THE BEGINNING OF THE EBB
The Russo-Japanese War is one of those landmarks in human history whose
significance increases with the lapse of time. That war was momentous, not
only for what it did, but even more for what it revealed. The legend of
white invincibility was shattered, the veil of prestige that draped white
civilization was torn aside, and the white world's manifold ills were laid
bare for candid examination.
Of course previous blindness to the trend of things had not been
universal. The white world had had its Cassandras, while keen-sighted
Asiatics had discerned symptoms of white weakness. Nevertheless, so
imposing was the white world's aspect and so unbroken its triumphant
progress that these seers had been a small and discredited minority. The
mass of mankind, white and non-white alike, remained oblivious to signs of
change.
This, after all, was but natural. Not only had the white advance been
continuous, but its tempo had been ever increasing. The nineteenth
century, in particular, witnessed an unprecedented outburst of white
activity. We have already surveyed white territorial gains, both as to
area of settlement and sphere of political control. But along many other
lines white expansion was equally remarkable. White race-increase--the
basis of all else--was truly phenomenal. In the year 1500 the white race
(then confined to Europe) could not have numbered more than 70,000,000. In
1800 the population of Europe was 150,000,000, while the whites living
outside Europe numbered over 10,000,000. The white race had thus a trifle
more than doubled its numbers in three centuries. But in the year 1900 the
population of Europe was nearly 450,000,000, while the extra-European
whites numbered fully 100,000,000. Thus the whites had increased threefold
in the European homeland, while in the new areas of settlement outside
Europe they had increased tenfold. The total number of whites at the end
of the nineteenth century was thus nearly 550,000,000--a gain in numbers
of almost 400,000,000, or over 400 per cent. This spelled an increase six
times as great as that of the preceding three centuries.
White race-growth is most strikingly exemplified by the increase of its
most expansive and successful branch--the Anglo-Saxons. In 1480, as
already seen, the population of England proper was not much over
2,000,000. Of course this figure was abnormally low even for mediaeval
times, it being due to the terrible vital losses of the Wars of the Roses,
then drawing to a close. A century later, under Elizabeth, the population
of England had risen to 4,000,000. In 1900 the population of England was
31,000,000, and in 1910 it was 35,000,000, the population of the British
Isles at the latter date being 45,500,000. But in the intervening
centuries British blood had migrated to the ends of the earth, so that the
total number of Anglo-Saxons in the world to-day cannot be much less than
100,000,000. This figure includes Scotch and Scotch-Irish strains (which
are of course identical with English in the Anglo-Saxon sense), and adopts
the current estimate that some 50,000,000 of people in the United States
are predominantly of Anglo-Saxon origin. Thus, in four centuries, the
Anglo-Saxons multiplied between forty and fifty fold.
The prodigious increase of the white race during the nineteenth century
was due not only to territorial expansion but even more to those
astounding triumphs of science and invention which gave the race
unprecedented mastery over the resources of nature. This material advance
is usually known as the "industrial revolution." The industrial revolution
began in the later decades of the eighteenth century, but it matured
during the first half of the nineteenth century, when it swiftly and
utterly transformed the face of things.
This transformation was, indeed, absolutely unprecedented in the world's
history. Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution.
With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material
energy since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our
great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn
Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to
Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the
brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall.
Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave,
harnessed nature's hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the
terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new
material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of
previous generations.
When I say "Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned,
the white man. It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this,
and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two
outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine industry
with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative
development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favored
a prodigious increase in population, particularly in Europe, since Europe
became the workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century,
Europe was transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of
industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to
the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw
material for new fabrication and exchange. The amount of wealth amassed by
the white world in general and by Europe in particular since the beginning
of the nineteenth century is simply incalculable. Some faint conception of
it can be gathered from the growth of world-trade. In the year 1818 the
entire volume of international commerce was valued at only $2,000,000,000.
In other words, after countless millenniums of human life upon our globe,
man had been able to produce only that relatively modest volume of
world-exchange. In 1850 the volume of world-trade had grown to
$4,000,000,000. In 1900 it had increased to $20,000,000,000, and in 1913
it swelled to the inconceivable total of $40,000,000,000--a twentyfold
increase in a short hundred years.
Such were the splendid achievements of nineteenth-century civilization.
