Lothrop Stoddard, A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard)
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY
(1922)
PART I - The
Rising Tide of Color
CHAPTER I:
THE WORLD OF COLOR
THE man who,
on a quiet spring evening of the year 1914, opened his atlas to a political map
of the world and pored over its many-tinted patterns probably got one
fundamental impression: the overwhelming preponderance of the white race in the
ordering of the world's affairs. Judged by accepted canons of statecraft, the
white man towered the indisputable master of the planet. Forth from Europe's
teeming mother hive the imperious Sons of Japhet had swarmed for centuries to
plant their laws, their customs, and their battle-flags at the uttermost ends
of the earth. Two whole continents, North America and Australia, had been made
virtually as white in blood as the European motherland; two other continents,
South America and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while
even huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the
white man's abode. Even where white populations had not locked themselves to
the soil few regions of the earth had escaped the white man's imperial sway,
and vast areas inhabited by uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed the white
man's will.
Beside the
enormous area of white settlement or control, the regions under non-white
governance bulked small indeed. In eastern Asia, China, Japan, and Siam; in
western Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia; in Africa, Abyssinia, and
Liberia; and in America the minute state of Haiti: such was the brief list of
lands under non-white rule. In other words, of the 53,000,000 square miles
which (excluding the polar regions) constitute the land area of the globe, only
6,000,000 square miles had non-white governments, and nearly two-thirds of this
relatively modest remainder was represented by China and its dependencies.
Since 1914
the world has been convulsed by the most terrible war in recorded history. This
war was primarily a struggle between the white peoples, who have borne the
brunt of the conflict and have suffered most of the losses. Nevertheless, one
of the war's results has been a further whittling down of the areas standing
outside white political control. Turkey is to-day practically an Anglo-French
condominium, Persia is virtually a protectorate of the British Empire, while
the United States has thrown over the endemic anarchy of Haiti the aegis of the
Pax Americana. Study of the political map might thus apparently lead one to
conclude that white world-predominance is immutable since the war's ordeal has
still further broadened the territorial basis of its authority.
At this
point the reader is perhaps asking himself why this book was ever undertaken.
The answer is: the dangerous delusion created by viewing world affairs solely
from the angle of politics, The late war has taught many lessons as to the
unstable and transitory character of even the most imposing political
phenomena, while a better reading of history must bring home the truth that the
basic factor in human affairs is not politics, but race. The reader has already
encountered this fundamental truth on every page of the Introduction. He will
remember, for instance, how west-central Asia, which in the dawn of history was
predominantly white man's country, is to-day racially brown man's land in which
white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance. If
this portion of Asia, the former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the
very homeland of the white race itself, should have so entirely changed its
ethnic character, what assurance can the most impressive political panorama
give us that the present world-order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?
The force of
this query is exemplified when we turn from the political to the racial map of
the globe. What a transformation! Instead of a world politically nine-tenths
white, we see a world of which only four-tenths at the most can be considered
predominantly white in blood, the rest of the world being inhabited mainly by
the other primary races of mankind - yellows, browns, blacks, and reds.
Speaking by continents, Europe, North America to the Rio Grade, the southern
portion of South America, the Siberian part of Asia, and Australasia constitute
the real white world; while the bulk of Asia, virtually the whole of Africa,
and most of Central and South America form the world of color. The respective
areas of these two racially contrasted worlds are 22,000,000 square miles for
the whites and 31,000,000 square miles for the colored races. Furthermore it
must be remembered that fully one-third of the white area (notably Australasia
and Siberia) is very thinly inhabited and is thus held by a very slender racial
tenure-the only tenure which counts in the long run.
The statistical
disproportion between the white and colored worlds becomes still more marked
when we turn from surveys of area to tables of population. The total number of
human beings alive to-day is about 1,700,000,000. Of these 550,000,000 are
white, while 1,150,000,000 are colored. The colored races thus outnumber the
whites more than two to one. Another fact of capital importance is that the
great bulk of the white race is concentrated in the European continent. In 1914
the population of Europe was approximately 450,000,000. The late war has
undoubtedly caused an absolute decrease of many millions of souls.
Nevertheless, the basic fact remains that some four-fifths of the entire white
race is concentrated on less than one-fifth of the white world's territorial
area (Europe), while the remaining one-fifth of the race (some 110,000,000
souls), scattered to the ends of the earth, must protect four-fifths of the
white territorial heritage against the pressure of colored races eleven times
its numerical strength.
As to the
1,150,000,000 of the colored world, they are divided, as already stated, into
four primary categories: yellows, browns, blacks, and reds. The yellows are the
most numerous of the colored races, numbering over 500,000,000. Their habitat
is eastern Asia. Nearly as numerous and much more wide-spread than the yellows
are the browns, numbering some 450,000,000. The browns spread in a broad belt
from the Pacific Ocean westward across southern Asia and northern Africa to the
Atlantic Ocean. The blacks total about 150,000,000. Their centre is Africa
south of the Sahara Desert, but besides the African continent there are
vestigial black traces across southern Asia to the Pacific and also strong
black outposts in the Americas. Least numerous of the colored race-stocks are
the reds-the "Indians" of the western hemisphere. Mustering a total
of less than 40,000,000, the reds are almost all located south of the Rio
Grande in "Latin America."
Such is the
ethnic make-up of that world of color which, as already seen, outnumbers the
white world two to one. That is a formidable ratio, and its significance is
heightened by the fact that this ratio seems destined to shift still further in
favor of color. There can be no doubt that at present the colored races are increasing
very much faster than the white. Treating the primary race-stocks as units, it
would appear that whites tend to double in eighty years, yellows and browns in
sixty years, blacks in forty years. The whites are thus the slowest breeders,
and they will undoubtedly become slower still, since section after section of
the white race is revealing that lowered birth rate which in France has reached
the extreme of a stationary population.
On the other
hand, none of the colored races shows perceptible signs of declining
birth-rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available subsistence.
Such checks as now limit the increase of colored populations are wholly
external, like famine, disease, and tribal warfare. But by a curious irony of
fate, the white man has long been busy removing these checks to colored
multiplication. The greater part of the colored world is to-day under white
political control. Wherever the white man goes he attempts to impose the bases
of his ordered civilization. He puts down tribal war, he wages truceless combat
against epidemic disease, and he so improves communications that augmented and
better distributed food-supplies minimize the blight of famine. In response to
these life-saving activities the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept
the colored races from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions
comparable with the death-rate of white countries. But to lower the colored
world's prodigious birth rate is quite another matter. The consequence is a
portentous increase of population in nearly every portion of the colored world
now under white political sway. In fact, even those colored countries which
have maintained their independence, such as China and Japan, are adopting the
white man's life-conserving methods and are experiencing the same accelerated
increase of population.
Now what
must be the inevitable result of all this? It can mean only one thing: a
tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from
overcrowded colored homelands. Remember that these homelands are already
populated up to the available limits of subsistence. Of course present limits
can in many cases be pushed back by better living conditions, improved
agriculture, and the rise of modern machine industry such as is already under
way in Japan. Nevertheless, in view of the tremendous population increases
which must occur, these can be only palliatives. Where, then, should the
congested colored world tend to pour its accumulating human surplus, inexorably
condemned to emigrate or starve? The answer is: into those emptier regions of
the earth under white political control. But many of those relatively empty
lands have been definitely set aside by the white man as his own special
heritage. The upshot is that the rising flood of color finds itself walled in
by white dikes debarring it from many a promised land which it would fain
deluge with its dusky waves.
Thus the
colored world, long restive under white political domination, is being welded
by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of self-preservation, into a
common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man, and in the fire of
a common purpose internecine differences tend, for the time at least, to be
burned away. Before the supreme fact of white political world-domination,
antipathies within the colored world must inevitably recede into the
background.
The
imperious urge of the colored world toward racial expansion was well visualized
by that keen English student of world affairs, Doctor E. J. Dillon, when he
wrote more than a decade ago: "The problem is one of life and death-a
veritable sphinx-question- to those most nearly concerned. For, no race,
however inferior it may be, will consent to famish slowly in order that other
people may fatten and take their ease, especially if it has a good chance to
make a fight for life." (E. J. Dillon, "The Asiatic Problem,"
Contemporary Review, February, 1908.)
This white
statement of the colored thesis is an accurate reflection of what colored men
say themselves. For example, a Japanese scholar, Professor Ryutaro Nagai,
writes: "The world was not made for the white races, but for the other
races as well. In Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States, there
are vast tracts of unoccupied territory awaiting settlement, and although the
citizens of the ruling Powers refuse to take up the land, no yellow people are
permitted to enter. Thus the white races seem ready to commit to the savage
birds and beasts what they refuse to intrust to their brethren of the yellow
race. Surely the arrogance and avarice of the nobility in apportioning to
themselves the most and the best of the land in certain countries is as nothing
compared with the attitude of the white races toward those of a different
hue." (Ryutaro Nagai in The Japan Magazine. Quoted from The American
Review of Reviews, July, 1913, p. 107.)
The bitter
resentment of white predominance and exclusiveness awakened in many colored
breasts is typified by the following lines penned by a brown man a British-educated
Afghan, shortly before the European War. Inveighing against our "racial
prejudice, that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European and the American
the world over," he exultantly predicts "a coming struggle between
Asia, all Asia, against Europe and America. You are heaping up material for a
Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy War, a gigantic day of reckoning, an
invasion of a new Attila and Tamerlane who will use rifles and bullets, instead
of lances and spears. You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so
you must be taught with the whirring swish of the sword when it is red."
(Achmet Abdullah, "Seen Through Mohammedan Spectacles," Forum,
October, 1914.)
