the climate above the fortieth parallel of latitude. In no portion of
Southern Europe did it ever maintain itself, and when its members were
carried in numbers as slaves to Mauritius and Ceylon, they succumbed
to the change.[197] Even in Africa it is doubtful if it ever effected
a permanent settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean. Pulmonary
diseases and scrofula are the chief morbid changes which destroy its
emigrants.
In the West Indies and generally in tropical and sub-tropical America
they seem to flourish. In the United States the “colored people”
increase by birth more rapidly in proportion than the whites, though
this calculation includes the mulattoes and others of mixed blood.
Whether the Asian race has greater or less powers of acclimation
than others is a question of much significance at present, when the
teeming millions of the Celestial empire seem ready to pour forth in
resistless floods over the whole earth. We are not prepared to reply.
The subjection of this race to foreign climatic influences has been too
recent and under conditions too exceptional to furnish the requisite
data; and in their own land, the Chinese, from whom we look for the
most portentous migrations, have lived in a country which does not
present contrasts equal to those of the various zones.
The American race may be regarded as an exception to the others. The
area it always occupied extended from one polar circle to the other,
including every degree of altitude, and every extreme of temperature to
which man is exposed. No difference in the viability or the energy of
its members in various parts of the continent can be noted. The most
remarkable monuments of its toilsome industry were completed under the
tropical sun of Yucatan; while one of the most ingenious of its tribes
lived the farthest north of any human beings. The physical energy of
the stalwart Patagonian is not superior to that of the active Carib or
the northern Algonkin. We may possibly find the explanation of this in
the trend of the chief mountains and rivers of the continent, which
facilitated easy progress from north to south, while in the eastern
hemisphere the trend running parallel with the latitude, separated the
early peoples into smaller climatic areas.
While the facts so far as ascertained seem to point to the decision
that each race is confined to climatic conditions similar to that of
its original area of characterization, the theory has been advanced
that this is but for a time, that by persistence and repeated
sacrifices of the unfit, finally a remnant will survive fully able to
face the novel trials of the climatic change.[198]
This, however, is a theory only. It may be allowed credence to the
extent that the survival of a remnant is possible; but it would be at
the sacrifice of the distinctive qualities of the higher races; those
can flourish only under the physical conditions which gave them birth.
It has also been urged that the improved sanitary hygienic science of
modern times will do efficient battle against the lethal influences of
strange climes. Doubtless in individual cases such precautions are of
the highest value; they aid the system in withstanding malarial and
zymotic poisons; but the best of them, employed on the widest scale,
will prove sadly inadequate, as is shown by their failure in many a
tract in the temperate zone. If we cannot restore salubrity to the
Roman Campagna, or to Staten Island in New York Harbor, it is more than
wild to talk of rendering healthful the Congo Basin.
I am tempted, therefore, to consider this problem of acclimation
insoluble, and to express myself in the words of the learned physician
I have already quoted, “There is no such thing as acclimation. A race
never was acclimated, and in the present condition of the world, a race
never can become acclimated.”[199]
The second of our inquiries relates to
_The Problem of Amalgamation_
--that which the French call _métissage_ and the Americans
_miscegenation_. The fact that we have manufactured this “recent and
ill-formed word,” as Webster’s _Unabridged_ calls it, is evidence
that the questions involved in this problem touch us nearly. They
touch the whole world, and very closely. I know of nothing within
the range of human power to control, more decisive of the future
prosperity or failure of the human species than this of the effect of
race-intermarriage.
The consequences of such blendings may be studied with reference to the
viability of the offspring, their mental faculties, and their fecundity.
At the outset it is important to premise that the question cannot
be treated as simple and single. It is complex. The results of
race-crossings differ with races and with evironment. The law that
applies to one case in one place is not certainly good in other cases
and elsewhere.
It seems, for instance, tolerably certain that the cross between the
white and black races produces offspring (mulattoes) who are deficient
in physical vigor. It is well ascertained in the United States that
they are peculiarly prone to scrofula and consumption, unable to bear
hard work, and shorter lived than either the full black or the white.
This is not owing to our climate, as the same results are recognized
by the negroes of the Gold Coast, who for four hundred years have been
in constant contact with the whites.[200] In the West India Islands,
the mulattoes must be constantly reinforced by new crossings, or they
disappear.
