The socialism of Karl Marx is characteristically inclined to peaceable

measures and disinclined to a coercive government and belligerent

politics. It is, or at least it was, strongly averse to international

jealousy and patriotic animosity, and has taken a stand against

armaments, wars, and dynastic aggrandisement. At the time of the

French-Prussian war the official organisation of Marxism, the

International, went so far in its advocacy of peace as to urge the

soldiery on both sides to refuse to fight. After the campaign had warmed

the blood of the two nations, this advocacy of peace made the

International odious in the eyes of both French and Germans. War begets

patriotism, and the socialists fell under the reproach of not being

sufficiently patriotic. After the conclusion of the war the Socialistic

Workingmen's Party of Germany sinned against the German patriotic

sentiment in a similar way and with similarly grave results. Since the

foundation of the empire and of the Social-Democratic party, the

socialists and their doctrines have passed through a further experience

of a similar kind, but on a larger scale and more protracted. The

government has gradually strengthened its autocratic position at home,

increased its warlike equipment, and enlarged its pretensions in

international politics, until what would have seemed absurdly impossible

a generation ago is now submitted to by the German people, not only with

a good grace, but with enthusiasm. During all this time that part of the

population that has adhered to the socialist ideals has also grown

gradually more patriotic and more loyal, and the leaders and keepers of

socialist opinion have shared in the growth of chauvinism with the rest

of the German people. But at no time have the socialists been able to

keep abreast of the general upward movement in this respect. They have

not attained the pitch of reckless loyalty that animates the

conservative German patriots, although it is probably safe to say that

the Social Democrats of to-day are as good and headlong patriots as the

conservative Germans were a generation ago. During all this period of

the new era of German political life the socialists have been freely

accused of disloyalty to the national ambition, of placing their

international aspirations above the ambition of imperial aggrandisement.

The socialist spokesmen have been continually on the defensive. They

set out with a round opposition to any considerable military

establishment, and have more and more apologetically continued to oppose

any "undue" extension of the warlike establishments and the warlike

policy. But with the passage of time and the habituation to warlike

politics and military discipline, the infection of jingoism has

gradually permeated the body of Social Democrats, until they have now

reached such a pitch of enthusiastic loyalty as they would not patiently

hear a truthful characterisation of. The spokesmen now are concerned to

show that, while they still stand for international socialism, consonant

with their ancient position, they stand for national aggrandisement

first and for international comity second. The relative importance of

the national and the international ideals in German socialist

professions has been reversed since the seventies.[18] The leaders are

busy with interpretation of their earlier formulations. They have come

to excite themselves over nebulous distinctions between patriotism and

jingoism. The Social Democrats have come to be German patriots first and

socialists second, which comes to saying that they are a political party

working for the maintenance of the existing order, with modifications.

They are no longer a party of revolution, but of reform, though the

measure of reform which they demand greatly exceeds the Hohenzollern

limit of tolerance. They are now as much, if not more, in touch with the

ideas of English liberalism than with those of revolutionary Marxism.

The material and tactical exigencies that have grown out of changes in

the industrial system and in the political situation, then, have brought

on far-reaching changes of adaptation in the position of the

socialists. The change may not be extremely large at any one point, so

far as regards the specific articles of the programme, but, taken as a

whole, the resulting modification of the socialistic position is a very

substantial one. The process of change is, of course, not yet

completed,--whether or not it ever will be,--but it is already evident

that what is taking place is not so much a change in amount or degree of

conviction on certain given points as a change in kind,--a change in the

current socialistic habit of mind.

The factional discrepancies of theory that have occupied the socialists

of Germany for some years past are evidence that the conclusion, even a

provisional conclusion, of the shifting of their standpoint has not been

reached. It is even hazardous to guess which way the drift is setting.

It is only evident that the past standpoint, the standpoint of

neo-Hegelian Marxism, cannot be regained,--it is a forgotten standpoint.

For the immediate present the drift of sentiment, at least among the

educated, seems to set toward a position resembling that of the National

Socials and the Rev. Mr. Naumann; that is to say, imperialistic

liberalism. Should the conditions, political, social, and economic,

which to-day are chiefly effective in shaping the habits of thought

among the German people, continue substantially unchanged and continue

to be the chief determining causes, it need surprise no one to find

German socialism gradually changing into a somewhat characterless

imperialistic democracy. The imperial policy seems in a fair way to get

the better of revolutionary socialism, not by repressing it, but by

force of the discipline in imperialistic ways of thinking to which it

subjects all classes of the population. How far a similar process of

sterilisation is under way, or is likely to overtake the socialist

movement in other countries, is an obscure question to which the German

object-lesson affords no certain answer.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from _The Quarterly Journal of Economics_,

Vol. XXI, Feb., 1907.

[2] "Scientific" is here used in the half-technical sense which by usage

it often has in this connection, designating the theories of Marx and

his followers.

[3] There is, indeed, a remarkable consistency, amounting substantially

to an invariability of position, in Marx's writing, from the _Communist

Manifesto_ to the last volume of the _Capital_. The only portion of the

great _Manifesto_ which became antiquated, in the apprehension of its

creators, is the polemics addressed to the "Philosophical" socialists of

the forties and the illustrative material taken from contemporary

politics. The main position and the more important articles of

theory--the materialistic conception, the doctrine of class struggle,

the theory of value and surplus value, of increasing distress, of the

reserve army, of the capitalistic collapse--are to be found in the

_Critique of Political Economy_ (1859), and much of them in the _Misery

of Philosophy_ (1847), together with the masterful method of analysis

and construction which he employed throughout his theoretical work.

[4] _Cf._ Engels, _Feuerbach_ (English translation, Chicago, 1903),

especially Part IV, and various papers published in the _Neue Zeit_;

also the preface to the _Communist Manifesto_ written in 1888; also the

preface to volume ii. of _Capital_, where Engels argues the question of

Marx's priority in connection with the leading theoretical principles of

his system.

[5] _Cf._ _Feuerbach_, as above; _The Development of Socialism from

Utopia to Science_, especially sections ii and iii.

[6] Such a socialist as Anton Menger, _e.g._, comes into the neo-Marxian

school from without, from the field of modern scientific inquiry, and

shows, at least virtually, no Hegelian color, whether in the scope of

his inquiry, in his method, or in the theoretical work which he puts

forth. It should be added that his _Neue Staatslehre_, and _Neue

Sittenlehre_ are the first socialistic constructive work of substantial

value as a contribution to knowledge, outside of economic theory proper,

that has appeared since Lassalle. The efforts of Engels (_Ursprung der

Familie_) and Bebel (_Die Frau_) would scarcely be taken seriously as

scientific monographs even by hot-headed socialists if it were not for

the lack of anything better. Menger's work is not Marxism, whereas

Engels's and Bebel's work of this class is practically without value or

originality. The unfitness of the Marxian postulates and methods for the

purposes of modern science shows itself in the sweeping barrenness of

socialistic literature all along that line of inquiry into the evolution

of institutions for the promotion of which the materialistic dialectic

was invented.

[7] This contrast holds between the original Marxism of Marx and the

scope and method of modern science; but it does not, therefore, hold

between the latter-day Marxists--who are largely imbued with

post-Darwinian concepts--and the non-Marxian scientists. Even Engels, in

his latter-day formulation of Marxism, is strongly affected with the

notions of post-Darwinian science, and reads Darwinism into Hegel and

Marx with a good deal of _naivete_. (See his _Feuerbach_, especially pp.

93-98 of the English translation.) So, also, the serious but scarcely

quite consistent qualifications of the materialistic conception offered

by Engels in the letters printed in the _Sozialistische Akademiker_,

1895.

[8] The fact that the theoretical structures of Marx collapse when their

elements are converted into the terms of modern science should of itself

be sufficient proof that those structures were not built by their maker

out of such elements as modern science habitually makes use of. Marx was

neither ignorant, imbecile, nor disingenuous, and his work must be

construed from such a point of view and in terms of such elements as

will enable his results to stand substantially sound and convincing.

[9] Cf. _Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus_, especially the first two

(critical) chapters. Bernstein's reverent attitude toward Marx and

Engels, as well as his somewhat old-fashioned conception of the scope

and method of science, gives his discussion an air of much greater

consonance with the orthodox Marxism than it really has. In his later

expressions this consonance and conciliatory animus show up more

strongly rather than otherwise. (See _Socialism and Science_, including

the special preface written for the French edition.) That which was to

Marx and Engels the point of departure and the guiding norm--the

Hegelian dialectic--is to Bernstein a mistake from which scientific

socialism must free itself. He says, _e.g._ (_Voraussetzungen_, end of

ch. iv.), "The great things achieved by Marx and Engels they have

achieved not by the help of the Hegelian dialectic, but in spite of it."

The number of the "revisionists" is very considerable, and they are

plainly gaining ground as against the Marxists of the older line of

orthodoxy. They are by no means agreed among themselves as to details,

but they belong together by virtue of their endeavor to so construe (and

amend) the Marxian system as to bring it into consonance with the

current scientific point of view. One should rather say points of view,

since the revisionists' endeavors are not all directed to bringing the

received views in under a single point of view. There are two main

directions of movement among the revisionists: (_a_) those who, like

Bernstein, Conrad Schmidt, Tugan-Baranowski, Labriola, Ferri, aim to

bring Marxism abreast of the standpoint of modern science, essentially

Darwinists; and (_b_) those who aim to return to some footing on the

level of the romantic philosophy. The best type and the strongest of the

latter class are the neo-Kantians, embodying that spirit of revulsion to

romantic norms of theory that makes up the philosophical side of the

reactionary movement fostered by the discipline of German imperialism.

(See K. Vorlaender, _Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus_.)

Except that he is not officially inscribed in the socialist calendar,

Sombart might be cited as a particularly effective revisionist, so far

as concerns the point of modernising Marxism and putting the modernised

materialistic conception to work.

[10] _Cf._ the files of the _Neue Zeit_, particularly during the

controversy with Bernstein, and _Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische

Programm_.

[11] The "idealist" socialists are even more in evidence outside of

Germany. They may fairly be said to be in the ascendant in France, and

they are a very strong and free-spoken contingent of the socialist

movement in America. They do not commonly speak the language either of

science or of philosophy, but, so far as their contentions may be

construed from the standpoint of modern science, their drift seems to be

something of the kind indicated above. At the same time the spokesmen of

this scattering and shifting group stand for a variety of opinions and

aspirations that cannot be classified under Marxism, Darwinism, or any

other system of theory. At the margin they shade off into theology and

the creeds.

[12] Throughout the revisionist literature in Germany there is a visible

softening of the traits of the doctrine of the class struggle, and the

like shows itself in the programmes of the party. Outside of Germany the

doctrinaire insistence on this tenet is weakening even more decidedly.