Of course in
these statements there is nothing either exceptional or novel. The colored
races never welcomed white predominance and were always restive under white
control. Down to the close of the nineteenth century, however, they generally
accepted white hegemony as a disagreeable but inevitable fact. For four hundred
years the white man had added continent to continent in his imperial progress,
equipped with resistless sea-power and armed with a mechanical superiority that
crushed down all local efforts at resistance. In time, therefore, the colored
races accorded to white supremacy a fatalistic acquiescence, and, though never
loved, the white man was usually respected and universally feared.
During the
closing decades of the nineteenth century, to be sure, premonitory signs of a
change in attitude began to appear. The yellow and brown races, at least,
stirred by the very impact of Western ideas, measured the white man with a more
critical eye and commenced to wonder whether his superiority was due to
anything more than a fortuitous combination of circumstances which might be altered
by efforts of their own. Japan put this theory to the test by going sedulously
to the white man's school. The upshot was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, an
event the momentous character of which is even now not fully appreciated. Of
course, that war was merely the sign-manual of a whole nexus of forces making
for a revivified Asia. But it dramatized and clarified ideas which had been
germinating half-unconsciously in millions of colored minds, and both Asia and
Africa thrilled with joy and hope. Above all, the legend of white invincibility
lay, a fallen idol, in the dust. Nevertheless, though freed from imaginary
terrors, the colored world accurately gauged the white man's practical strength
and appreciated the magnitude of the task involved in overthrowing white
supremacy. That supremacy was no longer acquiesced in as inevitable and hopes
of ultimate success were confidently entertained, but the process was usually
conceived as a slow and difficult one. Fear of white power and respect for
white civilization thus remained potent restraining factors.
Then came
the Great War. The colored world suddenly saw the white peoples which, in
racial matters had hitherto maintained something of a united front, locked in
an internecine death-grapple of unparalleled ferocity; it saw those same
peoples put one another furiously to the ban as irreconcilable foes; it saw
white race-unity cleft by political and moral gulfs which white men themselves
continuously iterated would never be filled. As colored men realized the
significance of it all, they looked into each other's eyes and there saw the
light of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces.
White solidarity was riven and shattered. And fear of white power and respect
for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the
bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: "The East will see the West to
bed! "
The chorus
of mingled exultation, hate, and scorn sounded from every portion of the
colored world. Chinese scholars, Japanese professors, Hindu pundits, Turkish
journalists, and Afro-American editors, one and all voiced drastic criticisms
of white civilization and hailed the war as a well-merited Nemesis on white
arrogance and greed. This is how the Constantinople Tanine, the most serious
Turkish newspaper, characterized the European Powers: "They would not look
at the evils in their own countries or elsewhere, but interfered at the
slightest incident in our borders; every day they would gnaw at some part of
our rights and our sovereignty; they would perform vivisection on our quivering
flesh and cut off great pieces of it. And we, with a forcibly controlled spirit
of rebellion in our hearts and with clinched but powerless fists, silent and
depressed, would murmur as the fire burned within: 'Oh, that they might fall
out with one another! Oh, that they might eat one another up!' And lo! to-day
they are eating each other up, just as the Turk wished they would."
(Quoted from The Literary Digest, October 24, 1914, p. 784.)
The
Afro-American author, W. E. Burghardt Dubois, wrote of the colored world:
"These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of
humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and not
a moment longer. Then they are going to fight, and the War of the Color Line
will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored
folk have much to remember and they will not forget." (W. E. Burghardt
Dubois `'The African Roots of War," Atlantic Monthly, May, 1915.)
"What
does the European War mean to us Orientals?" queried the Japanese writer,
Yone Noguchi "It means the saddest downfall of the so-called western
civilization, our belief that it was builded upon a higher and sounder footing
than ours was at once knocked down and killed; we are sorry that we somehow
overestimated its happy possibility and were deceived and cheated by its
superficial glory. My recent western journey confirmed me that the so-called
dynamic western civilization was all against the Asiatic belief. And when one
does not respect the others, there will be only one thing to come, that is,
fight, in action or silence." (Yone Noguchi, "The Downfall of Western
Civilization," The Nation (New York), October 8, 1914.)
Such was the
colored world's reaction to the white death-grapple, and as the long struggle
dragged on both Asia and Africa stirred to their very depths. To be sure, no
great explosions occurred during the war years, albeit lifting veils of
censorship reveal how narrowly such explosions were averted. Nevertheless, Asia
and Africa are to-day in acute ferment, and we must not forget that this
ferment is not primarily due to the war. The war merely accelerated a movement
already existent long before 1914. Even if the Great War had been averted, the
twentieth century must have been a time of wide-spread racial readjustments in
which the white man's present position of political world-domination would have
been sensibly modified, especially in Asia. However, had the white race and
white civilization been spared the terrific material and moral losses involved
in the Great War and its still unliquidated aftermath, the process of racial
readjustment would have been far more gradual and would have been fraught with
far fewer cataclysmic possibilities. Had white strength remained intact it
would have acted as a powerful shock-absorber, taking up and distributing the
various colored impacts. As a result, the coming modification of the world's
racial equilibrium, though inevitable, would have been so graduated that it
would have seemed more an evolution than a revolution. Such violent breaches as
did occur might have been localized, and anything like a general race-cataclysm
would probably have been impossible.
But it was
not to be. The heart of the white world was divided against itself, and on the
fateful 1st of August, 1914, the white race, forgetting ties of blood and
culture, heedless of the growing pressure of the colored world without, locked
in a battle to the death. An ominous cycle opened whose end no man can foresee.
- Armageddon engendered Versailles; earth's worst war closed with an
unconstructive peace which left old sores unhealed and even dealt fresh wounds.
The white world to-day lies debilitated and uncured; the colored world views conditions
which are a standing incitement to rash dreams and violent action.
Such is the
present status of the world's race-problem, expressed in general terms. The
analysis of the specific elements in that complex problem will form the subject
of the succeeding chapters.
CHAPTER II:
YELLOW MAN'S LAND
YELLOW MAN'S
LAND is the Far East. Here the group of kindred stocks usually termed Mongolian
have dwelt for unnumbered ages. Down to the most recent times the yellows lived
virtually a life apart. Sundered from the rest of mankind by stupendous
mountains, burning deserts, and the illimitable ocean, the Far East constituted
a world in itself, living its own life and developing its own peculiar
civilization. Only the wild nomads of its northern marches-Huns, Mongols,
Tartars, and the like-succeeded in gaining direct contact with the brown and
white worlds to the West.
The ethnic
focus of the yellow world has always been China. Since the dawn of history this
immense human ganglion has been the centre from which civilization has radiated
throughout the Far East. About this "Middle Kingdom," as it sapiently
styled itself, the other yellow folk were disposed-Japanese and Koreans to the
east; Siamese, Annamites, and Cambodians to the south; and to the north the nomad
Mongols and Manchus. To all these peoples China was the august preceptor,
sometimes chastising their presumption, yet always instilling the principles of
its ordered civilization. However diverse may have been the individual
developments of the various Far Eastern peoples, they spring from a common
Chinese foundation. Despite modern Japan's meteoric rise to political mastery
of the Far East, it must not be forgotten that China remains not only the
cultural but also the territorial and racial centre of the yellow world.
Four-fifths of the yellow race is concentrated in China, there being nearly
400,000,000 Chinese as against 60,000,000 Japanese, 16,000,000 Koreans,
26,000,000 Indo-Chinese, and perhaps 10,000,000 people of non-Chinese stocks
included within China's political frontiers.
The age-long
seclusion of the yellow world, first decreed by nature, was subsequently
maintained by the voluntary decision of the yellow peoples themselves. The
great expansive movement of the white race which began four centuries ago soon
brought white men to the Far East, by sea in the persons of the Portuguese
navigators and by land with the Cossack adventurers ranging through the empty
spaces of Siberia. Yet after a brief acquaintance with the white strangers the
yellow world decided that it wanted none of them, and they were rigidly
excluded. This exclusion policy was not a Chinese peculiarity; it was common to
all the yellow peoples and was adopted spontaneously at about the same time. In
China, Japan, Korea, and Indo-China, the same reaction produced the same
results. The yellow world instinctively felt the white man to be a destructive,
dissolving influence on its highly specialized line of evolution, which it
wished to maintain unaltered. For three centuries the yellow world succeeded in
maintaining its isolation, then, in the middle of the last century, insistent
white pressure broke down the barriers and forced the yellow races into full
contact with the outer world.
At the
moment, the "opening" of the Far East was hailed by white men with
general approval, but of late years many white observers have regretted this
forcible dragging of reluctant races into the full stream of world affairs. As
an Australian writer, J. Liddell Kelly, remarks: "We have erred grievously
by prematurely forcing ourselves upon Asiatic races. The instinct of the
Asiatic in desiring isolation and separation from other forms of civilization
was much more correct than our craze for imposing our forms of religion,
morals, and industrialism upon them. It is not race-hatred, nor even
race-antagonism, that is at the root of this attitude; it is an unerring
intuition, which in years gone by has taught the Asiatic that his evolution in
the scale of civilization could best be accomplished by his being allowed to
develop on his own lines. Pernicious European compulsion has led him to abandon
that attitude. Let us not be ashamed to confess that he was right and we were
wrong." (J. Liddell Kelly, "What is the Matter with the
Asiatic?" Westminister Review, September, 1910.)
However,
rightly or wrongly, the deed was done, and the yellow races, forced into the
world-arena, proceeded to adapt themselves to their new political environment
and to learn the correct methods of survival under the strenuous conditions
which there prevailed. In place of their traditional equilibrated,
self-sufficient order, the yellow peoples now felt the ubiquitous impacts of
the dynamic Western spirit, insistent upon rapid material progress and
forceful, expansive evolution. Japan was the first yellow people to go
methodically to the white man's school, and Japan's rapid acquirement of the
white man's technology soon showed itself in dramatic demonstrations like her
military triumphs over China in 1894, and over Russia a decade later.