But there was a seamy side to this cloth of gold. The vices of our age
have been portrayed by a thousand censorious pens, and there is no need
here to recapitulate them. They can mostly be summed up by the word
"Materialism." That absorption in material questions and neglect of
idealistic values which characterized the nineteenth century has been
variously accounted for. But, after all, was it not primarily due to the
profound disturbance caused by drastic environmental change? Civilized man
had just entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but
in kind from that of his ancestors. It is a scientific truism that every
living organism, in order to survive, must adapt itself to its
environment. Therefore any change of environment must evoke an immediate
readjustment on the part of the organism, and the more pronounced the
environmental change, the more rapid and thoroughgoing the organic
readjustment must be. Above all, speed is essential. Nature brooks no
delay, and the disharmonic organism must attune itself or perish.
Now, is not readaptation precisely the problem with which civilized man
has been increasingly confronted for the past hundred years? No one surely
can deny that our present environment differs vastly from that of our
ancestors. But if this be so, the necessity for profound and rapid
adaptation becomes equally true. In fact, the race has instinctively
sensed this necessity, and has bent its best energies to the task,
particularly on the materialistic side. That was only natural. The
pioneer's preoccupation with material matters in opening up new country is
self-evident, but what is not so generally recognized is the fact that
nineteenth-century Europe and the eastern United States are in many
respects environmentally "newer" than remote backwoods settlements.
Of course the changed character of our civilization called for idealistic
adaptations no less sweeping. These were neglected, because their
necessity was not so compellingly patent. Indeed, man was distinctly
attached to his existing idealistic outfit, to the elaboration of which he
had so assiduously devoted himself in former days, and which had fairly
served the requirements of his simpler past. Therefore nineteenth-century
man concentrated intensively, exclusively upon materialistic problems,
feeling that he could thus concentrate because he believed that the
idealistic conquests of preceding epochs had given him sound moral bases
upon which to build the new material edifice.
Unfortunately, that which had at first been merely a means to an end
presently became an end in itself. Losing sight of his idealisms,
nineteenth-century man evolved a thoroughly materialistic philosophy. The
upshot was a warped, one-sided development which quickly revealed its
unsoundness. The fact that man was much less culpable for his errors than
many moralists aver is quite beside the point, so far as consequences are
concerned. Nature takes no excuses. She demands results, and when these
are not forthcoming she inexorably inflicts her penalties.
As the nineteenth century drew toward its close the symptoms of a profound
_malaise_ appeared on every side. Even those most fundamental of all
factors, the vitality and quality of the race, were not immune. Vital
statistics began to display features highly disquieting to thoughtful
minds. The most striking of these phenomena was the declining birth-rate
which affected nearly all the white nations toward the close of the
nineteenth century and which in France resulted in a virtually stationary
population.
Of course the mere fact of a lessened birth-rate, taken by itself, is not
the unmixed evil which many persons assume. Man's potential reproductive
capacity, like that of all other species, is very great. In fact, the
whole course of biological progress has been marked by a steady checking
of that reproductive exuberance which ran riot at the beginning of life on
earth. As Havelock Ellis well says: "Of one minute organism it is
estimated that, if its reproduction were not checked by death or
destruction, in thirty days it would form a mass a million times larger
than the sun. The conger-eel lays 15,000,000 eggs, and if they all grew
up, and reproduced themselves on the same scale, in two years the whole
sea would become a wriggling mass of fish. As we approach the higher forms
of life reproduction gradually dies down. The animals nearest to man
produce few offspring, but they surround them with parental care, until
they are able to lead independent lives with a fair chance of surviving.
The whole process may be regarded as a mechanism for slowly subordinating
quantity to quality, and so promoting the evolution of life to ever higher
stages."[97]
While man's reproductive power is slight from the standpoint of bacteria
and conger-eels, it is yet far from negligible, as is shown by the
birth-rate of the less-advanced human types at all times, and by the
birth-rate of the higher types under exceptionally favorable
circumstances. The nineteenth century was one of these favorable
occasions. In the new areas of settlement outside Europe, vast regions
practically untenanted by colored competitors invited the white colonists
to increase and multiply; while Europe itself, though historically "old
country," was so transformed environmentally by the industrial revolution
that it suddenly became capable of supporting a much larger population
than heretofore. By the close of the century, however, the most pressing
economic stimuli to rapid multiplication had waned in Europe and in many
of the race dependencies. Therefore the rate of increase, even under the
most favorable biological circumstances, should have shown a decline.