The opportunist politicians, with strong aspirations, but with

relatively few and ill-defined theoretical preconceptions, are gaining

ground.

[13] _Cf._ Bernstein, _Die heutige Sozialdemokratie in Theorie

und Praxis_, an answer to Brunhuber, _Die heutige Sozialdemokratie_,

which should be consulted in the same connection: Goldscheid,

_Verelendungs- oder Meliorationstheorie_; also Sombart, _Sozialismus

und soziale Bewegung_, 5th edition, pp. 86-89.

[14] Accordingly, in later Marxian handling of the questions of

exploitation and accumulation, the attention is centered on the "surplus

product" rather than on the "surplus value." It is also currently held

that the doctrines and practical consequences which Marx derived from

the theory of surplus value would remain substantially well founded,

even if the theory of surplus value was given up. These secondary

doctrines could be saved--at the cost of orthodoxy--by putting a theory

of surplus product in the place of the theory of surplus value, as in

effect is done by Bernstein (_Socialdemokratie in Theorie und Praxis_,

sec. 5. Also various of the essays included in _Zur Geschichte und

Theorie des Sozialismus_).

[15] The "right to the full product of labor" and the Marxian theory of

exploitation associated with that principle has fallen into the

background, except as a campaign cry designed to stir the emotions of

the working class. Even as a campaign cry it has not the prominence, nor

apparently the efficacy, which it once had. The tenet is better

preserved, in fact, among the "idealists", who draw for their

antecedents on the French Revolution and the English philosophy of

natural rights, than among the latter-day Marxists.

[16] It is, of course, well known that even in the transactions and

pronounciamentos of the International a good word is repeatedly said for

the trade-unions, and both the Gotha and the Erfurt programmes speak in

favor of labor organisations, and put forth demands designed to further

the trade-union endeavors. But it is equally well known that these

expressions were in good part perfunctory, and that the substantial

motive behind them was the politic wish of the socialists to conciliate

the unionists, and make use of the unions for the propaganda. The early

expressions of sympathy with the unionist cause were made for an

ulterior purpose. Later on, in the nineties, there comes a change in the

attitude of the socialist leaders toward the unions.

[17] _Cf._ _Kapital_, vol. i, ch. xiii, sect 10.

[18] _Cf._ Kautsky, _Erfurter Programm_, ch. v, sect. 13; Bernstein,

_Voraussetzungen_, ch. iv, sect. e.

THE MUTATION THEORY AND THE BLOND RACE[1]

The theories of racial development by mutation, associated with the name

of Mendel, when they come to be freely applied to man, must greatly

change the complexion of many currently debated questions of race--as to

origins, migrations, dispersion, chronology, cultural derivation and

sequence. In some respects the new theories should simplify current

problems of ethnology, and they may even dispense with many analyses and

speculations that have seemed of great moment in the past.

The main postulate of the Mendelian theories--the stability of type--has

already done much service in anthropological science, being commonly

assumed as a matter of course in arguments dealing with the derivation

and dispersion of races and peoples. It is only by force of this

assumption that ethnologists are able to identify any given racial stock

over intervals of space or time, and so to trace the racial affinities

of any given people. Question has been entertained from time to time as

to the racial fixity of given physical traits--as, _e.g._, stature, the

cephalic indices, or hair and eye color--but on the whole these and

other standard marks of race are still accepted as secure grounds of

identification.[2] Indeed, without some such assumption any ethnological

inquiry must degenerate into mere wool-gathering.

But along with this, essentially Mendelian, postulate of the stability

of types, ethnologists have at the same time habitually accepted the

incompatible Darwinian doctrine that racial types vary incontinently

after a progressive fashion, arising through insensible cumulative

variations and passing into new specific forms by the same method, under

the Darwinian rule of the selective survival of slight and unstable

(non-typical) variations. The effect of these two incongruous premises

has been to leave discussions of race derivation somewhat at loose ends

wherever the two postulates cross one another.

If it be assumed, or granted, that racial types are stable, it follows

as a matter of course that these types or races have not arisen by the

cumulative acquirement of unstable non-specific traits, but must have

originated by mutation or by some analogous method, and this view must

then find its way into anthropology as into the other biological

sciences. When such a step is taken an extensive revision of questions

of race will be unavoidable, and an appreciable divergence may then be

looked for among speculations on the mutational affinities of the

several races and cultures.

Among matters so awaiting revision are certain broad questions of

derivation and ethnography touching the blond race or races of Europe.

Much attention, and indeed much sentiment, has been spent on this

general topic. The questions involved are many and diverse, and many of

them have been subject of animated controversy, without definitive

conclusions.

The mutation theories, of course, have immediately to do with the facts

of biological derivation alone, but when the facts are reviewed in the

light of these theories it will be found that questions of cultural

origins and relationship are necessarily drawn into the inquiry. In

particular, an inquiry into the derivation and distribution of the

blond stock will so intimately involve questions of the Aryan speech and

institutions as to be left incomplete without a somewhat detailed

attention to this latter range of questions. So much so that an inquiry

into the advent and early fortunes of the blond stock in Europe will

fall, by convenience, under two distinct but closely related captions:

The Origin of the Blond Type, and The Derivation of the Aryan Culture.

* * * * *

(a) It is held, on the one hand, that there is but a single blond race,

type or stock (Keane, Lapouge, Sergi), and on the other hand that there

are several such races or types, more or less distinct but presumably

related (Deniker, Beddoe, and other, especially British, ethnologists).

(b) There is no good body of evidence going to establish a great

antiquity for the blond stock, and there are indications, though perhaps

inconclusive, that the blond strain, including all the blond types, is

of relatively late date--unless a Berber (Kabyle) blond race is to be

accepted in a more unequivocal manner than hitherto. (c) Neither is

there anything like convincing evidence that this blond strain has come

from outside of Europe--except, again, for the equivocal Kabyle--or that

any blond race has ever been widely or permanently distributed outside

of its present European habitat, (d) The blond race is not found

unmixed. In point of pedigree all individuals showing the blond traits

are hybrids, and the greater number of them show their mixed blood in

their physical traits. (e) There is no community, large or small, made

up exclusively of blonds, or nearly so, and there is no good evidence

available that such an all-blond or virtually all-blond community ever

has existed, either in historic or prehistoric times. The race appears

never to have lived in isolation. (f) It occurs in several (perhaps

hybrid) variants--unless these variants are to be taken (with Deniker)

as several distinct races, (g) Counting the dolicho-blond as the

original type of the race, its nearest apparent relative among the races

of mankind is the Mediterranean (of Sergi), at least in point of

physical traits. At the same time the blond race, or at least the

dolicho-blond type, has never since neolithic times, so far as known,

extensively and permanently lived in contact with the Mediterranean. (h)

The various (national) ramifications of the blond stock--or rather the

various racial mixtures into which an appreciable blond element

enters--are all, and to all appearance have always been, of Aryan

("Indo-European," "Indo-Germanic") speech--with the equivocal exception

of the Kabyle. (i) Yet far the greater number and variety (national and

linguistic) of men who use the Aryan speech are not prevailingly blond,

or even appreciably mixed with blond. (j) The blond race, or the peoples

with an appreciable blond admixture, and particularly the communities in

which the dolicho-blond element prevails, show little or none of the

peculiarly Aryan institutions--understanding by that phrase not the

known institutions of the ancient Germanic peoples, but that range of

institutions said by competent philologists to be reflected in the

primitive Aryan speech. (k) These considerations raise the presumption

that the blond race was not originally of Aryan speech or of Aryan

culture, and they also suggest (l) that the Mediterranean, the nearest

apparent relative of the dolicho-blond, was likewise not originally

Aryan.

* * * * *

Accepting the mutation theory, then, for the purpose in hand, and

leaving any questions of Aryanism on one side for the present, a

canvass of the situation so outlined may be offered in such bold, crude

and summary terms as should be admissible in an analysis which aims to

be tentative and provisional only. It may be conceived that the

dolichocephalic blond originated as a mutant of the Mediterranean type

(which it greatly resembles in its scheme of biometric measurements[3])

probably some time after that race had effected a permanent lodgment on

the continent of Europe. The Mediterranean stock may be held (Sergi and

Keane) to have come into Europe from Africa,[4] whatever its remoter

derivation may have been. It is, of course, not impossible that the

mutation which gave rise to the dolicho-blond may have occurred before

the parent stock left Africa, or rather before it was shut out of Africa

by the submergence of the land connection across Sicily, but the

probabilities seem to be against such a view. The conditions would

appear to have been less favorable to a mutation of this kind in the

African habitat of the parent stock than in Europe, and less favorable

in Europe during earlier quaternary time than toward the close of the

glacial period.

The causes which give rise to a variation of type have always been

sufficiently obscure, whether the origin of species be conceived after

the Darwinian or the Mendelian fashion, and the mutation theories have

hitherto afforded little light on that question. Yet the Mendelian

postulate that the type is stable except for such a mutation as shall

establish a new type raises at least the presumption that such a

mutation will take place only under exceptional circumstances, that is

to say, under circumstances so substantially different from what the

type is best adapted to as to subject it to some degree of physiological

strain. It is to be presumed that no mutation will supervene so long as

the conditions of life do not vary materially from what they have been

during the previous uneventful life-history of the type. Such is the

presumption apparently involved in the theory and such is also the

suggestion afforded by the few experimental cases of observed mutation,

as, _e.g._, those studied by De Vries.

A considerable climatic change, such as would seriously alter the

conditions of life either directly or through its effect on the food

supply, might be conceived to bring on a mutating state in the race; or

the like effect might be induced by a profound cultural change,

particularly any such change in the industrial arts as would radically

affect the material conditions of life. These considerations, mainly

speculative it is true, suggest that the dolicho-blond mutant could

presumably have emerged only at a time when the parent stock was exposed

to notably novel conditions of life, such as would be presumed (with De

Vries) to tend to throw the stock into a specifically unstable

(mutating) state; at the same time these novel conditions of life must

also have been specifically of such a nature as to favor the survival

and multiplication of this particular human type. The climatic tolerance

of the dolicho-blond, _e.g._, is known to be exceptionally narrow. Now,

it is not known, indeed there is no reason to presume, that the

Mediterranean race was exposed to such variations of climate or of

culture before it entered Europe as might be expected to induce a

mutating state in the stock, and at the same time a mutant gifted with

the peculiar climatic intolerance of the dolicho-blond would scarcely

have survived under the conditions offered by northern Africa in late

quaternary time. But the required conditions are had later on in Europe,

after the Mediterranean was securely at home in that continent.