Japan's easy
victory over huge China astounded the whole world. That those "highly
intelligent children," as one of the early British ministers to Japan had
characterized them, should have so rapidly acquired the technique of Western
methods was almost unbelievable. Indeed, the full significance of the lesson
was not immediately grasped, and the power of New Japan was still
underestimated. A good example of Europe's underestimation of Japanese strength
was the proposal a Dutch writer made in 1896 to curb possible Japanese
aggression on the Dutch Indies by taking from Japan the island of Formosa which
Japan had acquired from China as one of the fruits of victory.
"Holland," asserted this writer, "must take possession of
Formosa." (Professor Schlegel in the Hague Dagblad. Quoted from The
Literary Digest., November 7, 1896, p. 24.) The grotesqueness of this dictum as
it appears to us in the light of subsequent history shows how the world has
moved in twenty-five years.
But even at
that time Japan's expansionist tendencies were well developed, and voices were
warning against Japanese imperialism. In the very month when our Hollander was
advocating a Dutch seizure of Formosa, an Australian wrote the following lines
in a Melbourne newspaper concerning his recent travels in Japan: "While in
a car with several Japanese officers, they were conversing about Australia,
saying that it was a fine, large country, with great forests and excellent soil
for the cultivation of rice and other products. The whites settled in
Australia, so thought these officers, are like the dog in the manger. Some one
will have to take a good part of Australia to develop it, for it is a pity to
see so fine a country lying waste. If any ill-feeling arose between the two
countries, it would be a wise thing to send some battleships to Australia and
annex part of it." (Audley Coote in the Melbourne Argus. Quoted from The
Literary Digest, November 7, 1896, p. 24.)
Whatever may
have been the world's misreading of the Chino-Japanese conflict, the same
cannot be said of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. The echoes of that yellow
triumph over one of the great white Powers reverberated to the ends of the
earth and started obscure trains of consequences even to-day not yet fully
disclosed. The war's reactions in these remoter fields will be discussed in
later chapters. Its effect upon the Far East is our present concern. And the
well-nigh unanimous opinion of both natives and resident Europeans was that the
war signified a body-blow to white ascendancy. So profound an English student
of the Orient as Meredith Townsend wrote: "It may be taken as certain that
the victory of Japan will be profoundly felt by the majority of European
states. With the exception of Austria, all European countries have implicated
themselves in the great effort to conquer Asia, which has now been going on for
two centuries, but which, as this author thinks must now terminate.... The
disposition, therefore, to edge out intrusive Europeans from their Asiatic
possessions is certain to exist even if it is not manifested in Tokyo and it
may be fostered by a movement of which, as yet, but little has been said. No
one who has ever studied the question doubts that as there is a comity of
Europe, so there is a comity of Asia, a disposition to believe that Asia
belongs of right to Asiatics, and that any event which brings that right nearer
to realization is to all Asiatics a pleasurable one. Japanese victories will
give new heart and energy to all the Asiatic nations and tribes which now fret under
European rule, will inspire in them a new confidence in their own power to
resist, and will spread through them a strong impulse to avail themselves of
Japanese instruction. It will take, of course, many years to bring this new
force into play; but time matters nothing to Asiatics, and they all possess
that capacity for complete secrecy which the Japanese displayed."
[Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe (fourth edition, 1911). From the preface to
the fourth edition pages xvii-xix.]
That
Meredith Townsend was reading the Asiatic mind aright seems clear from the
pronouncements of Orientals themselves. For example, BUDDHISM, of Rangoon,
Burma, a country of the Indo-Chinese borderland between the yellow and brown
worlds, expressed hopes for an Oriental alliance against the whites. "It
would, we think," said this paper, "be no great wonder if a few years
after the conclusion of this war saw the completion of a defensive alliance
between Japan, China, and not impossibly Siam-the formulation of a new Monroe Doctrine
for the Far East, guaranteeing the integrity of existing states against further
aggression from the West. The West has justified-perhaps with some reason -
every aggression on weaker races by the doctrine of the Survival of the
Fittest; on the ground that it is best for future humanity that the unfit
should be eliminated and give place to the most able race. That doctrine
applies equally well to any possible struggle between Aryan and
Mongolian-whichever survives, should it ever come to a struggle between the two
for world-mastery, will, on their own doctrine, be the one most fit to do so,
and if the survivor be the Mongolian, then is the Mongolian no 'peril' to
humanity, but the better part of it." (Quoted from The American Review of
Reviews, February, 1905, p. 219.)
The decade
which elapsed between the Russo-Japanese and European Wars saw in the Far East
another event of the first magnitude: the Chinese Revolution of 1911. Toward
the close of the nineteenth century the world had been earnestly discussing the
" break-up " of China. The huge empire, with its 400,000,000 of
people, one-fourth the entire human race, seemed at that time plunged in so
hopeless a lethargy as to be foredoomed to speedy ruin. About the apparently
moribund carcass the eagles of the earth were already gathered, planning a
"partition of China" analogous to the recent partition of Africa. The
partition of China, however, never came off. The prodigious moral shock of the
Japanese War roused China's lite to the imminence of their country's peril.
First attempts at reform wore blocked by the Dowager Empress, but her
reactionary lurch ended in the Boxer nightmare and the frightful Occidental
chastisement of 1900. This time the lesson was learned. China was at last
shaken broad awake. The Bourbon Manchu court, it is true, wavered, but popular
pressure forced it to keep the upward path. Every year after 1900 saw
increasingly rapid reform - reform, be it noted, not imposed upon the country
from above but forced upon the rulers from below. When the slow-footed Manchus
showed themselves congenitally incapable of keeping step with the quickening
national pace, the rising tide of national life overwhelmed them in the
Republican Revolution of 1911, and they were no more.
Even with
the Manchu handicap, the rate of progress during those years was such as to
amaze the wisest foreign observers. "Could the sage, Confucius, have
returned a decade ago," wrote that "old China hand," W. R.
Manning, in 1910, "he would have felt almost as much at home as when he
departed twenty-five centuries before. Should he return a decade hence he will
feel almost as much out of place as Rip Van Winkle if the recent rate of
progress continues." (W. R. Manning, "China and the Powers since the
Boxer Movement," American Journal of International Law, October, 1910.)
Toward the close of 1909 a close student of things Chinese, Harlan P. Beach,
remarked: "Those who, like myself, can compare the China of twenty-five
years ago with the China of this year, can hardly believe our senses."
(Quoted by Manning, supra.) It was on top of all this that there came the
revolution, a happening hailed by so sophisticated an observer as Doctor Dillon
as "the most momentous event in a thousand years." (E. J. Dillon,
"The Most Momentous Event in a Thousand Years," Contemporary Review,
December, 1911.) Whatever may have been the political blunders of the
revolutionists (and they were many), the revolution's moral results wore
stupendous. The stream of Western innovation flowed at a vastly accelerated
pace into every Chinese province. The popular masses wore for the first time
awakened to genuine interest in political, as distinguished from economic or
personal, questions. Lastly, the semi-religlous feeling of family kinship,
which in the past had been almost the sole recognized bond of Chinese race
solidarity, was powerfully supplemented by those distinctively modern concepts,
national self-consciousness and articulate patriotism.
Here was the
Far Eastern situation at the outbreak of the Great War - a thoroughly
modernized, powerful Japan, and a thoroughly aroused, but still disorganized,
China. The Great War automatically made Japan supreme in the Far East by
temporarily reducing all the European Powers to ciphers in Oriental affairs.
How Japan proceeded to buttress this supremacy by getting a strangle-hold on
China, every one knows. Japan's methods were brutal and cynical, though not a
whit more so than the methods employed by white nations seeking to attain vital
ends. And "vital" is precisely how Japan regards her hold over China.
An essentially poor country with a teeming population, Japan feels that the
exploitation of China's incalculable natural resources, a privileged position
in the Chinese market, and guidance of Chinese national evolution in ways not
inimical to Japan, can alone assure her future.
Japan's
attitude toward her huge neighbor is one of mingled superiority and
apprehension. She banks on China's traditional pacifism, yet she is too shrewd
not to realize the explosive possibilities latent in the modern nationalist
idea. As a Japanese publicist, Adachi Kinnosuke, remarks: "The Twentieth
Century Jenghiz Khan threatening the Sun-Flag with a Mongol horde armed with
Krupp guns may possibly strike the Western sense of humor. But it is not
altogether pleasing to contemplate a neighbor of 400,000,000 population with
modern armament and soldiers trained on the modern plan. The awakening of China
means all this and a little more which we of the present are not sure of. Japan
cannot forget that between this nightmare of armed China and herself there is
only a very narrow sea." (Adachi Kinnosuke, "Does Japanese Trade
Endanger the Peace of Asia? World's Work, April, 1909.) Certainly, "Young
China" has already displayed much of that unpleasant ebullience which
usually accompanies nationalist awakenings. A French observer, Jean Rodes,
writes on this point: "One of the things that most disquiet thinking men
is that this new generation, completely neglecting Chinese studies while
knowing nothing of Western science, yet convinced that it knows everything,
will no longer possess any standard of values, national culture, or foreign
culture. We can only await with apprehension the results of such ignorance
united with unbounded pride as characterize the Chinese youth of to-day."
(Jean Rodes in L'Asie Francaise, June, 1911.)