The fertility of such unions, though generally equal if the number
of births alone is considered, is really less on account of the
greater mortality of the infants. As a rule, the third generation
of descendants of a marriage between the white and the Polynesian,
Australian or Dravidian, become extinct through short lives, feeble
constitutions or sterility. According to one writer, except a few small
islands in the Pacific, there is not an instance of a modern population
of mixed white blood, living by itself, which is not on the road to
extinction.[201]
It is not certain that this applies either to the crossing of the
Eurafrican or the African with the American race. The half-breed
between the negro and the Indian, of which we have examples in the
Cafusos of Brazil, the Zambos of Paraguay, the Chinos of Peru, and
the “Black Caribs” of St. Vincent, are said to be finely formed and
vigorous. Throughout Mexico, Central and South America, there has
been a blending of the white and red races on an enormous scale, and
the result has been that both physically and mentally this mixed race
has repeatedly taken precedence in political and social life over the
pure descendants of the European colonists. It is well-known that the
half-breeds of our frontiers, of British America and of Greenland, are
singularly hardy, intelligent and vigorous scouts, guides, hunters
and soldiers. Not a few of them have distinguished themselves in our
colleges, and later in clerical and political life.
It would appear also that in the earlier conditions of social life, no
such debility attended the crossing of the Eurafrican and African race
as seems at present to be the case. The only physiological explanation
which can be offered of the numerous negroid tribes of eastern and
southern Africa, is that they are the descendants of prolonged and
intimate unions between the pure negroes and members of the Hamitic and
Semitic divisions of the white race (see above, p. 185). This permits
the suggestion that there are special causes now at work which alter
the influences of race-mixture from what they once were.
Some of them are patent. In modern times it is an almost universal law
that all mixed-white populations derive their white blood exclusively
from the father, their dark blood exclusively from the mother. I
do not know that I can tell you precisely what effect this would
have,[202] but it is certain that such a divergence from what is
customary within the race limits would exert a decided influence both
physically and socially. It is generally believed among students of
heredity that the psychical qualities are inherited more from the
mother, the physical more from the father; and if this holds good
in most cases, we should expect the children of such unions to be
intellectually inferior to the average of their parents. This I think
is true. Advocates of miscegenation, such as de Quatrefages, Serres and
others, are apt to draw a different conclusion, because they compare
the average intellectual ability of the products of such unions with
the average of the lower race, and this is certainly in favor of the
mixed stock, but is an unscientific procedure.
It is also true that in perhaps ninety per cent. of the cases, these
mixed unions are illegal, and the children suffer under the stigma of
illegitimacy. This means more or less deficiency in home training,
education, legal protection, and social recognition. In primitive
conditions this was not the case, and hence race minglings at that time
were under far more favorable auspices.
In most modern communities the prejudice against members or partial
members of the dark races forces them to rest content with unequal
advantages, if not educational, at least social, and the recognition
of these invisible barriers must necessarily have a deteriorating
influence on ambition. This of course was not the case in primitive
society, where no other power was recognized than that of the strong
right arm.
The possibility of a vigorous and fertile cross-race under certain
conditions seems therefore to have been demonstrated by the past
history of the species. Is it a desirable result in itself? May we look
forward to the commingling of races as worth the fostering care of
states and societies? The question bristles with difficulties--moral,
not physical difficulties.
There can be no doubt but that any white mixed race is lower in the
scale of intelligence than the pure white race. A white man entails
indelible degradation on his descendants who takes in marriage a woman
of a darker race; and any relation other than that of marriage, no
matter if it does lift the lower race, is unauthorized by any sound
moral code. Still more to be deplored is the woman of the white race
who unites herself with a man of a lower ethnic type. It cannot be
too often repeated, too emphatically urged, that it is to the women
alone of the highest race that we must look to preserve the purity of
the type, and with it the claims of the race to be the highest. They
have no holier duty, no more sacred mission, than that of transmitting
in its integrity the heritage of ethnic endowment gained by the race
through thousands of generations of struggle. That philanthropy is
false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman
enduring the embrace of a colored man.
The two problems we have now discussed seem to present a dilemma. The
pure races do not flourish out of their physiological surroundings;
and yet some of them are not adequate for the work required by modern
culture. What resource have we? The answer is, in the union of the
lower races among themselves, especially the Mongolian and the African.
Thus we may expect a blending capable of resisting the heat of the
tropics, and intelligent enough to carry out the directions of that
race which will ever and everywhere maintain its supremacy so long as
it maintains its ethnic purity--the Eurafrican.
Let us now turn to
_The Problem of Civilization._
It is one which has arisen within the last two or three centuries, and
is now so urgent that it will have an instant reply. With increased
means of locomotion and augmented love of progress, civilization is
now transported, with all its complex forces, to every nation and
every tribe, no matter where or of what race, and the question is
put point blank, Will you accept this precious gift, or will you
have it forced upon you, with such results as may happen? Japan has
welcomed the message, inscrutable China hesitates, Persia wavers, the
miserable Australians refuse, the savages turn their back--all in vain;
the message is importunate, will take no denial, must be accepted.