The whole episode may be conceived to have run off somewhat in the

following manner. The Mediterranean race is held to have entered Europe

in force during quaternary time, presumably after the quaternary period

was well advanced, most likely during the last genial, interglacial

period. This race then brought the neolithic culture, but without the

domestic animals (or plants?) that are a characteristic feature of the

later neolithic age, and it encountered at least the remnants of an

older, palaeolithic population. This older European population was made

up of several racial stocks, some of which still persist as obscure and

minor elements in the later peoples of Europe. The (geologic) date to be

assigned this intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe is of

course not, and can perhaps never be, determined with any degree of

nicety or confidence. But there is a probability that it coincides with

the recession of the ice-sheet, following one or another of the severer

periods of glaciations, that occurred before the submergence of the land

connection between Europe and Africa, over Gibraltar, Sicily, and

perhaps Crete. How late in quaternary time the final submergence of the

Mediterranean basin occurred is still a matter of surmise; the intrusion

of the Mediterranean race into Europe appears, on archaeological

evidence, to have occurred in late quaternary time, and in the end this

archaeological evidence may help to decide the geologic date of the

severance of Europe from Africa.

The Mediterranean race seems to have spread easily over the habitable

surface of Europe and shortly to have grown numerous and taken rank as

the chief racial element in the neolithic population; which argues that

no very considerable older population occupied the European continent at

the time of the Mediterranean invasion; which in turn implies that the

fairly large (Magdalenian) population of the close of the palaeolithic

age was in great part destroyed or expelled by the climatic changes that

coincided with or immediately preceded the advent of the Mediterranean

race. The known characteristics of the Magdalenian culture indicate a

technology, a situation and perhaps a race, somewhat closely paralleled

by the Eskimo;[5] which argues that the climatic situation before which

this Magdalenian race and culture gave way would have been that of a

genial interglacial period rather than a period of glaciation.

During this genial (perhaps sub-tropical) inter-glacial period

immediately preceding the last great glaciation the Magdalenian stock

would presumably find Europe climatically untenable, judging by analogy

with the Eskimo; whereas the Mediterranean stock should have found it an

eminently favorable habitat, for this race has always succeeded best in

a warm-temperate climate. Both the extensive northward range of the

early neolithic (Mediterranean) settlements and the total disappearance

of the Magdalenian culture from the European continent point to a

climatic situation in Europe more favorable to the former race and more

unwholesome for the latter than the conditions known to have prevailed

at any time since the last interglacial period, especially in the higher

latitudes. The indications would seem to be that the whole of Europe,

even the Baltic and Arctic seaboards, became climatically so fully

impossible for the Magdalenian race during this interglacial period as

to result in its extinction or definitive expulsion; for when, in recent

times, climatically suitable conditions return, on the Arctic seaboard,

the culture which takes the place that should have been occupied by the

Magdalenian is the Finnic (Lapp)--a culture unrelated to the

Magdalenian either in race or technology, although of much the same

cultural level and dealing with a material environment of much the same

character. And this genial interval that was fatal to the Magdalenian

was, by just so much, favorable to the Mediterranean race.

But glacial conditions presently returned, though with less severity

than the next preceding glacial period; and roughly coincident with the

close of the genial interval in Europe the land connection with Africa

was cut off by submergence, shutting off retreat to the south. How far

communication with Asia may have been interrupted during the subsequent

cold period, by the local glaciation of the Caucasus, Elburz and

Armenian highlands, is for the present apparently not to be determined,

although it is to be presumed that the outlet to the east would at least

be seriously obstructed during the glaciation. There would then be left

available for occupation, mainly by the Mediterranean race, central and

southern Europe together with the islands, notably Sicily and Crete,

left over as remnants of the earlier continuous land between Europe and

Africa. The southern extensions of the mainland, and more particularly

the islands, would still afford a favorable place for the Mediterranean

race and its cultural growth. So that the early phases of the great

Cretan (Aegean) civilisation are presumably to be assigned to this

period that is covered by the last advance of the ice in northern

Europe. But the greater portion of the land area so left accessible to

the Mediterranean race, in central or even in southern Europe, would

have been under glacial or sub-glacial climatic conditions. For this

race, essentially native to a warm climate, this situation on the

European mainland would be sufficiently novel and trying, particularly

throughout that ice-fringed range of country where they would be

exposed to such cold and damp as this race has never easily tolerated.

The situation so outlined would afford such a condition of physiological

strain as might be conceived to throw the stock into a specifically

unstable state and so bring on a phase of mutation. At the same time

this situation, climatic and technological, would be notably favorable

to the survival and propagation of a type gifted with all the peculiar

capacities and limitations of the dolicho-blond; so that any mutant

showing the traits characteristic of that type would then have had an

eminently favorable chance of survival. Indeed, it is doubtful, in the

present state of the available evidence, whether such a type of man

could have survived in Europe from or over any period of quaternary time

prior to the last period of glaciation. The last preceding interglacial

period appears to have been of a sufficiently genial (perhaps

sub-tropical) character throughout Europe to have definitively

eliminated the Magdalenian race and culture, and a variation of climate

in the genial sense sufficiently pronounced to make Europe absolutely

untenable for the Magdalenian--presumed to be something of a counterpart

to the Eskimo both in race and culture--should probably have reached the

limit of tolerance for the dolicho-blond as well. The latter is

doubtless not as intolerant of a genial--warm-temperate--climate as the

former, but the dolicho-blond after all stands much nearer to the Eskimo

in this matter of climatic tolerance than to either of the two chief

European stocks with which it is associated. Apparently no racial stock

with a climatic tolerance approximately like that of the Eskimo, the

Magdalenian, or the current races of the Arctic seaboard, survived over

the last inter-glacial period; and if the dolicho-blond is conceived to

have lived through that period it would appear to have been by a

precariously narrow margin. So that, on one ground and another, the

mutation out of which the dolicho-blond has arisen is presumably to be

assigned to the latest period of glaciation in Europe, and with some

probability to the time when the latest glaciation was at its maximum,

and to the region where glacial and seaboard influences combined to give

that racial type a differential advantage over all others.

This dolicho-blond mutation may, of course, have occurred only once, in

a single individual, but it should seem more probable, in the light of

De Vries' experiments, that the mutation will have been repeated in the

same specific form in several individuals in the same general locality

and in the same general period of time. Indeed, it would seem highly

probable that several typically distinct mutations will have occurred,

repeatedly, at roughly the same period and in the same region, giving

rise to several new types, some of which, including the dolicho-blond,

will have survived. Many, presumably the greater number, of these mutant

types will have disappeared, selectively, being unfit to survive under

those sub-glacial seaboard conditions that were eminently favorable to

the dolicho-blond; while other mutants arising out of the same mutating

period and adapted to climatic conditions of a more continental

character, suitable to more of a continental habitat, less humid, at a

higher altitude and with a wider seasonal variation of temperature, may

have survived in the regions farther inland, particularly eastward of

the selectively defined habitat of the dolicho-blond. These latter may

have given rise to several blond races, such as are spoken for by

Deniker[6] and certain British ethnologists.

The same period of mutation may well have given rise also to one or more

brunet types, some of which may have survived. But if any new brunet

type has come up within a period so recent as this implies, the fact has

not been noted or surmised hitherto--unless the brunet races spoken for

by Deniker are to be accepted as typically distinct and referred to such

an origin. The evidence for the brunet stocks has not been canvassed

with a question of this kind in view. These stocks have not been subject

of such eager controversy as the dolicho-blond, and the attention given

them has been correspondingly less. The case of the blond is unique in

respect of the attention spent on questions of its derivation and

prehistory, and it is also singular in respect of the facility with

which it can be isolated for the purposes of such an inquiry. This large

and persistent attention, from all sorts of ethnologists, has brought

the evidence bearing on the dolicho-blond into such shape as to permit

more confident generalisations regarding that race than any other.

In any case the number of mutant individuals, whether of one or of

several specific types, will have been very few as compared with the

numbers of the parent stock from which they diverged, even if they may

have been somewhat numerous as counted absolutely, and the survivors

whose offspring produced a permanent effect on the European peoples will

have been fewer still. It results that these surviving mutants will not

have been isolated from the parent stock, and so could not breed in

isolation, but must forthwith be crossed on the parent stock and could

therefore yield none but hybrid offspring. From the outset, therefore,

the community or communities in which the blond mutants were propagated

would be made up of a mixture of blond and brunet, with the brunet

greatly preponderating. It may be added that in all probability there

were also present in this community from the start one or more minor

brunet elements besides the predominant Mediterranean, and that at least

shortly after the close of the glacial period the new brachycephalic

brunet (Alpine) race comes into the case; so that the chances favor an

early and persistent crossing of the dolicho-blond with more than one

brunet type, and hence they favor complications and confusion of types

from the start. It follows that, in point of pedigree, according to this

view there neither is nor ever has been a pure-bred dolicho-blond

individual since the putative original mutant with which the type came

in. But under the Mendelian rule of hybrids it is none the less to be

expected that, in the course of time and of climatically selective

breeding, individuals (perhaps in appreciable numbers) will have come up

from time to time showing the type characters unmixed and unweakened,

and effectively pure-bred in point of heredity. Indeed, such

individuals, effectively pure-bred or tending to the establishment of a

pure line, will probably have emerged somewhat frequently under

conditions favorable to the pure type. The selective action of the

conditions of life in the habitat most favorable to the propagation of

the dolicho-blond has worked in a rough and uncertain way toward the

establishment, in parts of the Baltic and North Sea region, of

communities made up prevailingly of blonds. Yet none of these

communities most favorably placed for a selective breeding in the

direction of a pure dolicho-blond population have gone far enough in

that direction to allow it safely to be said that the composite

population of any such given locality is more than half blond.

Placed as it is in a community of nations made up of a hybrid mixture of

several racial stocks there is probably no way at present of reaching a

convincing demonstration of the typical originality of this

dolicho-blond mutant, as contrasted with the other blond types with

which it is associated in the European population; but certain general

considerations go decidedly, perhaps decisively, to enforce such a view:

(a) This type shows such a pervasive resemblance to a single one of the

known older and more widely distributed types of man (the Mediterranean)

as to suggest descent by mutation from this one rather than derivation

by crossing of any two or more known types. The like can not be said of

the other blond types, all and several of which may plausibly be

explained as hybrids of known types. They have the appearance of blends,

or rather of biometrical compromises, between two or more existing

varieties of man. Whereas it does not seem feasible to explain the

dolicho-blond as such a blend or compromise between any known racial

types. (b) The dolicho-blond occurs, in a way, centrally to the other

blond types, giving them a suggestive look of being ramifications of the

blond stock, by hybridisation, into regions not wholly suited to the

typical blond. The like can scarcely be said for any of the other

European types or races. The most plausible exception would be Deniker's

East-European or Oriental race, Beddoe's Saxon, which stands in a

somewhat analogous spacial relation to the other blond types. But this

brachycephalic blond is not subject to the same sharp climatic

limitations that hedge about the dolicho-blond; it occurs apparently

with equally secure viability within the littoral home area of the

dolicho-blond and in continental situations where conditions of altitude

and genial climate would bar the latter from permanent settlement. The

ancient and conventionally accepted center of diffusion of blondness in

Europe lies within the seaboard region bordering on the south Baltic,

the North Sea and the narrow waters of the Scandinavian peninsulas.