And another
French observer, Rene Pinon, as far back as 1905, found the primary school
children of Kiang-Su province chanting the following lines: "I pray that
the frontiers of my country become hard as bronze; that it surpass Europe and
America; that it subjugate Japan; that its land and sea armies cover themselves
with resplendent glory: that over the whole earth float the Dragon Standard;
that the universal mastery of the empire extend and progress. May our empire,
like a sleeping tiger suddenly awakened, spring roaring into the arena of
combats." [Rene Pinon, La Lutte pour le Pacifique" p. 152 (Paris,
1906)]
Japan's
masterful policy in China is thus unquestionably hazardous. Chinese national
feeling is today genuinely aroused against Japan, and resentment over Japanese
encroachments is bitter and wide-spread. Nevertheless, Japan feels that the
game is worth the risk and believes that both Chinese race-psychology and the
general drift of world affairs combine to favor her ultimate success. She knows
that China has in the past always acquiesced in foreign domination when
resistance has proved patently impossible. She also feels that her aspirations
for white expulsion from the Far East and for the winning of wider spheres for
racial expansion should appeal strongly to yellow peoples generally and to the
Chinese in particular. To turn China's nascent nationalism into purely
anti-white channels and to transmute Chinese patriotism into a wider
"Pan-Mongolism" would constitute a Japanese triumph of incalculable
splendor. It would increase her effective force manyfold and would open up
almost limitless vistas of power and glory.
Nor are the
Chinese themselves blind to the advantages of Chino-Japanese co-operation. They
have an instinctive assurance in their own capacities, they know how they have
ultimately digested all their conquerors, and many Chinese to-day think that
from a Chino-Japanese partnership, no matter how framed, the inscrutable
"Sons of Han" would eventually get the lion's share. Certainly no one
has ever denied the Chinaman's extraordinary economic efficiency. Winnowed by
ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of
subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the
fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his
whole life literally within a hand's breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when
removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him
a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors. That urbane Celestial,
Doctor Wu-Ting-Fang, well says of his own people: "Experience proves that
the Chinese as all-round laborers can easily outdistance all competitors. They
are industrious, intelligent, and orderly. They can work under conditions that
would kill a man of less hardy race; in heat that would kill a salamander, or
in cold that would please a polar bear, sustaining their energies, through long
hours of unremitting toil with only a few bowls of rice." (Quoted by
Alleyne Ireland, "Commercial Aspects of the Yellow Peril," North
American Review, September, 1900.)
This Chinese
estimate is echoed by the most competent foreign observers. The Australian
thinker, Charles E. Pearson, wrote of the Chinese a generation ago in his
epoch-making book, "National Life and Character": "Flexible as
Jews, they can thrive on the mountain plateaux of Thibet and under the sun of
Singapore; more versatile even than Jews, they are excellent laborers, and not
without merit as soldiers and sailors; while they have a capacity for trade
which no other nation of the East possesses. They do not need even the accident
of a man of genius to develop their magnificent future." [Charles H. Pearson,
National Life and Character, p. 118 (2nd edition)]
And Lafcadio
Hearn says: "A people of hundreds of millions disciplined for thousands of
years to the most untiring industry and the most self-denying thrift, under
conditions which would mean worse than death for our working masses -- a
people, in short, quite content to strive to the uttermost in exchange for the
simple privilege of life." (Quoted by Ireland, supra.)
This
economic superiority of the Chinaman shows not only with other races, but with
his yellow kindred as well. As regards the Japanese, John Chinaman has proved
it to the hilt. Wherever the two have met in economic competition, John has won
hands down. Even in Japanese colonies like Korea and Formosa, the Japanese,
with all the backing of their government behind them, have been worsted. In
fact, Japan itself, so bitter at white refusals to receive her emigrants, has
been obliged to enact drastic exclusion laws to protect her working classes
from the influx of "Chinese cheap labor." It seems, therefore, a just
calculation when Chinese estimate that Japanese triumphs against white
adversaries would inure largely to China's benefit. After all, Chinese and
Japanese are fundamentally of the same race and culture. They may have their
very bitter family quarrels, but in the last analysis they understand each
other and may arrive at surprisingly sudden agreements. One thing is certain:
both these over-populated lands will feel increasingly the imperious need of
racial expansion. For all these reasons, then, the present political tension
between China and Japan cannot be reckoned as permanent, and we would do well
to envisage the possibility of close Chinese co-operation in the ambitious
programme of Japanese foreign policy.
This
Japanese programme looks first to the prevention of all further white
encroachment in the Far East by the establishment of a Far Eastern Monroe
Doctrine based on Japanese predominance and backed if possible by the moral
support of the other Far Eastern peoples. The next stage in Japanese foreign
policy seems to be the systematic elimination of all existing white holdings in
the Far East. Thus far practically all Japanese appear to be in substantial
agreement. Beyond this point lies a wide realm of aspiration ranging from
determination to secure complete racial equality and freedom of immigration
into white lands to imperialistic dreams of wholesale conquests and
"world-dominion." These last items do not represent the united
aspiration of the Japanese nation, but they are cherished by powerful circles
which, owing to Japan's oligarchical system of government, possess an influence
over governmental action quite disproportionate to their numbers.
Although
Japanese plans and aspirations have broadened notably since 1914, their
outlines were well defined a decade earlier. Immediately after her victory over
Russia, Japan set herself to strengthen her influence all over eastern Asia.
Special efforts were made to establish intimate relations with the other
Asiatic peoples. Asiatic students were invited to attend Japanese universities
and as a matter of fact did attend by the thousand, while a whole series of
societies was formed having for their object the knitting of close cultural and
economic ties between Japan and specific regions like China, Siam, the Pacific,
and even India. The capstone was a " Pan-Asiatic Association,"
founded by Count Okuma. Some of the facts regarding these societies, about
which too little is known, make interesting reading. For instance, there was
the "Pacific Ocean Society" ("Taheijoka"), whose preamble
reads in part: "For a century the Pacific Ocean has been a battle-ground
wherein the nations have straggled for supremacy. To-day the prosperity or
decadence of a nation depends on its power in the Pacific: to possess the
empire of the Pacific is to be the Master of the World. As Japan finds itself
at the centre of that Ocean, whose waves bathe its shores, it must reflect
carefully and have clear views on Pacific questions." (Quoted by
Scie-Ton-Fa, "La Chine et le Japon," Revue Politique Internationale,
September, 1915.)
Equally
interesting is the "Indo-Japanese Association," whose activities
appear somewhat peculiar in view of the political alliance between Japan and
the British Empire. One of the first articles of its constitution (from Count
Okuma's pen, by the way) reads: "All men wore born equal. The Asiatics
have the same claim to be called men as the Europeans themselves. It is
therefore quite unreasonable that the latter should have any right to predominate
over the former." (The Literary Digest, March 6, 1910, p. 429.) No mention
is made anywhere in the document of India's political connection with England.
In fact, Count Okuma, in the autumn of 1907, had this to say regarding India:
"Being oppressed by the Europeans, the 300,000,000 people of India are
looking for Japanese protection. They have commenced to boycott European
merchandise. If, therefore, the Japanese let the chance slip by and do not go
to India, the Indians will be disappointed. From old times, India has been a
land of treasure. Alexander the Great obtained there treasure sufficient to
load a hundred camels, and Mahmoud and Attila also obtained riches from India.
Why should not the Japanese stretch out their hands toward that country, now
that the people are looking to the Japanese? The Japanese ought to go to India,
the South Ocean, and other parts of the world." (The Literary Digest,
January 18, 1908, p. 81.)
In 1910,
Putnam Weale, a competent English student of Oriental affairs asserted:
"It can no longer be doubted that a very deliberate policy is certainly
being quietly and cleverly pursued. Despite all denials, it is a fact that
Japan has already a great hold in the schools and in the vernacular newspapers
all over eastern Asia, and that the gospel of 'Asia for the Asiatics' is being
steadily preached not only by her schoolmasters and her editors, but by her
merchants and peddlers, and every other man who travels." [B. L. Putnam
Weale, The Conflict of Color, pp. 145-6 (New York, 1910)]
Exactly how
much these Japanese propagandist efforts accomplished is impossible to say.
Certain it is, however, that during the years just previous to the Great War
the white colonies in the Far East were afflicted with considerable native
unrest. In French Indo-China, for example, revolutionary movements during the
year 1908 necessitated reinforcing the French garrison by nearly 10,000 men,
and though the disturbances were sternly repressed, fresh conspiracies were
discovered in 1911 and 1913. Much sedition and some sharp fighting also took
place in the Dutch Indies, while in the Philippines the independence movement
continued to gain ground.
What the
growing self-consciousness of the Far East portended for the white man's
ultimate status in those regions was indicated by an English publicist, J. D.
Whelpley, who wrote, shortly after the outbreak of the European War: "With
the aid of Western ideas the Far East is fast attaining a solidarity impossible
under purely Oriental methods. The smug satisfaction expressed in the West at
what is called the 'modernization' of the East shows lack of wisdom or an
ineffective grasp of the meaning of comparatively recent events in Japan,
China, eastern Siberia, and even in the Philippines. In years past the solidarity
of the Far East was largely in point of view, while in other matters the
powerful nations of the West played the game according to their own rules.
To-day the solidarity of mental outlook still maintains, while in addition
there is rapidly coming about a solidarity of political and material interests
which in time will reduce Western participation in Far Eastern affairs to that
of a comparatively unimportant factor. It might truly be said that this point
is already reached, and that it only needs an application of the test to prove
to the world that the Far East would resent Western interference as an
intolerable impertinence." (J. D. Whelpley, "East and West: A New
Line of Cleavage," Fortnightly Review, May, 1915.)
The scope of
Japan's aspirations, together with differences of outlook between various
sections of Japanese public opinion as to the rate of progress feasible for
Japanese expansion, account for Japan's differing attitudes toward the white
Powers. Officially, the keystone of Japan's foreign policy since the beginning
of the present century has been the alliance with England, first negotiated in
1902 and renewed with extensive modifications in 1911. The 1902 alliance was
universally popular in Japan. It was directed specifically against Russia and
represented the common apprehensions of both the contracting parties. By 1911,
however, the situation had radically altered. Japan's aspirations in the Far
East, particularly as regards China, were arousing wide-spread uneasiness in
many quarters, and the English communities in the Far East generally condemned
the new alliance as a gross blunder of British diplomacy. In Japan also there
was considerable protest. The official organs, to be sure, stressed the
necessity of friendship with the Mistress of the Seas for an island empire like
Japan, but opposition circles pointed to England's practical refusal to be
drawn into a war with the United States under any circumstances which
constituted the outstanding feature of the new treaty and declared that Japan
was giving much and receiving nothing in return.