Opposition means destruction. The Bechuana kraal which refuses to have
a grand opera house and electric lights, if the European sees fit to
put them there, will be wiped out of existence. So will every tribe,
every nation, every race, which sets forth to oppose the resistless
flow of civilized progress.
Preservation, however, and not destruction, is the maxim of the ripest
culture. The Tasmanian is extinct, the Polynesian disappearing, many
an American tribe lives only in name, all gone down before the fierce
flames of a civilization which did not lighten, but consumed them. Many
another people is disappearing in the same way, in spite of the devoted
efforts of earnest men and women to save them, to bring them into
accord with the thought of the higher race, to teach them the boundless
blessings of European enlightenment.
What is the history of these efforts? Failure, and yet again failure.
Consider the history of the attempts to bring the American race into
accord with the European. There were the noble endeavors of the Jesuits
in Paraguay, the untiring zeal of the Franciscans in Yucatan, the
admirable devotion of the Moravian brethren in the northern continent,
and the long list of missionary societies in Protestant churches. These
represent the most sustained, unselfish and enlightened efforts which
have ever been made to civilize the Indians. They are of the same
nature and on the same plan as those which have been and still are
directed toward other savage peoples, the Polynesians and Africans for
example.
Have they been successful? Can an instance be adduced where they have
achieved a full and permanent introduction of a savage tribe to the
real benefits of our civilization?
I cannot answer for the history of missions throughout the world, but
I can and do for my special field, America, and I say, not a single
instance of success can be named. The Jesuits and the Moravians
succeeded, indeed, in reclaiming the natives from their wild life;
they transformed them from warring savages into peaceful planters;
from drunken, cruel and superstitious, they made them sober, kind
and religious. This was a noble, an admirable result. But were their
converts any the more able to accept the civilization of Europe? Not a
whit. David Zeisberger’s last sermon was a wail that his sixty years’
of missionary work had failed to accomplish this result. Ten years
after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, their extensive
“reductions,” which at one time included thirty or forty thousand
Christianized natives, were a heap of ruins, and the converts dispersed
to the four winds--and this after nearly two centuries of training!
Should we conclude from these sad histories that it is impossible to
bring the existing savage nations into accord with our own culture?
This is not my conclusion. Rather I infer that we have not tried the
proper measures. We have relied almost exclusively on missionary
religious work, forgetting that our religion is only one part of our
civilization, and, so far as it is dogmatic and ceremonial, much the
least part. We have been singularly inconsequent. We send our own
children six days to a secular school, and only on the seventh to a
Sunday-school; but the poor Indian we send to Sunday-school all seven
days, and then expect him to have an education like our own! Our
missionaries hold up to the savage pictures of Christian brotherhood,
of unselfish motive, of universal charity, which he soon finds have
no existence in Christian communities or modern civilization. If he
is an honest convert, he is absolutely disqualified from contact with
civilized peoples! The Jesuits and the Moravians, both practical
orders, knew this well, and therefore not only prevented their acolytes
learning European tongues, but used every means at their command to
banish all relations between the two races in those under their control.
It may seem uncharitable in me to oppose and condemn missionary
enterprises in savage communities; but I do so under the full
conviction that as usually conducted they fail, and are bound to fail,
in the most excellent aim they have in view. To succeed, they should
be combined with a broad secular education, with a full recognition
of the real impulses of modern life, and an effort to inculcate sound
principles rather than respect for ceremonies and dogmas, about
which the Christian sects themselves are never in unison. The native
religious and moral codes should be studied, and all that is good in
them--generally there is a great deal of good--should be retained;
right actions should be based on respect for law, on the inherent sense
of justice, on natural affection, and not merely on ecclesiastical
edicts. Above all, independence of thought should be encouraged, the
principles of religious and political freedom should be held up as
superior to those of subjection, and the convert should be instructed
that attachment to any particular creed is in no wise requisite to
enjoy the best results of civilization.
It may be objected that doctrines such as these would leave the
missionary as such little to teach. I reply that these doctrines are
true, and are those necessary to the reception of civilization, and
if they are omitted or obscured, the missionary is not an apostle of
light, but of darkness, and that his efforts will prove unsuccessful in
the future, as they have in the past.
The consideration of this problem of civilization leads us to cast a
glance at the future and to ponder on
_The Destiny of Races._
We are well aware that many a family, many a tribe, many a linguistic
stock, has perished off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of its
existence. Of others we know but the “naked nominations.” May not whole
races have followed the same fatal course? Nay, more, may not some of
the existing races be likewise doomed, as the mature tree, to fall and
disappear?