The trouble was that this diminishing human output was of less and less
biological value. Wherever one looked in the white world, it was precisely
those peoples of highest genetic worth whose birth-rate fell off most
sharply, while within the ranks of the several peoples it was those social
classes containing the highest proportion of able strains which were
contributing the smallest quotas to the population. Everywhere the better
types (on which the future of the race depends) were numerically
stationary or dwindling, while conversely, the lower types were gaining
ground, their birth-rate showing relatively slight diminution.
This "disgenic" trend, so ominous for the future of the race, is a
melancholy commonplace of our time, and many efforts have been made to
measure its progress in economic or social terms. One of the most striking
and easily measured examples, however, is furnished by the category of
race. As explained in the Introduction, the white race divides into three
main sub-species--the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. All
three are good stocks, ranking in genetic worth well above the various
colored races. However, there seems to be no question that the Nordic is
far and away the most valuable type; standing, indeed, at the head of the
whole human genus. As Madison Grant well expresses it, the Nordic is "The
Great Race."
Now it is the Nordics who are most affected by the disgenic aspects of our
civilization. In the newer areas of white settlement like our Pacific
coast or the Canadian Northwest, to be sure, the Nordics even now thrive
and multiply. But in all those regions which typify the transformation of
the industrial revolution, the Nordics do not fit into the altered
environment as well as either Alpines or Mediterraneans, and hence tend to
disappear. Before the industrial revolution the Nordic's chief eliminator
was war. His pre-eminent fighting ability, together with the position of
leadership which he had generally acquired, threw on his shoulders the
brunt of battle and exposed him to the greatest losses, whereas the more
stolid Alpine and the less robust Mediterranean stayed at home and
reproduced their kind. The chronic turmoil of both the mediaeval and modern
periods imposed a perpetual drain on the Nordic stock, while the era of
discovery and colonization which began with the sixteenth century further
depleted the Nordic ranks in Europe, since it was adventurous Nordics who
formed the overwhelming majority of explorers and pioneers to new lands.
Thus, even at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was much less
Nordic than it had been a thousand years before.
Nevertheless, down to the close of the eighteenth century, the Nordics
suffered from no other notable handicaps than war and migration, and even
enjoyed some marked advantages. Being a high type, the Nordic is naturally
a "high standard" man. He requires healthful living conditions, and
quickly pines when deprived of good food, fresh air, and exercise. Down to
the close of the eighteenth century, Europe was predominantly
agricultural. In cool northern and central Europe, therefore, environment
actually favored the big, blond Nordics, especially as against the
slighter, less muscular Mediterranean; while in the hotter south the
Nordic upper class, being the rulers, were protected from field labor, and
thus survived as an aristocracy. In peaceful times, therefore, the Nordics
multiplied and repaired the gaps wrought by proscription and war.
The industrial revolution, however, profoundly modified this state of
things. Europe was transformed from an agricultural to an urbanized,
industrial area. Numberless cities and manufacturing centres grew up,
where men were close packed and were subjected to all the evils of
congested living. Of course such conditions are not ideal for any stock.
Nevertheless, the Nordic suffered more than any one else. The cramped
factory and the crowded city weeded out the big, blond Nordic with
portentous rapidity, whereas the little brunet Mediterranean, in
particular, adapted himself to the operative's bench or the clerk's stool,
prospered--and reproduced his kind.
The result of these new handicaps, combined with the continuance of the
traditional handicaps (war and migration), has been a startling decrease
of Nordics all over Europe throughout the nineteenth century, with a
corresponding resurgence of the Alpine, and still more of the
Mediterranean, elements. In the United States it has been the same story.
Our country, originally settled almost exclusively by Nordics, was toward
the close of the nineteenth century invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines
and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and
Jews. As a result, the Nordic native American has been crowded out with
amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens, and after two short
generations he has in many of our urban areas become almost extinct.
The racial displacements induced by a changed economic or social
environment are, indeed, almost incalculable. Contrary to the popular
belief, nothing is more _unstable_ than the ethnic make-up of a people.