The growing
divergence between Japanese and English views regarding China increased
anti-English feeling, and in 1912 the semi-official Japan Magazine asserted
roundly that the general feeling in Japan was that the alliance was a detriment
rather than a benefit going on to forecast a possible alignment with Russia and
Germany, and remarking of the latter: "Germany's healthy imperialism and
scientific development would have a wholesome effect upon our nation and
progress, while the German habit of perseverance and frugality is just what we
need. German wealth and industry are gradually creeping upward to that of Great
Britain and America, and the efficiency of the German army and navy is a model
for the world. Her lease of the territory of Kiaochow Bay brings her into
contact with us, and her ambition to exploit the coal-mines of Shantung lends
her a community of interest with us. It is not too much to say that German
interests in China are greater than those of any other European Power. If the
alliance with England should ever be abrogated, we might be very glad to shake
hands with Germany." (The Literary Digest, July 6, 1912, p. 9.)
The outbreak
of the European War gave Japan a golden opportunity (of which she was not slow
to take advantage) to eliminate one of the white Powers from the Far East. The
German stronghold of Kiaochow was promptly reduced, while Germany's possessions
in the Pacific Ocean north of the equator, the Caroline, Pelew, Marianne, and
Marshall island-groups, wore likewise occupied by Japanese forces. Here Japan
stopped and politely declined all proposals to send armies to Europe or western
Asia. Her sphere was the Far East; her real objectives were the reduction of
white influence there and the riveting of her control over China. Japanese
comment was perfectly candid on these matters. As the semi-official Japanese
Colonial Journal put it in the autumn of 1914: "To protect Chinese
territory, Japan is ready to fight no matter what nation. Not only will Japan
try to erase the ambitions of Russia and Germany; it will also do its best to
prevent England and the United States from touching the Chinese cake. The
solution of the Chinese problem is of great importance for Japan, and Great Britain
has little to do with it." (Quoted by Scie-Ton-Fa, supra.)
Equally
frank were Japanese warnings to the English ally not to oppose Japan's progress
in China. English criticism of the series of ultimatums by which Japan forced
reluctant China to do her bidding roused angry admonitions like the following
from the Tokio Universe in April, 1915: "Hostile English opinion seems to
want to oppose Japanese demands in China. The English forget that Japan has, by
her alliance, rendered them signal services against Russia in 1905 and in the
present war by assuring security in their colonies of the Pacific and the Far
East. If Japan allied herself with England, it was with the object of
establishing Japanese preponderance in China and against the encroachments of Russia.
To-day the English seem to be neglecting their obligations toward Japan by not
supporting her cause. Let England beware! Japan will tolerate no wavering; she
is quite ready to abandon the Anglo-Japanese alliance and turn to Russia-a
Power with whom she can agree perfectly regarding Far Eastern interests. In the
future, even, she is ready to draw closer to Germany. The English colonies will
then be in great peril." (Quoted by Scie-Ton-Fa, supra.)
As to the
imminence of a Russo-Japanese understanding, the journal just quoted proved a
true prophet, for a year later, in July, 1916, the Japanese and Russian
Governments signed a diplomatic instrument which amounted practically to an
alliance. By this document Russia recognized Japan's paramountcy over the bulk
of China, while Japan recognized Russia's special interests in China's Western
dependencies, Mongolia and Turkestan. Japan had thus eliminated another of the
white Powers from the Far East, since Russia renounced those ambitions to
dominate China proper which had provoked the war of 1904.
Meanwhile
the press campaign against England continued. A typical sample is this
editorial from the Tokio Yamato: "Great Britain never wished at heart to
become Japan's ally. She did not wish to enter into such intimate relations
with us, for she privately regarded us as an upstart nation radically different
from us in blood and religion. It was simply the force of circumstances which
compelled her to enter into an alliance with us. It is the height of conceit on
our part to think that England really cared for our friendship, for she never
did. It was the Russian menace to India and Persia on the one hand, and the
German ascendancy on the other, which compelled her to clasp our hands."
(The Literary Digest, February 12, 1916, pp. 369-70.)
At the same
time many good things were being said about Germany. At no time during the war
was any real hostility to the Germans apparent in Japan. Germany was of course
expelled from her Far Eastern footholds in smart, workmanlike fashion, but the
fighting before Kiaochow was conducted without a trace of hatred, the German
prisoners were treated as honored captives, and German civilians in Japan
suffered no molestation. Japanese writers were very frank in stating that, once
Germany resigned herself to exclusion from the Far East and acquiesced in
Japanese predominance in China, no reason existed why Japan and Germany should
not be good friends. Unofficial diplomatic exchanges certainly took place
between the two governments during the war, and no rancor for the past appears
to exist on either side to-day.
The year
1917 brought three momentous modifications into the world-situation: the
entrance of the United States and China into the Great War and the Russian
Revolution. The first two were intensely distasteful to Japan. The
transformation of virtually unarmed America into a first-class fighting power
reacted portentously upon the Far East, while China's adhesion to the Grand
Alliance (bitterly opposed in Tokio) rescued her from diplomatic isolation and
gave her potential friends. The Russian Revolution was also a source of
perplexity to Tokio. In 1916, as we have seen, Japan had arrived at a thorough
understanding with the Czarist regime. The new Russian Government was an
unknown quantity, acting quite differently from the old.
Russia's
collapse into Bolshevist anarchy, however, presently opened up new vistas. Not
merely northern Manchuria, but also the huge expanse of Siberia, an almost
empty world of vast potential riches, lay temptingly exposed. At once the
powerful imperialist elements m Japanese political life began clamoring for
"forward" action. An opportunity far such action was soon vouchsafed
by the Allied determination to send a composite force to Siberia to checkmate
the machinations of the Russian Bolsheviki, now hostile to the Allies and
playing into the hands of Germany. The imperialist party at Tokio took the bit
in its teeth, and, in flagrant disregard of the inter-Allied agreement, poured
a great army into Siberia, occupying the whole country as far west as Lake
Baikal. This was in the spring of 1918. The Allies, then in their supreme
death-grapple with the Germans, dared not even protest, but in the autumn, when
the battle-tide had turned in Europe, Japan was called to account, the United
States taking the lead in the matter. A furious debate ensued at Tokio between
the imperialist and moderate parties, the hotter jingoes urging defiance of the
United States even at the risk of war. Then, suddenly, came the news that Germany
was cracking, and the moderates had their way. The Japanese armies in Siberia
were reduced, albeit they still remained the most powerful military factor in
the situation
Germany's
sudden collapse and the unexpectedly quick ending of the war was a blow to
Japanese hopes and plans in more ways than one. Despite official felicitations,
the nation could hardly disguise its chagrin. For Japan the war had been an
unmixed benefit. It had automatically made her mistress of the Far East and had
amazingly enriched her economic life. Every succeeding month of hostilities had
seen the white world grow weaker and had conversely increased Japanese power.
Japan had counted on at least one more year of war. Small wonder that the
sudden passing of this halcyon time provoked disappointment and regret.
The above
outline of Japanese foreign policy reveals beneath all its surface mutations a
fundamental continuity. Whatever may be its ultimate goals, Japanese foreign
policy has one minimum objective: Japan as hegemon of a Far East in which white
influence shall have been reduced to a vanishing quantity. That is the bald
truth of the matter - and no white man has any reason for getting indignant
about it. Granted that Japanese aims endanger white vested interests in the Far
East. Granted that this involves rivalry and perhaps war. That is no reason for
striking a moral attitude and inveighing against Japanese
"wickedness," as many people are to-day doing. These mighty racial
tides flow from the most elemental of vital urges: self-expansion and
self-preservation. Both outward thrust of expanding life and counter-thrust of
threatened life are equally normal phenomena. To condemn the former as
"criminal" and the latter as "selfish" is either silly or
hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary rancor what objective
fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable yet alleviated by mutual
comprehension and respect. This is no mere plea for "sportsmanship";
it is a very practical matter. There are critical times ahead; times in which
intense race-pressures will engender high tensions and perhaps wars. If men
will keep open minds and will eschew the temptation to regard those opposing
their desires to defend or possess respectively as impious fiends, the
struggles will lose half their bitterness, and the wars (if wars there must be)
will be shorn of half their ferocity.
The
unexpected ending of the European War was, as we have seen, a blow to Japanese
calculations. Nevertheless, the skill of her diplomats at the ensuing Versailles
Conference enabled Japan to harvest most of her war gains. Japan's territorial
acquisitions in China were definitely written into the peace treaty, despite
China's sullen veto, and Japan's preponderance in Chinese affairs was tacitly
acknowledged. Japan also took advantage of the occasion to pose as the champion
of the colored races by urging the formal promulgation of "racial
equality" as part of the peace settlement, especially as regards
immigration. Of course the Japanese diplomats had no serious expectation of
their demands being acceded to; in fact, they might have been rather
embarrassed if they had succeeded, in view of Japan's own stringent laws
against immigration and alien landholding. Nevertheless, it was a politic move,
useful for future propagandist purposes, and it advertised Japan broadcast as
the standard-bearer of the colored cause.
