THE WHITE FLOOD
The world-wide expansion of the white race during the four centuries
between 1500 and 1900 is the most prodigious phenomenon in all recorded
history. In my opening pages I sketched both the magnitude of this
expansion and its ethnic and political implications. I there showed that
the white stocks together constitute the most numerous single branch of
the human species, nearly one-third of all the human souls on earth to-day
being whites. I also showed that white men racially occupy four-tenths of
the entire habitable land-area of the globe, while nearly nine-tenths of
this area is under white political control. Such a situation is
unprecedented. Never before has a race acquired such combined
preponderance of numbers and dominion.
This white expansion becomes doubly interesting when we realize how sudden
was its inception and how rapid its evolution. A single decade before the
voyage of Columbus, he would have been a bold prophet who should have
predicted this high destiny. At the close of the fifteenth century the
white race was confined to western and central Europe, together with
Scandinavia and the northwestern parts of European Russia. The total white
race-area was then not much over 2,000,000 square miles--barely one-tenth
its area to-day. And in numbers the proportion was almost as unfavorable.
At that moment (say, A. D. 1480) England could muster only about 2,000,000
inhabitants, the entire population of the British Isles not much exceeding
3,000,000 souls. To be sure, the continent was relatively better peopled.
Still, the population of Europe in 1480 was probably not one-sixth that of
1914.
Furthermore, population had dwindled notably in the preceding one hundred
and fifty years. During the fourteenth century Europe had been hideously
scourged by the "Black Death" (bubonic plague), which carried off fully
one-half of its inhabitants, while thereafter a series of great wars had
destroyed immense numbers of people. These losses had not been repaired.
Mediaeval society was a static, equilibrated affair, which did not favor
rapid human multiplication. In fact, European life had been intensive and
recessive ever since the fall of the Roman Empire a thousand years before.
Europe's one mediaeval attempt at expansion (the Crusades) had utterly
failed. In fact, far from expanding, white Europe had been continuously
assailed by brown and yellow Asia. Beginning with the Huns in the last
days of Rome, continuing with the Arabs, and ending with the Mongols and
Ottoman Turks, Europe had undergone a millennium of Asiatic aggression;
and though Europe had substantially maintained its freedom, many of its
outlying marches had fallen under Asiatic domination. In 1480, for
example, the Turk was marching triumphantly across southeastern Europe,
embryonic Russia was a Tartar dependency, while the Moor still clung to
southern Spain.
The outlook for the white race at the close of the fifteenth century thus
seemed gloomy rather than bright. With a stationary or declining
population, exposed to the assaults of powerful external foes, and racked
by internal pains betokening the demise of the mediaeval order, white
Europe's future appeared a far from happy one.
Suddenly, in two short years, all was changed. In 1492 Columbus discovered
America, and in 1494 Vasco da Gama, doubling Africa, found the way to
India. The effect of these discoveries cannot be overestimated. We can
hardly conceive how our mediaeval forefathers viewed the ocean. To them the
ocean was a numbing, constricting presence; the abode of darkness and
horror. No wonder mediaeval Europe was static, since it faced on ruthless,
aggressive Asia, and backed on nowhere. Then, in the twinkling of an eye,
dead-end Europe became mistress of the ocean--and thereby mistress of the
world.
No such strategical opportunity had, in fact, ever been vouchsafed. From
classic times down to the end of the fifteenth century, white Europe had
confronted only the most martial and enterprising of Asiatics. With such
peoples war and trade had alike to be conducted on practically equal
terms, and by frontal assault no decisive victory could be won. But, after
the great discoveries, the white man could flank his old opponents. Whole
new worlds peopled by primitive races were unmasked, where the white man's
weapons made victory certain, and whence he could draw stores of wealth to
quicken his home life and initiate a progress that would soon place him
immeasurably above his once-dreaded assailants.
And the white man proved worthy of his opportunity. His inherent racial
aptitudes had been stimulated by his past. The hard conditions of mediaeval
life had disciplined him to adversity and had weeded him by natural
selection. The hammer of Asiatic invasion, clanging for a thousand years
on the brown-yellow anvil, had tempered the iron of Europe into the finest
steel. The white man could think, could create, could fight superlatively
well. No wonder that redskins and negroes feared and adored him as a god,
while the somnolent races of the Farther East, stunned by this strange
apparition rising from the pathless ocean, offered no effective
opposition.
Thus began the swarming of the whites, like bees from the hive, to the
uttermost ends of the earth. And, in return, Europe was quickened to
intenser vitality. Goods, tools, ideas, men: all were produced at an
unprecedented rate. So, by action and reaction, white progress grew by
leaps and bounds. The Spanish and Portuguese pioneers presently showed
signs of lassitude, but the northern nations--even more vigorous and
audacious--instantly sprang to the front and carried forward the proud
oriflamme of white expansion and world-dominion. For four hundred years
the pace never slackened, and at the close of the nineteenth century the
white man stood the indubitable master of the world.