Probably, if this broad central area of diffusion were to be narrowed

down to a particular spot, the consensus of opinion as to where the

narrower area of characteristic blondness is to be looked for, would

converge on the lands immediately about the narrow Scandinavian waters.

This would seem to hold true for historic and for prehistoric times

alike. This region is at the same time, by common consent, the peculiar

home of the dolicho-blond, rather than of any other blond type. (c) The

well known but little discussed climatic limitation of the blond race

applies particularly to the dolicho-blond, and only in a pronouncedly

slighter degree to the other blond types. The dolicho-blond is subject

to a strict regional limitation, the other blond types to a much less

definite and wider limitation of the same kind. Hence these others are

distributed somewhat widely, over regions often remote and climatically

different from the home area of the dolicho-blond, giving them the

appearance of being dispersed outward from this home area as hybrid

extensions of the central and typical blond stock. A further and equally

characteristic feature of this selective localisation of the

dolicho-blond race is the fact that while this race does not succeed

permanently outside the seaboard region of the south Baltic and North

Sea, there is no similar selective bar against other races intruding

into this region. Although the dolicho-blond perhaps succeeds better

within its home area than any other competing stock or type, yet several

other types of man succeed so well within the same region as to hold it,

and apparently always to have held it, in joint tenancy with the

dolicho-blond.

A close relationship, amounting to varietal identity, of the Kabyle with

the dolicho-blond has been spoken for by Keane and by other

ethnologists. But the very different climatic tolerance of the two

races should put such an identity out of the question. The Kabyle lives

and thrives best, where his permanent home area has always been, in a

high and dry country, sufficiently remote from the sea to make it a

continental rather than a littoral habitat. The dolicho-blond, according

to all available evidence, can live in the long run only in a seaboard

habitat, damp and cool, at a high latitude and low altitude. There is no

known instance of this race having gone out from its home area on the

northern seaboard into such a region as that inhabited by the Kabyle and

having survived for an appreciable number of generations. That this type

of man should have come from Mauritania, where it could apparently not

live under the conditions known to have prevailed there in the recent or

the remoter past, would seem to be a biologic impossibility. Hitherto,

when the dolicho-blond has migrated into such or a similar habitat it

has not adapted itself to the new climatic requirements but has

presently disappeared off the face of the land. Indeed, the experiment

has been tried in Mauritanian territory. If the Kabyle blond is to be

correlated with those of Europe, it will in all probability have to be

assigned an independent origin, to be derived from an earlier mutation

of the same Mediterranean stock to which the dolicho-blond is to be

traced.

Questions of race in Europe are greatly obscured by the prevalence of

hybrid types having more or less fixity and being more or less

distinctly localised. The existing European peoples are hybrid mixtures

of two or more racial stocks. The further fact is sufficiently obvious,

though it has received less critical attention than might be, that

these several hybrid populations have in the course of time given

rise to a number of distinct national and local types, differing

characteristically from one another and having acquired a degree of

permanence, such as to simulate racial characters and show well marked

national and local traits in point of physiognomy and temperament.

Presumably, these national and local types of physique and temperament

are hybrid types that have been selectively bred into these

characteristic forms in adaptation to the peculiar circumstances of

environment and culture under which each particular local population is

required to live, and that have been so fixed (provisionally) by

selective breeding of the hybrid material subject to such locally

uniform conditions--except so far as the local characters in question

are of the nature of habits and are themselves therefore to be classed

as an institutional element rather than as characteristics of race.

It is evident that under the Mendelian law of hybridisation the range of

favorable, or viable, variations in any hybrid population must be very

large--much larger than the range of fluctuating (non-typical)

variations obtainable under any circumstances in a pure-bred race. It

also follows from these same laws of hybridisation that by virtue of the

mutual exclusiveness of allelomorphic characters or groups of characters

it is possible selectively to obtain an effectually "pure line" of

hybrids combining characters drawn from each of the two or more parent

stocks engaged, and that such a composite pure line may selectively be

brought to a provisional fixity[7] in any such hybrid population. And

under conditions favorable to a type endowed with any given hybrid

combination of characters so worked out the given hybrid type (composite

pure line) may function in the racial mixture in which it is so placed

very much as an actual racial type would behave under analogous

circumstances; so that, _e.g._, under continued intercrossing such a

hybrid population would tend cumulatively to breed true to this

provisionally stable hybrid type, rather than to the actual racial type

represented by any one of the parent stocks of which the hybrid

population is ultimately made up, unless the local conditions should

selectively favor one or another of these ultimate racial types.

Evidently, too, the number of such provisionally stable composite pure

lines that may be drawn from any hybrid mixture of two or more parent

stocks must be very considerable--indeed virtually unlimited; so that on

this ground there should be room for any conceivable number of

provisionally stable national or local types of physique and

temperament, limited only by the number of characteristically

distinguishable local environments or situations that might each

selectively act to characterise and establish a locally characteristic

composite pure line; each answering to the selective exigencies of the

habitat and cultural environment in which it is placed, and each

responding to these exigencies in much the same fashion as would an

actual racial type--provided only that this provisionally stable

composite pure line is not crossed on pure-bred individuals of either of

the parent stocks from which it is drawn, pure-bred in respect of the

allelomorphic characters which give the hybrid type its typical traits.

When the hybrid type is so crossed back on one or other of its parent

stocks it should be expected to break down; but in so slow-breeding a

species as man, with so large a complement of unit characters (some 4000

it has been estimated), it will be difficult to decide empirically which

of the two lines--the hybrid or the parent stock--proves itself in the

offspring effectively to be a racial type; that is to say, which of the

two (or more) proves to be an ultimately stable type arisen by a

Mendelian mutation, and which is a provisionally stable composite pure

line selectively derived from a cross. The inquiry at this point,

therefore, will apparently have to content itself with arguments of

probability drawn from the varying behavior of the existing hybrid types

under diverse conditions of life.

Such general consideration of the behavior of the blond types of Europe,

other than the dolicho-blond, and more particularly consideration of

their viability under divergent climatic conditions, should apparently

incline to the view that they are hybrid types, of the nature of

provisionally stable composite pure lines.

So far, therefore, as the evidence has yet been canvassed, it seems

probable on the whole that the dolicho-blond is the only survivor from

among the several mutants that may have arisen out of this presumed

mutating period; that the other existing blond types, as well as certain

brunets, are derivatives of the hybrid offspring of the dolicho-blond

crossed on the parent Mediterranean stock or on other brunet stocks with

which the race has been in contact early or late; and that several of

these hybrid lines have in the course of time selectively been

established as provisionally stable types (composite pure lines),

breakable only by a fresh cross with one or other of the parent types

from which the hybrid line sprang, according to the Mendelian rule.[8]

All these considerations may not be convincing, but they are at least

suggestive to the effect that if originality is to be claimed for any

one of the blond types or stocks it can best be claimed for the

dolicho-blond, while the other blond types may better be accounted for

as the outcome of the crossing of this stock on one or another of the

brunet stocks of Europe.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Race Development_, Vol.

III, No. 4.

[2] _Cf._, however, W. Ridgeway, "The Application of Zoological Laws to

Man," _Report, British Association for Advancement of Science_ (Dublin),

1908.

[3] _Cf._ Sergi, _The Mediterranean Race_, ch. xi, xiii.

[4] Sergi, _Arii e Italici_; Keane, _Man Past and Present_, ch. xii.

[5] _Cf._ W. J. Sollas, "Palaeolithic Races and their Modern

Representatives," _Science Progress_, vol. iv, 1909-1910.

[6] _The Races of Mankind_; and "Les six races composant la population

de l'Europe," _Journal Anth. Inst._, 1906.

[7] Illustrated by the various pure breeds or "races" of domestic

animals.

[8] Mr. R. B. Bean's discussion of Deniker's "Six Races," _e.g._, goes

far to show that such is probably the standing of the blond types, other

than the dolicho-blond, among these six races of Europe; although such

is not the conclusion to which Mr. Bean comes. _Philippine Journal of

Science_, September, 1909.

THE BLOND RACE AND THE ARYAN CULTURE[1]

It has been argued in an earlier paper[2] that the blond type or types

of man (presumably the dolichocephalic blond) arose by mutation from the

Mediterranean stock during the last period of severe glaciation in

Europe. This would place the emergence of this racial type roughly

coincident with the beginning of the European neolithic; the evidence

going presumptively to show that the neolithic technology came into

Europe with the Mediterranean race, at or about the same time with that

race, and that the mutation which gave rise to the dolicho-blond took

place after the Mediterranean race was securely settled in Europe. Since

this blond mutant made good its survival under the circumstances into

which it so was thrown it should presumably be suited by native

endowment to the industrial and climatic conditions that prevailed

through the early phases of the neolithic age in Europe; that is to say,

it would be a type of man selectively adapted to the technological

situation characteristic of the early neolithic but lacking as yet the

domestic animals (and crop-plants?) that presently give much of its

character to that culture.

Beginning, then, with the period of the last severe glaciation, and

starting with this technological equipment, those portions of the

European population that contained an appreciable and increasing

admixture of the blond may be conceived to have ranged across the

breadth of Europe, particularly in the lowlands, in the belt of damp and

cool country that fringed the ice, and to have followed the receding

ice-sheet northward when the general climate of Europe began to take on

its present character with the returning warmth and dryness. By force of

the strict climatic limitation to which this type is subject, the blond

element, and more particularly the dolicho-blond, will presently have

disappeared by selective elimination from the population of those

regions from which the ice-sheet and its fringe of cool and humid

climate had receded. The cool and humid belt suited to the propagation

of the blond mutant (and its blond hybrids) would shift northward and

shorten down to the seaboard as the glacial conditions in which it had

originated presently ceased. So that presently, when Europe finally lost

its ice-sheet, the blond race and its characteristic hybrids would be

found confined nearly within the bounds which have marked its permanent

extension in historic times. These limits have, no doubt, fluctuated

somewhat in response to secular variations of climate; but on the whole

they appear to have been singularly permanent and singularly rigid.

Apparently after the dolicho-blond had come to occupy the restricted

habitat which the stock has since continued to hold on the northern

seaboard of Europe, toward the close of what is known in Danish

chronology as the "older stone age," the early stock of domestic animals

appear to have been introduced into Europe from Asia; the like statement

will hold more doubtfully for the older staple crop plants, with the

reservation that their introduction appears to antedate that of the

domestic animals. At least some such date seems indicated by their first

appearance in Denmark late in the period of the "kitchen middens."