Above all, there is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of the
"melting-pot." As a matter of fact, the melting-pot may mix but does not
melt. Each race-type, formed ages ago, and "set" by millenniums of
isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity. Each type
possesses a special set of characters: not merely the physical characters
visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual
characters as well. All these characters are transmitted substantially
unchanged from generation to generation. To be sure, where members of the
same race-stock intermarry (as English and Swedish Nordics, or French and
British Mediterraneans), there seems to be genuine amalgamation. In most
other cases, however, the result is not a blend but a mechanical mixture.
Where the parent stocks are very diverse, as in matings between whites,
negroes, and Amerindians, the offspring is a mongrel--a walking chaos, so
consumed by his jarring heredities that he is quite worthless. We have
already viewed the mongrel and his works in Latin America.
Such are the two extremes. Where intermarriage takes place between stocks
relatively near together, as in crossings between the main divisions of
the white species, the result may not be bad, and is sometimes distinctly
good. Nevertheless, there is no true amalgamation. The different
race-characters remain distinct in the mixed offspring. If the race-types
have generally intermarried, the country is really occupied by two or more
races, the races always tending to sort themselves out again as pure types
by Mendelian inheritance. Now one of these race-types will be favored by
the environment, and it will accordingly tend to gain at the other's
expense, while conversely the other types will tend to be bred out and to
disappear. Sometimes a modification of the environment through social
changes will suddenly reverse this process and will penalize a hitherto
favored type. We then witness a "resurgence," or increase, of the
previously submerged element.
A striking instance of this is going on in England. England is inhabited
by two race-stocks--Nordics and Mediterraneans. Down to the eighteenth
century, England, being an agricultural country with a cool climate,
favored the Nordics, and but for the Nordic handicaps of war and
migration the Mediterraneans might have been entirely eliminated. Two
hundred years ago the Mediterranean element in England was probably very
small. The industrial revolution, however, reversed the selective process,
and to-day the small, dark types in England increase noticeably with every
generation. The swart "cockney" is a resurgence of the primitive
Mediterranean stock, and is probably a faithful replica of his ancestors
of Neolithic times.
Such was the ominous "seamy side" of nineteenth-century civilization. The
regressive trend was, in fact, a vicious circle. An ill-balanced, faulty
environment penalized the superior strains and favored the inferior types;
while, conversely, the impoverishing race-stocks, drained of their
geniuses and overloading with dullards and degenerates, were increasingly
unable to evolve environmental remedies.
Thus, by action and reaction, the situation grew steadily worse,
disclosing its parlous state by numberless symptoms of social ill-health.
All the unlovely _fin de siecle_ phenomena, such as the decay of ideals,
rampant materialism, political disruption, social unrest, and the
"decadence" of art and literature, were merely manifestations of the same
basic ills.
Of course a thoughtful minority, undazzled by the prevalent optimism,
pointed out evils and suggested remedies. Unfortunately these "remedies"
were superficial, because the reformers confused manifestations with
causes and combated symptoms instead of fighting the disease. For
example: the white world's troubles were widely ascribed to the loss of
its traditional ideals, especially the decay of religious faith. But, as
the Belgian sociologist Rene Gerard acutely remarks, "to reason in this
manner is, we think, to mistake the effect for the cause. To believe that
philosophic and religious doctrines create morals and civilizations is a
seductive error, but a fatal one. To transplant the beliefs and the
institutions of a people to new regions in the hope of transplanting
thither their virtues and their civilization as well is the vainest of
follies.... The greater or less degree of vigor in a people depends on the
power of its vital instinct, of its greater or less faculty for adapting
itself to and dominating the conditions of the moment. When the vital
instinct of a people is healthy, it readily suggests to the people the
religious and moral doctrines which assure its survival. It is not,
therefore, because a people possesses a definite belief that it is healthy
and vigorous, but rather because the people is healthy and vigorous that
it adopts or invents the belief which is useful to itself. In this way, it
is not because it ceases to believe that it falls into decay, it is
because it is in decay that it abandons the fertile dream of its ancestors
without replacing this by a new dream, equally fortifying and creative of
energy."[98]
Thus we return once more to the basic principle of race. For what is
"vital instinct" but the imperious urge of superior heredity? As Madison
Grant well says: "The lesson is always the same, namely, that race is
everything. Without race there can be nothing except the slave wearing his
master's clothes, stealing his master's proud name, adopting his master's
tongue, and living in the crumbling ruins of his master's palace."[99]
The disastrous consequences of failure to realize this basic truth is
nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in the field of white
world-politics during the half-century preceding the Great War. That
period was dominated by two antithetical schools of political thinking:
national-imperialism and internationalism. Swayed by the ill-balanced
spirit of the times, both schools developed extremist tendencies; the
former producing such monstrous aberrations as Pan-Germanism and
Pan-Slavism, the latter evolving almost equally vicious concepts like
cosmopolitanism and proletarianism. The adherents of these rival schools
combated one another and wrangled among themselves. They both disregarded
the basic significance of race, together with its immediate corollary, the
essential solidarity of the white world.