The notable
progress that Japan has made toward the mastery of the Far East is written
plainly upon the map, which strikingly portrays the broadening territorial base
of Japanese power effected in the past twenty-five years. Japan now owns the
whole island chain masking the eastern sea frontage of Asia, from the tip of
Kamchatka to the Philippines, while her acquisition of Germany's Oceanican
islands north of the equator gives her important strategic outposts in
mid-Pacific. Her bridge-heads on the Asiatic continent are also strong and well
located. From the Korean peninsula (now an integral part of Japan) she firmly
grasps the vast Chinese dependency of Manchuria, while just south of Manchuria
across the narrow waters of the Pechili strait lies the rich Chinese province
of Shantung, become a Japanese sphere of influence as a result of the late war.
Thus Japan holds China's capital, Peking, as in the jaws of a vice and can
apply military pressure whenever she so desires. In southern China lies another
Japanese sphere of influence, the province of Fukien opposite the Japanese
island of Formosa. Lastly, all over China runs a veritable network of Japanese
concessions like the recently acquired control of the great iron deposits near
Hankow, far up the Yangtse River in the heart of China.
Whether this
Japanese imperium over China maintains itself or not, one thing seems certain:
future white expansion in the Far East has become impossible. Any such attempt
would instantly weld together Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism in a
"sacred union" whose result would probably be at the very least the
prompt expulsion of the white man from every foothold in eastern Asia.
That is what
will probably come anyway as soon as Japan and China, impelled by overcrowding
and conscious of their united potentialities, shall have arrived at a genuine
understanding. Since population-pressure seems to be the basic factor in the
future course of Far Eastern affairs, it would be well to survey possible
outlets for surplus population within the Far East itself, in order to
determine how much of this race expansion can be satisfied at home, thereby
diminishing, or at least postponing, acute pressure upon the political and
ethnic frontiers of the white world.
To begin
with, the population of Japan (approximately 60,000,000) is increasing at the
rate of about 800,000 per year. China has no modern vital statistics, but the
annual increase of her 400,000,000 population, at the Japanese rate, would be
6,000,000. Now the settled parts of both Japan and China may be considered as
fully populated so far as agriculture is concerned, further extensive increases
of population being dependent upon the rise of machine industry. Both countries
have, however, thinly settled areas within their present political frontiers.
Japan's northern island of Hokkaido (Yezo) has a great amount of good
agricultural land as yet almost unoccupied, some of her other island
possessions offer minor outlets, while Korea and Manchuria afford extensive
colonizing possibilities albeit Chinese and Korean competition preclude a
Japanese colonization on the scale which the size and natural wealth of these
regions would at first sight seem to indicate. China has even more extensive
colonizable areas. Both Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan, though largely desert,
contain within their vast areas enough fertile land to support many millions of
Chinese peasants as soon as modern roads and railways are built. The Chinese
colonization of Manchuria is also proceeding apace, and will continue despite
anything Japan may do to keep it down. Lastly, the cold but enormous plateau of
Tibet offers considerable possibilities.
Allowing for
all this, however, it cannot be said that either China or Japan possess within
their present political frontiers territories likely to absorb those prodigious
accretions of population which seem destined to occur within the next couple of
generations. From the resultant congestion two avenues of escape will naturally
present themselves: settlement of other portions of the Far East to-day under
white political control, but inhabited by colored populations; and pressure
into accessible areas not merely under white political control, but also
containing white populations. It is obvious that those are two radically
distinct issues, for while a white nation might not unalterably oppose
Mongolian immigration into its colored dependencies, it would almost certainly
fight to the limit rather than witness the racial swamping of lands settled by
its own flesh and blood.
Considering
the former issue, then, it would appear that virtually all the peninsulas and
archipelagoes lying between China and Australia offer attractive fields for
yellow, particularly Chinese, race-expansion. Ethnically they are all colored
men's lands; politically they are all, save Siam under white control; Britain,
France, Holland, and the United States being the titular owners of these extensive
territories. So far as the native races are concerned, none of them seem to
possess the vitality and economic efficiency needed to maintain themselves
against unrestricted Chinese immigration. Whether in the British Straits
Settlements and North Borneo, French Indo-China, the Dutch Indies, the American
Philippines, or independent Siam, the Chinaman, so far as he has been allowed,
has displayed his practical superiority, and in places where, like the Straits
Settlements, he has been allowed a free hand, he has virtually supplanted the
native stock, reducing the latter to an impotent and vanishing minority. The
chief barriers to Chinese race-expansion in these regions are legal hindrances
or prohibitions of immigration, and of course such barriers are in their
essence artificial and liable to removal under any shift of circumstances. Many
observers predict that most of these lands will ultimately become Chinese. Says
Alleyne Ireland, a recognized authority on these regions: "There is every
reason to suppose that, throughout the tropics, possibly excepting India, the
Chinaman, even though he should continue to emigrate in no greater force than
hitherto, will gradually supersede all the native races." (Alleyne
Ireland, "Commercial Aspects of the Yellow Peril," North American
Review, September, 1900.) Certainly, if this be true, China has here a vast
outlet for her surplus population. It has been estimated that the undeveloped
portions of the Dutch Indies alone are capable of supporting 100,000,000 people
living on the frugal Chinese plane. Their present population is 8,000,000
semi-savages.
China's
possibilities of race-expansion in the colored regions of the Far East are thus
excellent. The same cannot be said, however, for Japan. The Japanese, bred in a
distinctively temperate, island environment, have not the Chinese adaptability
to climatic variation. The Japanese, like the white man, does not thrive in
tropic heat, nor does he possess the white man's ability to resist sub-Arctic
cold. Formosa is not in the real tropics, yet Japanese colonists have not done
well there. On the other hand, even the far-from-Arctic winters of Hokkaido
(part of the Japanese archipelago) seem too chilly for the Japanese taste.
Japan thus
does not have the same vital interest as China in the Asiatic tropics.
Undoubtedly they would for Japan be valuable colonies of exploitation, just as
they to-day are thus valuable for white nations. But they could never furnish
outlets for Japan's excess population, and even commercially Japan would be
exposed to increasing Chinese competition, since the Chinaman excels the
Japanese in trade as well as in migrant colonization. Japanese lack of climatic
adaptability is also the reason why Japan's present military excursion in
eastern Siberia, even if it should develop into permanent occupation, would
yield no adequate solution of Japan's population problem. For the Chinaman,
Siberia would do very well. He would breed amusingly there and would fill up
the whole country in a remarkably short space of time. But the Japanese
peasant, so averse to the winters of Hokkaido, would find the sub-Arctic rigors
of Siberia intolerable.
Thus, for
Japanese migration, neither the empty spaces of northern or southern Asia will
do. The natural outlets lie outside Asia in the United States, Australasia, and
the temperate parts of Latin America. But all these outlets are rigorously
barred by the white man, who has marked them for his own race-heritage, and
nothing but force will break those barriers down.
There lies a
danger, not merely to the peace of the Far Fast, but to the peace of the world.
Fired by a fervent patriotism; resolved to make their country a leader among
the nations; the Japanese writhe at the constriction of their present
race-bounds. Placed on the flank of the Chinese giant whose portentous growth
she can accurately forecast, Japan seas herself condemned to ultimate
renunciation of her grandiose ambitions unless she can somehow broaden the
racial as well as the political basis of her power. In short: Japan must find
lands where Japanese can breed by the tens of millions if she is not to be
automatically overshadowed in course of time, even assuming that she does not
suffocate or blow up from congestion before that time arrives. This is the
secret of her aggressive foreign policy, her chronic imperialism, her
extravagant dreams of conquest and "world-dominion."
The longing
to hack a path to greatness by the samurai sword lurks ever in the back of
Japanese minds. The library of Nippon's chauvinist literature is large and
increasing. A good example of the earlier productions is Satori Kato's brochure
entitled "Mastery of the Pacific," published in 1909. Herein the
author announces confidently: "In the event of war Japan could, as if aided
by a magician's wand, overrun the Pacific with fleets manned by men who have
made Nelson their model and transported to the armadas of the Far East the
spirit that was victorious at Trafalgar. Whether Japan avows it or not, her
persistent aim is to gain the mastery of the Pacific. Although peace seems to
prevail over the world at present, no one can tell how soon the nations may be
engaged in war. It does not need the English alliance to secure success for
Japan. That alliance may be dissolved at any moment, but Japan will suffer no
defeat. Her victory will be won by her men, not by armor-plates - things weak
by comparison." (The Literary Digest, November 13, 1909.)
The late war
has of course greatly stimulated these bellicose emotions. Viewing their own
increased power and the debilitation of the white world, Japanese jingoes
glimpse prospects of glorious fishing in troubled waters. The
"world-dominion" note is stressed more often than of yore. For
instance, in the summer of 1919 the Tokio Hochi, Count Okuma's organ, prophesied
exultantly: "That age in which the Anglo-Japanese alliance was the pivot
and American-Japanese co-operation an essential factor of Japanese diplomacy is
gone. In future we must not look eastward for friendship but westward. Let the
Bolsheviki of Russia be put down and the more peaceful party established in
power. In them Japan will find a strong ally. By marching then westward to the
Balkans, to Germany, to France, and Italy, the greater part of the world may be
brought under our sway. The tyranny of the Anglo-Saxons at the Peace Conference
is such that it has angered both gods and men. Some may abjectly follow them in
consideration of their petty interests, but things will ultimately settle down
as has just been indicated." (The Literary Digest, July 5, 1919, p. 31.)
Still more
striking are the following citations from a Japanese imperialist pronouncement
written in the autumn of 1916:
"Fifty
millions of our race wherewith to conquer and possess the earth! It is indeed a
glorious problem! ...
"To
begin with, we now have China; China is our steed! Far shall we ride upon her!
Even as Rome rode Latium to conquer Italy, and Italy to conquer the
Mediterranean; even as Napoleon rode Italy and the Rhenish States to conquer
Germany, and Germany to conquer Europe; even as England to-day rides her
colonies and her so-called 'allies' to conquer her robust rival, Germany - even
so shall we ride China. So becomes our 50,000,000 race 500,000,000 strong; so
grow our paltry hundreds of millions of gold into billions!