Now four hundred years of unbroken triumph naturally bred in the white
race an instinctive belief that its expansion would continue indefinitely,
leading automatically to ever higher and more splendid destinies. Before
the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 the thought that white expansion could be
stayed, much less reversed, never entered the head of one white man in a
thousand. Why should it, since centuries of experience had taught the
exact contrary? The settlement of America, Australasia, and Siberia, where
the few colored aborigines vanished like smoke before the white advance;
the conquest of brown Asia and the partition of Africa, where colored
millions bowed with only sporadic resistance to mere handfuls of whites;
both sets of phenomena combined to persuade the white man that he was
invincible, and that the colored types would everywhere give way before
him and his civilization. The continued existence of dense colored
populations in the tropics was ascribed to climate; and even in the
tropics it was assumed that whites would universally form a governing
caste, directing by virtue of higher intelligence and more resolute will,
and exploiting natural resources to the incalculable profit of the whole
white race. Indeed, some persons believed that the tropics would become
available for white settlement as soon as science had mastered tropical
diseases and had prescribed an adequate hygiene.
This uncritical optimism, suggested by experience, was fortified by
ill-assimilated knowledge. During the closing decades of the past century,
not only were biology and economics less advanced than to-day, but they
were also infinitely less widely understood, exact knowledge being
confined to academic circles. The general public had only a vulgarized
smattering, mostly crystallizing about catchwords into which men read
their prepossessions and their prejudices. For instance: biologists had
recently formulated the law of the "Survival of the Fittest." This sounded
very well. Accordingly, the public, in conformity with the prevailing
optimism, promptly interpreted "fittest" as synonymous with "best," in
utter disregard of the grim truth that by "fittest" nature denotes only
the type best adapted to existing conditions of environment, and that if
the environment favors a low type, this low type (unless humanly
prevented) will win, regardless of all other considerations. So again with
economics. A generation ago relatively few persons realized that
low-standard men would drive out high-standard men as inevitably as bad
money drives out good, no matter what the results to society and the
future of mankind. These are but two instances of that shallow, cock-sure
nineteenth-century optimism, based upon ignorance and destined to be so
swiftly and tragically disillusioned.
However, for the moment, ignorance was bliss. Accordingly, the _fin de
siecle_ white world, having partitioned Africa and fairly well dominated
brown Asia, prepared to extend its sway over the one portion of the
colored world which had hitherto escaped subjection--the yellow Far East.
Men began speaking glibly of "manifest destiny" or piously of "the white
man's burden." European publicists wrote didactically on "the break-up of
China," while Russia, bestriding Siberia, dipped behemoth paws in Pacific
waters and eyed Japan.
[Illustration: CATEGORIES OF WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY]
Such was the white world's confident, aggressive temper at the close of
the last century. To be sure, voices were occasionally raised warning that
all was not well. Such were the writings of Professor Pearson and Meredith
Townsend. But the white world gave these Cassandras the reception always
accorded prophets of evil in joyous times--it ignored them or laughed them
to scorn. In fact, few of the prophets displayed Pearson's immediate
certainty. Most of them qualified their prophecies with the comforting
assurance that the ills predicted were relatively remote.
Meredith Townsend is a good case in point. The reader may recall his
prophecy of white expulsion from Asia, quoted in my second chapter.[95]
That prophecy occurs in the preface to the fourth edition, published in
1911, and written in the light of the Russo-Japanese War. Now, of course,
Mr. Townsend's main thesis--Europe's inability permanently to master and
assimilate Asia--had been elaborated by him long before the close of the
nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the preface to the fourth edition speaks
of Europe's failure to conquer Asia as absolute and eviction from present
holdings as probable within a relatively short time; whereas, in his
original introduction, written in 1899, he foresaw a great European
assault upon Asia, which would probably succeed and from which Asia would
shake itself free only after the lapse of more than a century.
In fact, Mr. Townsend's words of 1899 so exactly portray white confidence
at that moment that I cannot do better than quote him. His object in
publishing his book is, he says, "to make Asia stand out clearer in
English eyes, because it is evident to me that the white races under the
pressure of an entirely new impulse are about to renew their periodic
attempt to conquer or at least to dominate that vast continent.... So
grand is the prize that failures will not daunt the Europeans, still less
alter their conviction. If these movements follow historic lines they will
recur for a time upon a constantly ascending scale, each repulse eliciting
a greater effort, until at last Asia like Africa is 'partitioned,' that
is, each section is left at the disposal of some white people. If Europe
can avoid internal war, or war with a much-aggrandized America, she will
by A. D. 2000 be mistress in Asia, and at liberty, as her people think, to
enjoy."[96] If the reader will compare these lines with Mr. Townsend's
1911 judgment, he will get a good idea of the momentous change wrought in
white minds by Asia's awakening during the first decade of the twentieth
century as typified by the Russo-Japanese War.
1900 was, indeed, the high-water mark of the white tide which had been
flooding for four hundred years. At that moment the white man stood on the
pinnacle of his prestige and power. Pass four short years, and the flash
of the Japanese guns across the murky waters of Port Arthur harbor
revealed to a startled world--the beginning of the ebb.