Virtually all of these essential elements of their material civilisation

appear to have come to the blond-hybrid communities settled on the

narrow Scandinavian waters, as to the rest of Europe, from Turkestan.

This holds true at least for the domestic animals as a whole, the

possible exceptions among the early introductions being not of great

importance. Some of the early crop plants may well have come from what

is now Mesopotamian or Persian territory, and may conceivably have

reached western Europe appreciably earlier, without affecting the

present argument. If the European horse had been domesticated in

palaeolithic times, as appears at least extremely probable, that

technological gain appears to have been lost before the close of the

palaeolithic age; perhaps along with the extinction of the European

horse.

These new elements of technological equipment, the crop plants and

animals, greatly affected the character of the neolithic culture in

Europe; visibly so as regards the region presumably occupied by the

dolicho-blond,--or the blond-hybrid peoples. On the material side of the

community's life they would bring change direct and immediate, altering

the whole scheme of ways and means and shifting the pursuit of a

livelihood to new lines; and on the immaterial side their effect would

be scarcely less important, in that the new ways and means and the new

manner of life requisite and induced by their use would bring on certain

new institutional features suitable to a system of mixed farming.

Whatever may have been the manner of their introduction, whether they

were transmitted peaceably by insensible diffusion from group to group

or were carried in with a high hand by a new intrusive population that

overran the country and imposed its own cultural scheme upon the

Europeans along with the new ways and means of life,--in any case these

new cultural elements will have spread over the face of Europe somewhat

gradually and will have reached the blond-hybrid communities in their

remote corner of the continent only after an appreciable lapse of time.

Yet, it is to be noted, it is after all relatively early in neolithic

times that certain of the domestic plants and animals first come into

evidence in the Scandinavian region.

The crop plants appear to have come in earlier than the domestic

animals, being perhaps brought in by the peoples of the Mediterranean

race at their first occupation of Europe in late quaternary time. With

tillage necessarily goes a sedentary manner of life. So that at their

first introduction the domestic animals were intruded into a system of

husbandry carried on by a population living in settled communities, and

drawing their livelihood in great part from the tilled ground but also

in part from the sea and from the game-bearing forests that covered much

of the country at that time. It was into such a situation that the

domestic animals were intruded on their first coming into

Europe,--particularly into the seaboard region of north Europe.

On the open ranges of western and central Asia, from which these

domestic animals came, and even in the hill country of that general

region, the peoples that draw their livelihood from cattle and sheep are

commonly of a nomadic habit of life, in the sense that the requirements

of forage for their herds and flocks hold them to an unremitting round

of seasonal migration. It results that, except in the broken hill

country, these peoples habitually make use of movable habitations, live

in camps rather than in settled, sedentary communities. Certain peculiar

institutional arrangements also result from this nomadic manner of life

associated with the care of flocks and herds on a large scale. But on

their introduction into Europe the domestic animals appear on the whole

not to have supplanted tillage and given rise to such a nomadic-pastoral

scheme of life, exclusively given to cattle raising, but rather to have

fallen into a system of mixed farming which combined tillage with a

sedentary or quasi-sedentary grazing industry. Such particularly appears

to have been the case in the seaboard region of the north, where there

is no evidence of tillage having been displaced by a nomadic grazing

industry. Indeed, the small-scale and broken topography of this European

region has never admitted a large-scale cattle industry, such as has

prevailed on the wide Asiatic ranges. An exception, at least partial and

circumscribed, may perhaps be found in the large plains of the extreme

Southeast and in the Danube valley; and it appears also that grazing,

after the sedentary fashion, took precedence of tillage in prehistoric

Ireland as well as here and there in the hilly countries of southern and

central Europe.

Such an introduction of tillage and grazing would mean a revolutionary

change in the technology of the European stone age, and a technological

revolution of this kind will unavoidably bring on something of a radical

change in the scheme of institutions under which the community lives;

primarily in the institutions governing the details of its economic

life, but secondarily also in its domestic and civil relations. When

such a change comes about through the intrusion of new material factors

the presumption should be that the range of institutions already

associated with these material factors in their earlier home will

greatly influence the resulting new growth of institutions in the new

situation, even if circumstances may not permit these alien institutions

to be brought in and put into effect with the scope and force which they

may have had in the culture out of which they have come. Some

assimilation is to be looked for even if circumstances will not permit

the adoption of the full scheme of institutions, and the institutions

originally associated with the intrusive technology will be found

surviving with least loss or qualification in those portions of the

invaded territory where the invaders have settled in force, and

particularly where conditions have permitted them to retain something of

their earlier manner of life.

The bringers of these new elements of culture, material and immaterial,

had acquired what they brought with them on the open sheep and cattle

ranges of the central-Asiatic plains and uplands,--as is held to be the

unequivocal testimony of the Aryan speech, and as is borne out by the

latest explorations in that region. These later explorations indicate

west-central Turkestan as the probable center of the domestication and

diffusion of the animals, if not also of the crop plants, that have

stocked Europe. Of what race these bearers of the new technology and

culture may have been, and just what they brought into Europe, is all

a matter of inference and surmise. It was once usual to infer, as a

ready matter of course, that these immigrant pastoral nomads from the

Asiatic uplands were "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," "Indo-Germans," of a

predominantly blond physique. But what has been said above as well as in

the earlier paper referred to comes near excluding the possibility of

these invaders being blonds, or more specifically the dolicho-blond. It

is, of course, conceivable, with Keane (if his speculations on this head

are to be taken seriously), that a fragment of the alleged blond race

from Mauretania may have wandered off into Turkestan by way of the

Levant, and so may there have acquired the habits of a pastoral life,

together with the Aryan speech and institutions, and may then presently

have carried these cultural factors into Europe and imposed them on the

European population, blond and brunet. But such speculations, which once

were allowable though idle, have latterly been put out of all question,

at least for the present, by the recent Pumpelly explorations in

Turkestan. It is, for climatic reasons, extremely improbable that any

blond stock should have inhabited any region of the central-Asiatic

plains or uplands long enough to acquire the pastoral habits of life and

the concomitant Aryan speech and institutions, and it is fairly certain

that the dolicho-blond could not have survived for that length of time

under the requisite conditions of climate and topography.

It is similarly quite out of the question that the dolicho-blond,

arising as a mutant type late in quaternary time, should have created

the Aryan speech and culture in Europe, since neither the archaeological

evidence nor the known facts of climate and topography permit the

hypothesis that a pastoral-nomadic culture of home growth has ever

prevailed in Europe on a scale approaching that required for such a

result. And there is but little more possibility that the bringers of

the new (Aryan) culture should have been of the Mediterranean race;

although the explorations referred to make it nearly certain that the

communities which domesticated the pastoral animals (and perhaps the

crop-plants) in Turkestan were of that race. The Mediterranean race

originally is Hamitic, not Aryan, it is held by men competent to speak

on that matter, and the known (presumably) Mediterranean prehistoric

settlements in Turkestan, at Anau, are moreover obviously the

settlements of a notably sedentary people following a characteristically

peaceable mode of life. The population of these settlements might of

course conceivably have presently acquired the nomadic and predatory

habits reflected by the Aryan speech and institutions, but there is no

evidence of such an episode at Anau, where the finds show an

uninterrupted peaceable and sedentary occupation of the sites throughout

the period that could come in question. The population of the

settlements at Anau could scarcely have made such a cultural innovation,

involving the adoption of an alien language, except under the pressure

of conquest by an invading people; which would involve the subjection of

the peaceable communities of Anau and the incorporation of their

inhabitants as slaves or as a servile class in the predatory

organisation of their masters. The Mediterranean people of Anau could

accordingly have had a hand in carrying this pastoral-predatory (Aryan)

culture into the West only as a subsidiary racial element in a migratory

community made up primarily of another racial stock.

This leaves the probability that an Asiatic stock, without previous

settled sedentary habits of life, acquired the domesticated animals from

the sedentary and peaceable communities of Anau, or from some similar

village (pueblo) or villages of western Turkestan, and then through a

(moderately) long experience of nomadic pastoral life acquired also the

predatory habits and institutions that commonly go with a pastoral life

on a large scale. These cultural traits they acquired in such a degree

of elaboration and maturity as is implied by the primitive Aryan (or,

better, proto-Aryan) speech, including a more or less well developed

patriarchal system; so that they would presently become a militant and

migratory community somewhat after the later-known Tatar fashion, and so

made their way westward as a self-sufficient migratory host and carried

the new material culture into Europe together with the alien Aryan

speech. It is at the same time almost unavoidable that in such an event

this migratory host would have carried with them into the West an

appreciable servile contingent made up primarily of enslaved captives

from the peaceable agricultural settlements of the Mediterranean race,

which had originally supplied them with their stock of domestic animals.

Along with these new technological elements and the changes of law and

custom which their adoption would bring on, there will also have come in

the new language that was designed to describe these new ways and means

of life and was adapted to express the habits of thought which the new

ways and means bred in the peoples that adopted them. The immigrant

pastoral (proto-Aryan) language and the pastoral (patriarchal and

predatory) law and custom will in some degree have been bound up with

the technological ways and means out of which they arose, and they would

be expected to have reached and affected the various communities of

Europe in somewhat the same time and the same measure in which these

material facts of the pastoral life made their way among these peoples.

In the course of the diffusion of these cultural elements, material and

immaterial, among the European communities the language and in a less

degree the domestic and civil usages and ideals bred by the habits of

the pastoral life might of course come to be dissociated from their

material or technological basis and might so be adopted by remoter

peoples who never acquired any large measure of the material culture of

those pastoral nomads whose manner of life had once given rise to these

immaterial features of Aryan civilisation.

* * * * *

Certain considerations going to support this far-flung line of

conjectural history may be set out more in detail: (a) The Aryan

civilisation is of the pastoral type, with such institutions, usages

and preconceptions as a large-scale pastoral organisation commonly

involves. Such is said by competent philologists to be the evidence of

the primitive Aryan speech. It is substantially a servile organisation

under patriarchal rule, or, if the expression be preferred, a militant

or predatory organisation; these alternative phrases describe the same

facts from different points of view. It is characterised by a

well-defined system of property rights, a somewhat pronounced subjection

of women and children, and a masterful religious system tending strongly

to monotheism. A pastoral culture on the broad plains and uplands of a

continental region, such as west-central Asia, will necessarily fall

into some such shape, because of the necessity of an alert and mobile

readiness for offense and defense and the consequent need of soldierly

discipline. Insubordination, which is the substance of free

institutions, is incompatible with a prosperous pastoral-nomadic mode of

life. When worked out with any degree of maturity and consistency the

pastoral-nomadic culture that has to do with sheep and cattle appears

always to have been a predatory, and therefore a servile culture,

particularly when drawn on the large scale imposed by the topography of

the central-Asiatic plains, and reenforced with the use of the horse.