It was the opinion of the learned Broca that certain osseous remains in
Europe point to a race once there entirely unlike any other, modern
or ancient.[203] The gloomy precedent is established, therefore, and
we have to reflect if it applies to any now living varieties of our
species.
Beginning at home, we may first inquire concerning the American race.
The question, Are the Indians dying out? was investigated some years
ago by learned authorities at Washington, who announced the cheerful
result that, contrary to the universal opinion, the red man is not
decreasing at all, but increasing in numbers![204]
I have studied these pleasing statements with care, and regret that
I do not reach the same satisfactory conclusions. The writers in
question take no account of the signs of a dense ancient population
in the Ohio valley, in Michigan, in Florida, in the Pueblo region;
they take for granted that the estimates of all the early voyagers
and travelers were gross exaggerations; they pay no attention to the
historic fact that the natives of the Atlantic coast suffered severely
from epidemic diseases before the English established their first
settlements, diseases probably disseminated from the Spanish colonies
in Florida or Mexico; finally, they commit the fatal ethnographic error
of confounding under the name “Indians” both the pure and the mixed
members of the race.
This last oversight vitiates all the argument. No one is prepared
to say that some faint strain of native American blood may not be
perpetuated indefinitely. But this is not the survival of the race or
of the “Indians,” any more than the Normans survive to-day in England.
My own studies convince me that the American race is and has long
been disappearing, both actually, tribe by tribe, and relatively, by
admixture with the whites. In our own area there were many tribes once
of considerable numbers, who have become wholly extinct. The Timucuas
of Florida, the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Monacans of Virginia,
the Mohegans of New York, the Boethucs of Newfoundland, have no living
representatives. The whole of the inhabitants of the Bahamas and
Greater Antilles were hurried to destruction in a couple of generations
after the discovery by Columbus. The list would be long were I to
recapitulate the dead languages known by name or by a few sentences in
some old missionary book, to the student of American linguistics.
The process is not suspended. Beginning at the north with the Eskimos,
we find their number steadily diminishing;[205] the Athabascas,
according to Petitot, are but a wreck of their former selves; of the
tribes of the United States, Miss Alice Fletcher, who has traveled
extensively among them, assures me that in a few generations there will
be scarcely any of pure descent surviving; and I have noted for myself
on the reservations what an increasing proportion of the young people
reveal the infusion of European blood.
The same is true all over the Continent. The American Indian, as such,
is destined to disappear before European civilization. If he retains
his habits he will be exterminated; if he aims to preserve an unmixed
descent, he will be crushed out by disease and competition; his only
resource is to blend his race with the whites, and this infallibly
means his disappearance from the scene.
The Island World, extending from Easter Island to Madagascar, presents
the same spectacle. The aboriginal, undersized Negritos have long
disappeared from many of the larger islands where they lived in
historic times; and on the Philippines and elsewhere the report is that
they are slowly but steadily drifting toward annihilation.[206] The
Tasmanians have perished to the last man; the Australians are one-fifth
what they were estimated by the best authorities at the beginning of
the century; the Maoris of New Zealand have lessened one-half; the
natives of Easter Island have sunk from twenty-five hundred in 1850
to less than three hundred; and so on for nearly all the Polynesian
islands.
This extreme fatality has received the earnest attention of
philanthropists and scientific physicians. Its causes are visible.
They are the introduction of new epidemics, as measles, small-pox,
syphilis and consumption, the last mentioned peculiarly fatal, and
now recognized as eminently contagious under certain conditions; an
increased infant mortality; drunkenness and its consequences; and
diminished fecundity in the women. This last is both one of the most
potent and one of the obscurest of the causes of diminished population.
Why at some certain period a people should be smitten with sterility is
a mysterious fact, for which the explanation must be postponed until
we become better acquainted with the many enigmas which surround the
process of reproduction.
Add to the death-rate the considerable percentage of children who are
born of unions with the White, the Asian or the African races, and are
thus no longer representatives of the ancestral stock, and we must
acknowledge that these insular peoples are in no better, even a worse
case than the American Indians. They, too, are sitting beneath the
Damocles sword of extinction.
Such an assertion is doubtfully applicable to the Austafrican race. I
have already referred to some statistics showing its heavy mortality
in the isles of France and Ceylon, and the German ethnographer Ratzel
is inclined to believe that it is diminishing in Central Africa
itself.[207] But the census returns of our own country and of the West
Indies show a positive and rapid increase particularly if we include
the large population of mixed blood.