"How
well have done our people! How well have our statesmen led them! No mistakes!
There must be none now. In 1895 we conquered China - Russia, Germany, and
France stole from us the booty. How has our strength grown since then - and
still it grows! In ten years we punished and retook our own from Russia; in
twenty years we squared and retook from Germany; with France there is no need
for haste. She has already realized why we withheld the troops which alone
might have driven the invader from her soil! Her fingers are clutching more
tightly around her Oriental booty; yet she knows it is ours for the taking. But
there is no need of haste: the world condemns the paltry thief; only the
glorious conqueror wins the plaudits and approval of mankind.
"We are
now well astride of our steed, China; but the steed has long roamed wild and is
run down: it needs grooming, more grain, more training. Further, our saddle and
bridle are as yet mere makeshifts: would steed and trappings stand the strain
of war? And what would that strain be?
"As for
America - that fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment, but no
cohesion, no brains of government; stood she alone we should not need our China
steed. Well did my friend speak the other day when he called her people a race
of thieves with the hearts of rabbits. America, to any warrior race, is not as
a foe, but as an immense melon, ripe for the cutting. But there are other
warrior races - England, Germany - would they look on and let us slice and eat
our fill? Would they?
"But,
using China as our steed, should our first goal be the land? India? Or the
Pacific, the sea that must be our very own, even as the Atlantic is now
England's? The land is tempting and easy, but withal dangerous. Did we begin
there, the coarse white races would too soon awaken, and combine, and forever
immure us within our long since grown intolerable bounds. It must, therefore,
be the sea; but the sea means the Western Americas and all the islands between;
and with those must soon come Australia, India. And then the battling for the
balance of world-power, for the rest of North America. Once that is ours, we
own and control the whole - a dominion worthy of our race!
"North
America alone will support a billion people; that billion shall be Japanese
with their slaves. Not arid Asia, nor worn-out Europe (which, with its peculiar
and quaint relics and customs should in the interests of history and culture,
be in any case preserved), nor yet tropical Africa, is fit for our people. But
North America, that continent so succulently green, fresh, and unsullied -
except for the few chattering, mongrel Yankees - should have been ours by right
of discovery: it shall be ours by the higher, nobler right of conquest."
(The Military Historian and Economist, January, 1917, pp. 43-46.)
This apostle
of Japanese world-dominion then goes on to discuss in detail how his programme
can best be attained. It should be remembered that at the time he wrote America
was still an unarmed nation, apparently ridden by pacifism. Such imperialist
extravagances as the above do not represent the whole of Japan. But they do
represent a powerful element in Japan, against which the white world should be
forewarned.
CHAPTER III:
BROWN MAN'S LAND
BROWN MAN'S
LAND is the Near and Middle East. The brown world stretches in an immense belt
clear across southern Asia and northern Africa, from the Pacfic to the Atlantic
Oceans. The numbers of brown and yellow men are not markedly unequal
(450,000,000 browns as against 500,000,000 yellows), but in most other respects
the two worlds are sharply contrasted. In the first place, while the yellow
world is a fairly compact geographical block, the brown world sprawls half-way
round the globe, and is not only much greater in size, but also infinitely more
varied in natural features.
This
geographical diversity is reflected both in its history and in the character of
its inhabitants. Unlike the secluded yellow world, the brown world is nearly
everywhere exposed to foreign influences and has undergone an infinite series
of evolutionary modifications. Racially it has been a vast melting-pot, or
series of melting-pots, wherein conquest and migration have continually poured
new heterogeneous elements, producing the most diverse racial amalgamations. In
fact there is to-day no generalized brown type-norm as there are generalized
yellow or white type-norms, but rather a series of types clearly distinguished
from one another. Some of these types, like the Persians and Ottoman Turks, are
largely white; others, like the southern Indians and Yemenite Arabs, are
largely black; while still others, like the Himalayan and Central Asian
peoples, have much yellow blood. Again, there is no generalized brown culture
like those possessed by yellows and whites. The great spiritual bond is Islam,
yet in India, the chief seat of brown population, Islam is professed by only
one-fifth of the inhabitants.
Nevertheless,
there is a fundamental comity between the brown peoples. This comity is subtle
and intangible in character, yet it exists, and under certain circumstances it
is capable of momentous manifestations. Its salient feature is the instinctive
recognition by all Near and Middle Eastern peoples that they are fellow
Asiatics, however bitter may be their internecine feuds. This instinctive
Asiatic feeling has been noted by historians for more than two thousand years,
and it is just as true to-day as in the past. Of course it comes out most
strongly in face of the non-Asiatic - which in practice has always meant the white
man. The action and reaction of the brown and white worlds has, indeed, been a
constant, historic factor, the roles of hammer and anvil being continually
reversed through the ages. For the last four centuries the white world has, in
the main, been the dynamic factor. Certainly, during the last hundred years the
white world has displayed an unprecedentedly aggressive vigor, the brown world
playing an almost passive role.
Here again
is seen a difference between browns and yellows. The yellow world did not feel
the full tide of white aggression till the middle of the last century, while
even then it never really lost its political independence and soon reacted so
powerfully that its political freedom has to-day been substantially regained.
The brown world, on the other hand, felt the impact of the white tide much
earlier and was politically overwhelmed. The so-called "independence"
of brown states has long been due more to white rivalries than to their own
inherent strength. One by one they have been swallowed up by the white Powers.
In 1914 only three (Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan) survived, and the late war
has sent them the way of the rest. Turkey and Persia have lost their
independence, however they may still be painted on the map, while Afghanistan has
been compelled to recognize white supremacy as never before. Thus the cycle is
fulfilled, and white political mastery over the brown world is complete.
Political
triumphs, however, of themselves guarantee nothing, and the permanence of the
present order of things in the brown world appears more than doubtful when we
glance beyond the map. The brown world, like the yellow world, is to-day in
acute reaction against white supremacy. In fact, the brown reaction began a
full century ago, and has been gathering headway ever since, moved thereto both
by its own inherent vitality and by the external stimulus of white aggression.
The great dynamic of this brown reaction is the Mohammedan Revival. But before
analyzing that movement it would be well to glance at the human elements
involved.
Four salient
groupings stand out among the brown peoples: India, Iran,
"Arabistßn," and "Turkestßn." The last two words are used
in a special sense to denote ethnic and cultural aggregations for which no
precise terms have hitherto been coined. India is the population-centre of the
brown world. More than 300,000,000 souls live within its borders - two-thirds
of all the brown men on earth. India has not, however, been the brown world's
spiritual or cultural dynamic, those forces coming chiefly from the brown lands
to the westward. Iran (the Persian plateau) is comparatively small in area and
has less than 15,000,000 inhabitants, but its influence upon the brown world
has been out of all proportion to its size and population. "Arabistßn"
denotes the group of peoples, Arab in blood or Arabized in language and
culture, who inhabit the Arabian peninsula and its adjacent annexes, Syria and
Mesopotamia, together with the vast band of North Africa lying between the
Mediterranean and the Sahara Desert. The total number of these Arabic peoples
is 40,000,000, three-fourths of them living in North Africa. The term
"Turkestßn" covers the group of kindred peoples, often called
"Turanians," who stretch from Constantinople to Central Asia, including
the Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor, the Tartars of South Russia and Transcaucasia,
and the Central Asian Turkomans. They number in all about 25,000,000. Such are
the four outstanding race-factors in the brown world. Let us now examine that
spiritual factor, Islam, from which the brown renaissance originally proceeded,
and on which most of its present manifestations are based.
Islam's
warlike vigor has impressed men's minds ever since the far-off days when its
pristine fervor bore the Fiery Crescent from France to China. But with the
passing cycles this fervor waned, and a century ago Islam seemed plunged in the
stupor of senile decay. The life appeared to have gone out of it, leaving
naught but the dry husks of empty formalism and soulless ritual. Yet at this
darkest hour a voice came crying from out the vast Arabian desert, the cradle
of Islam, calling the Faithful to better things. This puritan reformer was the
famous Abd-el-Wahab, and his followers, known as Wahabees, soon spread over the
length and breadth of the Mohammedan world, purging Islam of its sloth and
rekindling the fervor of olden days. Thus began the great Mohammedan Revival.
That
revival, like all truly regenerative movements, had its political as well as
its spiritual side. One of the first things which struck the reformers was the
political weakness of the Moslem world and its increasing subjection to the
Christian West. It was during the early decades of the nineteenth century that
the revival spread through Islam. But this was the very time when Europe,
recovering from the losses of the Napoleonic Wars, began its unparalleled
aggressions upon the Moslem East. The result in Islam was a fusing of religion
and patriotism into a "sacred union" for the combined spiritual
regeneration and political emancipation of the Moslem world.
Of course
Europe's material and military superiority were then so great that speedy
success was recognized to be a vain hope. Nevertheless, with true Oriental
patience, the reformers were content to work for distant goals, and the results
of their labors, though hidden from most Europeans, was soon discernible to a
few keen-sighted white observers. Half a century ago the learned Orientalist
Palgrave wrote these prophetic lines: "Islam is even now an enormous power,
full of self-sustaining vitality, with a surplus for aggression; and a struggle
with its combined energies would be deadly indeed.... The Mohammedan peoples of
the East have awakened to the manifold strength and skill of their Western
Christian rivals; and this awakening, at first productive of respect and fear,
not unmixed with admiration, now wears the type of antagonistic dislike, and
even of intelligent hate. No more zealous Moslems are to be found in all the
ranks of Islam than they who have sojourned longest in Europe and acquired the
most intimate knowledge of its sciences and ways.... Mohammedans are keenly
alive to the ever-shifting uncertainties and divisions that distract the
Christianity of to-day, and to the woeful instability of modern European
institutions. From their own point of view, Moslems are as men standing on a
secure rock, and they contrast the quiet fixity of their own position with the
unsettled and insecure restlessness of all else." (W. G. Palgrave, 'Essays
on Eastern Questions, pp. 127-131 (London, 1872).)