(The reindeer nomads of the arctic seaboard may appear to be an

exception, at least in a degree, but they are a special case, admitting

a particular explanation, and their case does not affect the argument

for the Aryan civilisation.) The characteristic and pervasive human

relation in such a culture is that of master and servant, and the social

(domestic and civil) structure is an organisation of graded servitude,

in which no one is his own master but the overlord, even nominally. The

family is patriarchal, women and children are in strict tutelage, and

discretion vests in the male head alone. If the group grows large its

civil institutions are of a like coercive character, it commonly shows a

rigorous tribal organisation, and in the end, with the help of warlike

experience, it almost unavoidably becomes a despotic monarchy.

It has not been unusual to speak of the popular institutions of Germanic

paganism--typified, _e.g._, by the Scandinavian usages of local

self-government in pagan times--as being typically Aryan institutions,

but that is a misnomer due to uncritical generalisation guided by a

chauvinistic bias. These ancient north-European usages are plainly alien

to the culture reflected by the primitive Aryan Speech, if we are to

accept the consensus of the philological ethnologists to the effect that

the people who used the primitive Aryan speech must have been a

community of pastoral nomads inhabiting the plains and uplands of a

continental region. That many of these philological ethnologists also

hold to the view that these Aryans were north-European pagan blonds may

raise a personal question of consistency but does not otherwise touch

the present argument.

(b) A racial stock that has ever been of first-rate consequence in the

ethnology of Europe (the Alpine, brachycephalic brunet, the _homo

alpinus_ of the Linnean scheme) comes into Europe at this general

period, from Asia; and this race is held to have presently made itself

at home, if not dominant, throughout middle Europe, where it has in

historic times unquestionably been the dominant racial element.

(c) The pastoral-nomadic institutions spoken of above appear to have

best made their way in those regions of Europe where this brachycephalic

brunet stock has been present in some force if not as a dominant racial

factor. The evidence is perhaps not conclusive, but there is at least a

strong line of suggestion afforded by the distribution of the

patriarchal type of institutions within Europe, including the tribal and

gentile organisation. There is a rough concomitance between the

distribution of these cultural elements presumably derived from an Aryan

source on the one hand, and the distribution past or present of the

brachycephalic brunet type on the other hand. The regions where this

line of institutions are known to have prevailed in early times are, in

the main, regions in which the Alpine racial type is also known to have

been present in force, as, _e.g._, in the classic Greek and Roman

republics.

At the same time a gentile organisation seems also to have been

associated from the outset with the Mediterranean racial stock and may

well have been comprised in the institutional furniture of that race as

it stood before the advent of the Alpine stock; but the drift of later

inquiry and speculation on this head appears to support the view that

this Mediterranean gentile system was of a matrilinear character, such

as is found in many extant agricultural communities of the lower

barbarian culture, rather than of a patriarchal kind, such as

characterises the pastoral nomads. The northern blond communities alone

appear, on the available evidence, to have had no gentile or tribal

institutions, whether matrilinear or patriarchal. The classic Greek and

Roman communities appear originally to have been of the Mediterranean

race and to have always retained a broad substratum of the Mediterranean

stock as the largest racial element in their population, but the Alpine

stock was also largely represented in these communities at the period

when their tribal and gentile institutions are known to have counted for

much, as, indeed, it has continued ever since.

Apart from these communities of the Mediterranean seaboard, the peoples

of the Keltic culture appear to have had the tribal and gentile system,

together with the patriarchal family, in more fully developed form than

it is to be found in Europe at large. The peoples of Keltic speech are

currently believed by ethnologists to have originally been of a blond

type, although opinions are not altogether at one on that head,--the

tall, perhaps red-haired, brachycephalic blond, the "Saxon" of Beddoe,

the "Oriental" of Deniker. But this blond type is perhaps best accounted

for as a hybrid of the dolicho-blond crossed on the Alpine

brachycephalic brunet. Some such view of its derivation is fortified by

what is known of the prehistory and the peculiar features of the early

Keltic culture. This culture differs in some respects radically from

that of the dolicho-blond communities, and it bears more of a

resemblance to the culture of such a brunet group of peoples as the

early historic communities of upper and middle Italy. If the view is to

be accepted which is coming into currency latterly, that the Keltic is

to be affiliated with the culture of Hallstatt and La Tene, such

affiliation will greatly increase the probability that it is to be

counted as a culture strongly influenced if not dominated by the Alpine

stock. The Hallstatt culture, lying in the valley of the Danube and its

upper affluents, lay in the presumed westward path of immigration of the

Alpine stock; its human remains are of a mixed character, showing a

strong admixture of the brachycephalic brunet type; and it gives

evidence of cultural gains due to outside influence in advance of the

adjacent regions of Europe. This Keltic culture, then, as known to

history and prehistory, runs broadly across middle Europe along the belt

where blond and brunet elements meet and blend; and it has some of the

features of that predatory-pastoral culture reflected by the primitive

Aryan speech, in freer development, or in better preservation, than the

adjacent cultural regions to the north; at the same time the peoples of

this Keltic culture show more of affiliation to or admixture with the

brachycephalic brunet than the other blond-hybrid peoples do.

On the other hand the communities of dolicho-blond hybrids on the shores

of the narrow Scandinavian waters, remote from the centers of the Alpine

culture, show little of the institutions peculiar to a pastoral people.

These dolicho-blond hybrids of the North come into history at a later

date, but with a better preserved and more adequately recorded

paganism than the other barbarians of Europe. The late-pagan

Germanic-Scandinavian culture affords the best available instance of

archaic dolicho-blond institutions, if not the sole instance; and it is

to be noted that among these peoples the patriarchal system is weak and

vague,--women are not in perpetual tutelage, the discretion of the male

head of the household is not despotic nor even unquestioned, children

are not held under paternal discretion beyond adult age, the patrimony

is held to no clan liabilities and is readily divisible on inheritance,

and so forth. Neither is there any serious evidence of a tribal or

gentile system among these peoples, early or late, nor are any of them,

excepting the late and special instance of the Icelandic colony, known

ever to have been wholly or mainly of pastoral habits; indeed, they are

known to have been without the pastoral animals until some time in the

neolithic period. The only dissenting evidence on these heads is that of

the Latin writers, substantially Caesar and Tacitus, whose testimony is

doubtless to be thrown out as incompetent in view of the fact that it is

supported neither by circumstantial evidence nor by later and more

authentic records. In speaking of "tribes" among the Germanic hordes

these Latin writers are plainly construing Germanic facts in Roman

terms, very much as the Spanish writers of a later day construed

Mexican and Peruvian facts in mediaeval-feudalistic terms,--to the

lasting confusion of the historians; whereas in enlarging on the

pastoral habits of the Germanic communities they go entirely on data

taken from bodies of people on the move and organised for raiding, or

recently and provisionally settled upon a subject population presumably

of Keltic derivation or of other alien origin and inhabiting the broad

lands of middle Europe remote from the permanent habitat of the

dolicho-blond. Great freedom of assumption has been used and much

ingenuity has been spent in imputing a tribal system to the early

Germanic peoples, but apart from the sophisticated testimony of these

classical writers there is no evidence for it. The nearest approach to a

tribal or a gentile organisation within this culture is the "kin" which

counts for something in early Germanic law and custom; but the kin is

far from being a gens or clan, and it will be found to have more of the

force of a clan organisation the farther it has strayed from the

Scandinavian center of diffusion of the dolicho-blond and the more

protracted the warlike discipline to which the wandering host has been

exposed. All these properly Aryan institutions are weakest or most

notably wanting where the blond is most indubitably in evidence.

Taking early Europe as a whole, it will appear that among the European

peoples at large institutions of the character reflected in the

primitive Aryan speech and implied in the pastoral-nomadic life

evidenced by the same speech are relatively weak, ill-defined or

wanting, arguing that Europe was never fully Aryanised. And the peculiar

geographical and ethnic distribution of this Aryanism of institutions

argues further that the dolicho-blond culture of the Scandinavian region

was less profoundly affected by the Aryan invasion than any other

equally well known section of Europe. What is known of this primitive

Aryan culture, material, domestic, civil and religious, through the

Sanskrit and other early Asiatic sources, may convincingly be contrasted

with what is found in early Europe. These Asiatic records, which are our

sole dependence for a competent characterisation of the Aryan culture,

shows it to have resembled the culture of the early Hebrews or that of

the pastoral Turanians more closely than it resembles the early European

culture at large, and greatly more than it resembles the known culture

of the early communities of dolicho-blond hybrids.

(d) Scarcely more conclusive, but equally suggestive, is the evidence

from the religious institutions of the Aryanised Europeans. As would be

expected in any predatory civilisation, such as the pastoral-nomadic

cultures typically are, the Aryan religious system is said to have

leaned strongly toward a despotic monarchical form, a hierarchically

graded polytheism, culminating in a despotic monotheism. There is little

of all this to be found in early pagan Europe. The nearest well-known

approach to anything of the kind is the late-Greek scheme of Olympian

divinities with Zeus as a doubtful suzerain,--known through latter-day

investigations to have been superimposed on an earlier cult of a very

different character. The Keltic (Druidical) system is little known, but

it is perhaps not beyond legitimate conjecture, on the scant evidence

available, that this system had rather more of the predatory,

monarchical-despotic cast than the better known pagan cults of Europe.

The Germanic paganism, as indicated by the late Scandinavian--which

alone is known in any appreciable degree--was a lax polytheism which

imputed little if any coercive power to the highest god, and which was

not taken so very seriously anyway by the "worshipers,"--if Snorri's

virtually exclusive account is to be accepted without sophistication.

The evidence accorded by the religious cults of Europe yields little

that is conclusive, beyond throwing the whole loose-jointed, proliferous

European paganism out of touch with anything that can reasonably be

called Aryan. And this in spite of the fact that all the available

evidence is derived from the European cults as they stood after having

been exposed to long centuries of Aryanisation. So that it may well be

held that such systematisation of myths and observances as these

European cults give evidence of, and going in the direction of a

despotic monotheism, is to be traced to the influence of the intrusive

culture of the Aryan or Aryanised invaders,--as is fairly plain in the

instance of the Olympians.

(e) That the languages of early Europe, so far as known, belong almost

universally to the Aryan family may seem an insurmountable obstacle to

the view here spoken for. But the difficulties of the case are not

appreciably lessened by so varying the hypothesis as to impute the Aryan

speech to the dolicho-blond, or to any blond stock, as its original

bearer. Indeed, the difficulties are increased by such an hypothesis,

since the Aryan-speaking peoples of early times, as of later times, have

in the main been communities made up of brunets without evidence of a

blond admixture, not to speak of an exclusively blond people. (There is

no evidence of the existence of an all-blond people anywhere, early or

late.)