As a matter of fact, white solidarity has been one of the great constants
of history. For ages the white peoples have possessed a true "symbiosis"
or common life, ceaselessly mingling their bloods and exchanging their
ideas. Accordingly, the various white nations which are the race's
political expression may be regarded as so many planets gravitating about
the sun of a common civilization. No such sustained and intimate
race-solidarity has ever before been recorded in human annals. Not even
the solidarity of the yellow peoples is comparable in scope.
Of course the white world's internal frictions have been legion, and at
certain times these frictions have become so acute that white men have
been led to disregard or even to deny their fundamental unity. This is
perhaps also because white solidarity is so pervasive that we _live in
it_, and thus ordinarily do not perceive it any more than we do the air we
breathe. Should white men ever really lose their instinct of
race-solidarity, they would asphyxiate racially as swiftly and surely as
they would asphyxiate physically if the atmospheric oxygen should suddenly
be withdrawn. However, down to 1914 at least, the white world never came
within measurable distance of this fatal possibility. On the contrary, the
white peoples were continually expressing their fundamental solidarity by
various unifying concepts like the "Pax Romana" of antiquity, the "Civitas
Dei" or Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages, and the "European
Concert" of nineteenth-century diplomacy.
It was typical of the _malaise_ which was overtaking the white world that
the close of the nineteenth century should have witnessed an ominous
ignoring of white solidarity; that national-imperialists should have
breathed mutual slaughter while internationalists caressed visions of
"human solidarity" culminating in universal race-amalgamation; lastly,
that Asia's incipient revolt against white supremacy, typified by the
Russo-Japanese War, should have found zealous white sponsors and abetters.
Nothing, indeed, better illustrates the white world's unsoundness at the
beginning of the present century than its reaction to the Russo-Japanese
conflict. The tremendous significance of that event was no more lost upon
the whites than it was upon the colored peoples. Most far-seeing white men
recognized it as an omen of evil import for their race-future. And yet,
even in the first access of apprehension, these same persons generally
admitted that they saw no prospect of healing, constructive action to
remedy the ills which were driving the white world along the downward
path. Analyzing the possibility of Europe's presenting a common front to
the perils disclosed by the Japanese victories, the French publicist Rene
Pinon sadly concluded in the negative, believing that political passions,
social hates, and national rivalries would speak louder than the general
interest. "Contemporary Europe," he wrote, in 1905, "is probably not ready
to receive and understand the lesson of the war. What are the examples of
history to those gigantic commercial houses, uneasy for their New Year's
balances, which are our modern nations? It is in the nature of States
founded on mercantilism to content themselves with a hand-to-mouth policy,
without general views or idealism, satisfied with immediate gains and
unable to prepare against a distant future.
"Whence, in the Europe of to-day, could come the principle of an
_entente_, and on what could it be based? Too many divergent interests,
too many rival ambitions, too many festering hates, too many 'dead who
speak,' are present to stifle the voice of Europe's conscience.
"However menacing the external danger, we fear that political rancors
would not down; that the enemy from without would find accomplices, or at
least unconscious auxiliaries, within. Far more than in its regiments and
battleships, the power of Japan lies in our discords, in the absence of an
ideal capable of lifting the European peoples above the daily pursuit of
immediate interests, capable of stirring their hearts with the thrill of a
common emotion. The true 'Yellow Peril' lies within us."[100]
Rene Pinon was a true prophet. Not only was the "writing on the wall" not
taken to heart, the decade following the Russo-Japanese conflict witnessed
a prodigious aggravation of all the ills which had afflicted white
civilization during the nineteenth century. As if scourged by a tragic
fate, the white world hurtled along the downward path, until it entered
the fell shadow of--the modern Peloponnesian War.