligence, by what nations they have been dominated since the dawn of
history—then and then only shall we have the right to consider why the
higher individuals of one race are inferior to the geniuses of another.
We may then go on to compare the powers of the average men belonging to
these types, and to find out where these powers are equal and where one
surpasses the other. But this difficult and delicate task cannot be
performed until the relative position of the different races has been
accurately, and to some extent mathematically, gauged. I do not even
know if we shall ever get clear and undisputed results, if we shall ever
be free to go beyond a mere general conclusion and come to such close
grips with the minor varieties as to be able to recognize, define, and
classify the lower strata and the average minds of each nation. If we
can do this, we shall easily be able to show that the activity, energy,
and intelligence of the least gifted individuals in the dominant races,
are greater than the same qualities in the corresponding specimens
produced by the other groups.[111]
Mankind is thus divided into unlike and unequal parts, or rather into a
series of categories, arranged, one above the other, according to
differences of intellect.
In this vast hierarchy there are two great forces always acting on each
member of the series. These forces are continually setting up movements
that tend to fuse the races together; they are, as I have already
indicated,[112] (i) resemblance in general bodily structure and (ii) the
common power of expressing ideas and sensations by the modulation of the
voice.
I have said enough about the first of these, and have shown the true
limits within which it operates.
I will now discuss the second point, and inquire what is the relation
between the power of a race and the merit of its language; in other
words, whether the strongest races have the best idioms, and if not, how
the anomaly may be explained.