The early European situation, so far as known, offers no exceptional

obstacles to the diffusion of an intrusive language. Certain mass

movements of population, or rather mass movements of communities

shifting their ground by secular progression, are known to have taken

place, as, _e.g._, in the case of the Hallstatt-La Tene-Keltic culture

moving westward on the whole as it gained ground and spread by shifting

and ramification outward from its first-known seat in the upper Danube

valley. All the while, as this secular movement of growth, ramification

and advance was going on, the Hallstatt-La Tene-Keltic peoples continued

to maintain extensive trade relations with the Mediterranean seaboard

and the AEgean on the one side and reaching the North-Sea littoral on the

other side. In all probability it is by trade relations of this

kind--chiefly, no doubt, through trade carried on by itinerant

merchants--that the new speech made its way among the barbarians of

Europe; and it is no far-fetched inference that it made its way, in the

North at least, as a trade jargon. All this accords with what is going

on at present under analogous circumstances. The superior merit by force

of which such a new speech would make its way need be nothing more

substantial than a relatively crude syntax and phonetics--such as

furthers the dissemination of English to-day in the form of Chinook

jargon, Pidgin English, and Beach la Mar. Such traits, which might in

some other light seem blemishes, facilitate the mutilation of such a

language into a graceless but practicable trade jargon. With jargons as

with coins the poorer (simpler) drives out the better (subtler and more

complex). A second, and perhaps the chief, point of superiority by

virtue of which a given language makes its way as the dominant factor in

such a trade jargon, is the fact that it is the native language of the

people who carry on the trade for whose behoof the jargon is contrived.

The traders, coming in contact with many men, of varied speech, and

carrying their varied stock of trade goods, will impose their own names

for the articles bartered and so contribute that much to the jargon

vocabulary,--and a jargon is at its inception little more than a

vocabulary. The traders at the same time are likely to belong to the

people possessed of the more efficient technology, since it is the

superior technology that commonly affords them their opportunity for

advantageous trade; hence the new or intrusive words, being the names of

new or intrusive facts, will in so far find their way unhindered into

current speech and further the displacement of the indigenous language

by the jargon.

Such a jargon at the outset is little else than a vocabulary comprising

names for the most common objects and the most tangible relations. On

this simple but practicable framework new varieties of speech will

develop, diversified locally according to the kind and quantity of

materials and linguistic tradition contributed by the various languages

which it supplants or absorbs.

In so putting forward the conjecture that the several forms of Aryan

speech have arisen out of trade jargons that have run back to a common

source in the language of an intrusive proto-Aryan people, and

developing into widely diversified local and ethnic variants according

as the mutilated proto-Aryan speech (vocabulary) fell into the hands of

one or another of the indigenous barbarian peoples,--in this suggestion

there is after all nothing substantially novel beyond giving a

collective name to facts already well accepted by the philologists.

Working backward analytically step by step from the mature results given

in the known Aryan languages they have discovered and divulged--with

what prolixity need not be alluded to here--that in their beginnings

these several idioms were little else than crude vocabularies covering

the commonest objects and most tangible relations, and that by time-long

use and wont the uncouth strings of vocables whereby the beginners of

these languages sought to express themselves have been worked down

through a stupendously elaborate fabric of prefixes, infixes and

suffixes, etc., etc., to the tactically and phonetically unexceptionable

inflected languages of the Aryan family as they stood at their classical

best. And what is true of the European languages should apparently hold

with but slight modification for the Asiatic members of the family.

These European idioms are commonly said to be, on the whole, less true

to the pattern of the inferentially known primitive Aryan than are its

best Asiatic representatives; as would be expected in case the latter

were an outgrowth of jargons lying nearer the center of diffusion of the

proto-Aryan speech and technology.

As regards the special case of the early north-European communities of

dolicho-blond hybrids, the trade between the Baltic and Danish waters on

the one hand and the Danube valley, Adriatic and AEgean on the other hand

is known to have been continued and voluminous during the neolithic and

bronze ages,--as counted by the Scandinavian chronology. In the course

of this traffic, extending over many centuries and complicated as it

seems to have been with a large infiltration of the brachycephalic

brunet type, much might come to pass in the way of linguistic

substitution and growth.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from _The University of Missouri Bulletin_,

Science Series, vol. ii, No. 3.

[2] "The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race," in _The Journal of Race

Development_, April, 1913.

AN EARLY EXPERIMENT IN TRUSTS[1]

According to Much,[2] following in the main the views of Penka, Wilser,

De Lapouge, Sophus Mueller, Andreas Hansen, and other spokesmen of the

later theories touching Aryan origins, the area of characterisation of

the West-European culture, as well as of that dolicho-blond racial stock

that bears this culture, is the region bordering on the North Sea and

the Baltic, and its center of diffusion is to be sought on the southern

shores of the Baltic. This region is in a manner, then, the primary

focus of that culture of enterprise that has reshaped the scheme of life

for mankind during the Christian era. Its spirit of enterprise and

adventure has carried this race to a degree of material success that is

without example in history, whether in point of the extent or of the

scope of its achievements. Up to the present the culminating achievement

of this enterprise is dominion in business, and its most finished

instrument is the quasi-voluntary coalition of forces known as a Trust.

In its method and outward form this enterprise of the Indo-germanic

racial stock has varied with the passage of time and the change of

circumstances; but in its spirit and objective end it has maintained a

singularly consistent character through all the mutations of name and

external circumstance that have passed over it in the course of history.

In its earlier, more elemental expression this enterprise takes the

form of raiding, by land and sea. A shrewd interpretation might, without

particular violence to the facts, find a coalition of forces of the kind

which is later known as a Trust in the Barbarian raids spoken of as the

_Voelkerwanderung_. Such an interpretation would seem remote, however,

and not particularly apt. The beginnings of a _bona fide_ trust

enterprise are of a more businesslike character and have left a record

more amenable to the tests of accountancy. A trust, as that term is

colloquially understood, is a business organisation.

Now, the line of enterprise, of indigenous growth in the north-European

cultural region, which first falls into settled shape as an orderly,

organised business is the traffic of those seafaring men of the North

known to fame as the Vikings. And it is in this traffic, so far as the

records show, that a trust, with all essential features, is first

organised. The term "viking" covers, somewhat euphemistically, two main

facts: piracy and slave-trade. Without both of these lines of business

the traffic could not be maintained in the long run; and both, but more

particularly the latter, presume, as an indispensable condition to their

successful prosecution, a regular market and an assured demand for the

output. It is a traffic in which, in order to get the best results, a

relatively large initial investment must be sunk, and the period of

turnover--the "period of production"--is necessarily of some duration;

the risk is also considerable. Further, certain technological

prerequisites must be met, in the way particularly of shipbuilding,

navigation, and the manufacture of weapons; an adequate accumulation of

capital goods must be had, coupled with a sagacious spirit of adventure;

there must also be an available supply of labor. There appears to have

been a concurrence of all these circumstances, together with favorable

market conditions, in the south-Baltic region from about the sixth

century onward; the circumstances apparently growing gradually more

favorable through the succeeding four centuries.

The viking trade appears to have grown up gradually on the Baltic

seaboard, as well as in the Sound country and throughout the fjord

region of Norway, as a by-occupation of the farming population. Its

beginnings are earlier than any records, so that the earliest traditions

speak of it as an institution well understood and fully legitimate. The

well-to-do freehold farmers, including some who laid claim to the rank

of _jarl_, seem to have found it an agreeable and honorable diversion,

as well as a lucrative employment for their surplus wealth and labor

supply. From such sporadic and occasional beginnings it passed presently

into an independently organised and self-sustaining line of business

enterprise, and in the course of time it attained a settled business

routine and a defined code of professional ethics. Syndication, of a

loose form, had begun as early as the oldest accounts extant, but it is

evident from the way in which the matter is spoken of that combination

had not at that date--say, about the beginning of the ninth

century--long been the common practice. It was not then a matter of

course. The early combinations were relatively small and transient. They

took the form of "gentlemen's agreements," pools, working arrangements,

division of territory, etc., rather than hard and fast syndicates. In

those early days a combine would be formed for a season between two or

more capitalist-undertakers, for the most part employing their own

capital only, without recourse to credit; although credit arrangements

occur quite early, but are not very common in the earlier recorded

phases of the trade. Such a loose combine, say about the middle of the

ninth century, might comprise from two to a dozen boats. What may be

called the normal unit in the trade at that time was a boat of perhaps

thirty tons' burden, with an effective crew of some eighty men. Boats

and crews gradually increase both in size and efficiency for a century

and a half after that time.

Syndication, of an increasingly close texture and increasingly permanent

effect, appears to have rapidly grown in favor through the ninth and

tenth centuries. The reasons for this movement of coalition are plain.

The volume of the trade, as well as its territorial extension, increased

uninterruptedly. The technique of the trade was gradually improved, and

the equipment and management were improved and reduced to standard

forms. The tonnage employed at any given time can, of course, not be

ascertained with anything like a confident approximation; but its steady

increase is unmistakable. Year by year the boats and crews increase in

average size as well as in number, until by the middle of the tenth

century the number of men and ships engaged, as well as the volume of

capital invested in the trade, are probably larger than the

corresponding figures for any other form of lucrative enterprise at that

time. It is, at that time, altogether the best-organised line of

enterprise in the West-European region in respect of its business

management, and the most efficient and progressive in respect of its

equipment and technology. At a conservative guess, the aggregate number

of ships engaged about the middle of the tenth century must have

appreciably exceeded six hundred, and may have reached one thousand;

with crews which had also grown gradually larger until they may by this

time have averaged 150 or 200 men. There was consequently what would in

modern phrase be called an "overproduction" of piratical

craft--overinvestment in the viking trade and consequent cut-throat

competition. The various coalitions came into violent conflict, and many

of them went under, with great resultant loss of capital, impoverishment

of well-to-do families, hardship and demoralisation of the entire trade.

Added to these untoward conditions within the trade was the open

disfavor of the crown, in each of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. The

traffic had long passed out of the stage at which it had offered a

lucrative opening for farmers' sons who were tired of the farm and eager

to find excitement, reputation, and creature comforts in that wider

human contact and busier life for which the tedium of the farm had

sharpened their appetites. The larger capitalists alone could succeed as

organisers or directors of a viking concern under the changed

conditions. The common run of well-to-do farmers had neither the

tangible assets nor the "good-will" requisite to the successful

promotion of a new company of freebooters. At the best, their sons could

enter the business only as employees and with but a very uncertain

outlook to speedy promotion to an executive position. On the other hand,

as the trade became better organised in stronger hands, with a larger

equipment, and as the competition within the trade grew more severe, the

blackmail from which much of the profits of the trade was drawn grew

more excessive and more uncertain, both as to its amount and as to the

manner and incidents with which it was levied. As competition grew

severe and the small vikings practically disappeared, and as the

demoralisation that goes with cut-throat competition set in, the

livelihood of the common people, at whose expense the vikings lived,

grew progressively more precarious, and even their domestic peace and

household industry grew insecure. Popular sentiment was running strongly

against the whole traffic. So much so, indeed, as to threaten the tenure

of courts and sovereigns if the popular hardship incident to the

continuance of the trade were not abated.

The politicians, therefore, made a strenuous show of effort to regulate,

or even to repress, the viking organisations. Outright and

indiscriminate repression was scarcely a feasible remedy, certainly not

an agreeable one. The viking companies were a source of strength to the

country, both in that they might be drawn on for support in case of war

and in that they brought funds into the country. The remedy to which the

politicians turned, by preference, therefore, was a regulation of the

companies in such a manner as to let "the foreigners pay the tax," to

adapt a modern phrase. If the freebooters of a given state could be

induced, by stringent regulations, to prey upon the people of the

neighboring states, and particularly if they worked at cross-purposes

with similar companies of freebooters domiciled in such neighboring

states, it was then plain to the sagacious politicians of those days

that the companies might be more of a blessing than a curse. On trial it

was found that this policy of control gave at the best but very dubious

results, and consequently the repressive hand of the authorities

perforce fell with increasingly rigorous pressure on the viking

organisations, particularly on the smaller ones which were scarcely of

national importance. The competition in the trade was too severe to

admit of a consistent avoidance of excesses and irregularities on the

part of the vikings, and these irregularities obliged the authorities to

interfere.

Under these circumstances it is plain that no viking combine could hope

to prosper in the long run unless it were strong enough to take an

international position and to maintain a practical monopoly of the

trade. "International" in these premises means within the Scandinavian

countries. In the days of its finest development the viking trade was

domiciled in the Scandinavian countries, almost exclusively. This means

the two Scandinavian peninsulas, with Iceland, the Faroes, Orkneys,

Hebrides, and the Scandinavian portions of Scotland. To this, for

completeness of statement, is to be added a stretch of Wendish seaboard

on the south of the Baltic and a negligible patch of German territory.

The trade, so far as regards its home offices, to use a modern phrase,

gathered in the main about two chief centers: the Orkneys and the south

end of the Baltic. Outlying regions, such as the Norwegian fjord country

and the Hebrides, are by no means negligible, but the two regions named

above are after all the chief seats of the traffic; and of these two

centers the Baltic--chiefly Danish--region is in many respects the more

notable. Its viking traffic is better, more regularly organised, is

carried on with a more evident sense of a solidarity of interests and a

more consistent view to a long-term prosperity. As one might say,

looking at the matter from the modern standpoint, it has more of a look

of stability and conservative management, such as belongs to an

investment business, and has less of a speculative air, than the trade

that centers in the western isles.

Perhaps it is just on this account, because of its greater stability of

interests and more conservative animus, that the traffic of this region

responds with greater alacrity to the pressure of excessive competition

and political interference, and so enters on a policy of larger and

closer coalition. It may be added that many of the great captains of

adventure in this region are men of good family and substantial standing

in the community. As may often happen in a like conjuncture, when the

irksomeness of this competitive situation in the Baltic was fast

becoming intolerable, there arose a man of far-seeing sagacity and

settled principles, of executive ability and businesslike integrity, who

saw the needs of the hour and the available remedy, and who saw at the

same glance his own opportunity of gain. This man was Palnatoki, the

descendant of an honorable line of country gentlemen in the island of

Funen, whose family had from time immemorial borne an active and prudent

part in the trade, and had been well seen at court and in society. He

was a man of mature experience, with a large investment in the traffic,

and with a body of "good-will" that gave him perhaps his most decisive

advantage.

During the reign of Harald Gormsson, about the middle of the tenth

century, Palnatoki seems to have cast about for a basis on which to

promote an international coalition of vikings, such as would put an end

to headlong competition in the trade and would at the same time be

placed above the accidents of national politics. To this end it was

necessary to find a neutral ground on which to establish the home office

of the concern. Such a mediaeval-Scandinavian New Jersey was the Wendish

kingdom at the south of the Baltic.

Jomsborg (on the island of Wollin, at the mouth of the Oder) seems to

have been a resort of vikings before Palnatoki organised his company

there and strengthened the harbor, which may have been fortified by

those who held it before him. Here the new company was incorporated

under a special franchise from the Wendish crown, with the stipulation

that it was to do business only outside the Wendish territories. The

tangible assets of the corporation were the harbor and fortified town

of Jomsborg, together with the ships and other equipment of such vikings

as were admitted to fellowship; its intangible assets were its franchise

and the good-will of the promoter and the underlying companies. Its

by-laws were very strict, both as to the discipline of the personnel and

as to the distribution of earnings. The promoter, who was the first

president of the corporation, was given extreme powers for the

enforcement of the by-laws, and throughout his long incumbency of office

he exercised his powers with the greatest discretion and with a most

salutary effect.

This neutral, international corporation of piracy rapidly won a great

prestige. In modern phrase, its intangible assets grew rapidly larger.

Backed by the competitive pressure which the new corporation was able to

bring upon the smaller companies and syndicates, this prestige of the

Jomsvikings brought a steady run of applications for admission into the

trust. The trust's policy was substantially the same as has since become

familiar in other lines of enterprise, with the difference that in those

early days the competitive struggle took a less sophisticated form.

Outstanding syndicates and private firms were given the alternative of

submission to the trust's terms or retirement from the traffic. There

was great hardship among the outstanding concerns, especially among that

large proportion of them that were unable to meet the scale of

requirements imposed on applicants for admission into the trust. The

qualifications both as to equipment and personnel were extremely strict,

so that a large percentage of the applicants were excluded; and the

unfortunates who failed of admission found themselves in a doubtful

position that grew more precarious with every year that passed.

Practically, such concerns were either frozen out of the business or

forced into a liquidation which permanently wound up their affairs and

terminated their corporate existence.

The accounts extant are of course not reliable in minute details, being

not strictly contemporary, nor are they cast in such modern terms as

would give an easy comparison with present-day facts. The chief

documents in the case are _Jomsvikingasaga_, _Saxo Grammaticus_,

_Heimskringla_, and _Olafssaga Tryggvasonar_; but nearly the whole of

the saga literature bears on the development of the viking trade, and

characteristic references to the Jomsviking trust occur throughout. The

evidence afforded by these accounts converges to the conclusion that

toward the close of the tenth century the trust stood in a high state of

prosperity and was in a position virtually to dictate the course of the

traffic for all that portion of the viking trade that centered in the

Baltic. Its prestige and influence were strong wherever the traffic

extended, even in the region of the western isles and in the fjord

country of Norway. It had even come to be a factor of first-rate

consequence in international politics, and its power was feared and

courted by those two sovereigns who established the Danish rule in

England, as well as by their Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian

contemporaries. It is probably not an overstatement to say that the

Danish conquest of England would not have been practicable except for

the alliance of the trust with Svend, which enabled him to turn his

attention from the complications of Scandinavian politics to his English

interests.

The extent of the trust's material equipment at the height of its

prosperity is a matter of surmise rather than of statistical

information. Some notion of its strength may be gathered from the

statement that the fortified harbor of Jomsborg included within its

castellated sea-wall an inclosed basin capable of floating three

hundred ships at anchor. In the great raid against the kingdom of

Norway, whose failure inaugurated the disintegration of the trust, the

number of ships sent out is variously given by different authorities.

The _Jomsvikingasaga_ says that they numbered one long hundred. This

fleet, however, was made up of craft selected from among the ships that

were under the immediate command of four of the great captains of

adventure. The fleet, as it lay in the Sound before the final selection,

is said to have numbered 185, but the context shows that this fleet was

but a fraction of the aggregate Jomsviking tonnage. Of this disastrous

expedition but a fraction returned; yet various later expeditions of the

Jomsvikings are mentioned in which some scores of their ships took part.

The trust having become an international power, it undertook to shape

the destiny of nations and dynasties, and it broke under the strain. It,

or its directors, took a contract to bring Norway into subjection to the

Danish crown. Partly through untoward accidents, partly through

miscalculation and hurried preparations, it failed in this undertaking,

which brought the affairs of the trust to a spectacular crisis. From

this disaster it never recovered. With the opening of the eleventh

century the viking trust fell into abeyance, and in a few years it

disappeared from the field. There are several good reasons for its

failure. On the death of its founder the management had passed into the

hands of Sigvaldi, a man of less sagacity and less integrity as well as

of more unprincipled personal ambition, and somewhat given to flighty

ventures in the field of politics. It was Sigvaldi's overweening

personal ambition that committed the corporation to the ill-advised

expedition against Norway. The trust, moreover, being supreme within its

field, the discipline grew lax and its exactions grew arbitrary,

sometimes going to unprovoked excesses. As one might say, too little

thought was given to "economies of production," and the charges were

pushed beyond "what the traffic would bear." But for all that, in spite

of its meddling in politics, and in spite of jobbery and corruption in

its management, the trust still had a fair outlook for continued

success, except that the bottom dropped out of the trade. For better or

worse, the slave-trade in the north of Europe collapsed on the

introduction of Christianity, at least so far as regards the trade in

Christians; and without a slave market the viking enterprise had no

chance of reasonable earnings. At the same time, the risk and hardships

of the traffic--the "cost of production"--grew heavier as the countries

to the south became better able to defend their shores. The passenger

traffic failed almost entirely, and the goods traffic was in a

disorganised and unprofitable state. The costs were fast becoming

prohibitive, even to men so enterprising and necessitous as the

Norwegian freebooters. The situation changed in such a way as to leave

the trust out.

Some show of corporate existence was still maintained for a short period

after the trust's great crisis, but there was an end of discipline and

authoritative control. The minor concerns and private establishments

that had once formed part of the trust continued in the trade on an

independent footing, but with decreasing regularity and with diminishing

strength. As the equipment wore out it was not replaced, and the trade

lapsed. The great captains of the industry, like Sigvaldi, Thorkel

Haraldson, Sigurd Kapa, and Vagn Akason, turned their holdings to the

service of the dynastic politics which were then engaging the attention

of the northern countries. Much of this body of enterprise and wealth

was exhausted in working out the imperialistic schemes of expansion of

Svend and Knut the Great; and what was left over shared the fortunes

of the other available forces of the Scandinavian countries, being

dissipated in political dissensions, extortionate government

organisations, and the establishment of a church and a nobility.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Political Economy_,

Vol. XII, March, 1904.

[2] MATTHAEUS MUCH, _Die Heimat der Indogermanen_.

THE END