This
stability to which Palgrave alludes must not be confused with dead rigidity.
Too many of us still think of the Moslem East as hopelessly petrified. But
those Westerners best acquainted with the Islamic world assert that nothing
could be farther from the truth; emphasizing, on the contrary, Islam's present
plasticity and rapid assimilation of Western ideas and methods. "The
alleged rigidity of Islam is a European myth," (Theodore Morison,
"Can Islam Be Reformed?" Nineteenth Century, October, 1908.) says
Theodore Morison, late principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at
Aligarh, India; and another Orientalist, Marmaduke Pickthall writes:
"There is nothing in Islam, any more than in Christianity, which should
halt progress. The fact is that Christianity found, some time ago, a modus
vivendi with modern life, while Islam has not yet arrived thither. But this
process is even now being worked out." (Marmaduke Pickthall,
"L'Angleterre et la Turquie," Revue Politique Internationale,
January, 1914.)
The way in
which the Mohammedan world has availed itself of white institutions such as the
newspaper in forging its new solidarity is well portrayed by Bernard Temple.
"It all comes to this, then," he writes. "World-politics, as
viewed by Mohammedanism's political leaders, resolve themselves into a struggle
- not necessarily a bloody struggle, but still an intense and vital struggle
for place and power between the three great divisions of mankind. The Moslem
mind is deeply stirred by the prospect. Every Moslem country is in
communication with every other Moslem country: directly, by means of special
emissaries, pilgrims, travellers, traders, and postal exchanges; indirectly, by
means of Mohammedan newspapers, books, pamphlets, leaflets, and periodicals. I
have met with Cairo newspapers in Bagdad, Teheran, and Peshawar; Constantinople
newspapers in Basra and Bombay; Calcutta newspapers in Mohammerah, Kerbela, and
Port Said." (Bernard Temple, "The Place of Persia in World-Politics,"
Proceedings of the Central Asian Society, May, 1910.)
These
European judgments are confirmed by what Asiatics say themselves. For example,
a Syrian Christian, Ameen Rihani, thus characterizes the present strength and
vitality of the Moslem world: "A nation of 250,000,000 souls, more than
one-half under Christian rule, struggling to shake off its fetters; to
consolidate its opposing forces; replenishing itself in the south and in the
east from the inexhaustible sources of the life primitive; assimilating in the
north, but not without discrimination, the civilization of Europe; a nation
with a glorious past, a living faith and language, an inspired Book, an undying
hope, might be divided against itself by European diplomacy but can never be
subjugated by European arms.... What Islam is losing on the borders of Europe
it is gaining in Africa and Central Asia through its modern propaganda, which
is conducted according to Christian methods. And this is one of the grand
results of 'civilization by benevolent assimilation.' Europe drills the Moslem
to be a soldier who will ultimately turn his weapons against her; and she sends
her missionaries to awaken in the ulema the proselytizing evil." (Ameen
Rihani, "The Crisis of Islam," Forum, May, 1912.)
Typical of
Mohammedan literature on this subject are the following excerpts from a book
published at Cairo in 1907 by an Egyptian, Yahya Siddyk, significantly entitled
"The Awakening of the Islamic Peoples in the Fourteenth Century of the
Hegira." (I.e., the twentieth century of the Christian era.) The book is
doubly interesting because the author has a thorough Western education, holding
a law degree from the French university of Toulouse, and is a judge on the
Egyptian bench. Although writing as far back as 1907, Yahya Siddyk clearly
foresaw the imminence of the European War. "Behold," he writes,
"these Great-Powers ruining themselves in terrifying armaments; measuring
each other's strength with defiant glances; menacing each other; contracting
alliances which continually break and which presage those terrible shocks which
overturn the world and cover it with ruins, fire, and blood! The future is
God's, and nothing is lasting save His Will!"
He considers
the white world degenerate. "Does this mean," he asks, "that
Europe, our 'enlightened guide,' has already reached the summit of its
evolution? Has it already exhausted its vital force by two or three centuries
of hyper-exertion? In other words: is it already stricken with senility, and
will it see itself soon obliged to yield its civilizing role to other peoples
less degenerate, less neurasthenic; that is to say, younger, more robust, more
healthy, than itself? In my opinion, the present marks Europe's apogee, and its
immoderate colonial expansion means, not strength, but weakness. Despite the
aureole of so much grandeur, power, and glory, Europe is to-day more divided
and more fragile than ever, and ill conceals its malaise, its sufferings, and
its anguish. Its destiny is inexorably working out! . . .
"The
contact of Europe on the East has caused us both much good and much evil: good,
in the material and intellectual sense; evil, from the moral and political
point of view. Exhausted by long struggles, enervated by a brilliant
civilization, the Moslem peoples inevitably fell into a malaise, but they are
not stricken, they are not dead! These peoples, conquered by the force of
cannon, have not in the least lost their unity, even under the oppressive
rgimes to which the Europeans have long subjected them.... I have said that the
European contact has been salutary to us from both the material and the
intellectual point of view. What reforming Moslem Princes wished to impose by
force on their Moslem subjects is to-day realized a hundredfold. So great has
been our progress in the last twenty-five years in science, letters, and art
that we may well hope to be in all those things the equals of Europeans in less
than half a century....
" A new
era opens for us with the fourteenth century of the Hegira, and this happy
century will mark our renaissance and our great future! A new breath animates
the Mohammedan peoples of all races; all Moslems are penetrated with the
necessity of work and instruction! We all wish to travel, do business, tempt
fortune, brave dangers. There is in the East, among the Mohammedans, a
surprising activity, an animation, unknown twenty-five years ago.... There is
to-day a real public opinion throughout the East."
The author
concludes: "Let us hold firm, each for all, and let us hope, hope, hope!
We are fairly launched on the path of progress: let us profit by it! It is
Europe's very tyranny which has wrought our transformation! It is our continued
contact with Europe which favors our evolution and inevitably hastens our
revival! It is simply History repeating itself; the Will of God fulfilling
itself despite all opposition and all resistance.... Europe's tutelage over
Asiatics is becoming more and more nominal-the gates of Asia are closing
against the European! Surely we glimpse before us a revolution without parallel
in the world's annals. A new age is at hand!" (Yahya Siddyk, Le Reveil des
Peuples Islamiques au Quatorzime Sicle de l'higire (Cairo, 1907).)
If this be
indeed the present spirit of Islam it is a portentous fact, for its numerical
strength is very great. The total number of Mohammedans is estimated at from
200,000,000 to 250,000,000, and they not only predominate throughout the brown
world with the exception of India, but they also count 10,000,000 adherents in
China and are gaining prodigiously among the blacks of Africa.
The
proselyting power of Islam is extraordinary, and its hold upon its votaries is
even more remarkable. Throughout history there has been no single instance
where a people, once become Moslem, has ever abandoned the faith. Extirpated
they may have been, like the Moors of Spain, but extirpation is not apostasy.
This extreme tenacity of Islam, this ability to keep its hold, once it has got
a footing, under all circumstances short of downright extirpation, must be
borne in mind when considering the future of regions where Islam is to-day
advancing.
And, save in
eastern Europe, it is to-day advancing along all its far-flung frontiers. Its
most signal victories are being won among the negro races of central Africa,
and this phase will be discussed in the next chapter, but elsewhere the same
conditions, in lesser degree, prevail. Every Moslem is a born missionary and
instinctively propagates his faith among his non-Moslem neighbors. The quality
of this missionary temper has been well analyzed by Meredith Townsend.
"All the emotions which impel a Christian to proselytize," he writes,
"are in a Mussulman strengthened by all the motives which impel a
political leader and all the motives which sway a recruiting sergeant, until
proselytism has become a passion, which, whenever success seems practicable,
and especially success on a large scale, develops in the quietest Mussulman a
fury of ardor which induces him to break down every obstacle, his own strongest
prejudices included, rather than stand for an instant in the neophyte's way. He
welcomes him as a son, and whatever his own lineage, and whether the convert be
negro, or Chinaman, or Indian, or even European, he will without hesitation or
scruple give him his own child in marriage, and admit him fully, frankly, and
finally into the most exclusive circle in the world." (Meredith Townsend,
Asia and Europe, pp. 46-47.)
Such is the
vast and growing body of Islam, to-day seeking to weld its forces into a higher
unity for the combined objectives of spiritual revival and political
emancipation. This unitary movement is known as "Pan-Islamism." Most
Western observers seem to think that Pan-Islamism centres in the
"Caliphate," and European writers to-day hopefully discuss whether
the Caliphate's retention by the discredited Turkish Sultans, its transferrence
to the rulers of the new Arab Hedjaz Kingdom, or its total suppression, will
best clip Islam's wings.
This,
however, is a very short-sighted and partial view. The Khalifa or
"Caliph" (to use the Europeanized form), the Prophet's representative
on earth, has played an important historic role, and the institution is still
venerated in Islam. But the Pan-Islamic leaders have long been working on a
much broader basis. Pan-Islamism's real driving power lies, not in the
Caliphate, but in institutions like the "Hajj" or pilgrimage to
Mecca, the propaganda of the "Hablul-Matin" or "Tie of True
Believers," and the great religious fraternities. The Meccan Hajj, where tens
of thousands of picked zealots gather every year from every quarter of the
Moslem world, is really an annual Pan-Islamic congress, where all the interests
of the faith are discussed at length, and where plans are elaborated for its
defense and propagation. Similarly ubiquitous is the Pan-Islamic propaganda of
the Habl-ul-Matin, which works tirelessly to compose sectarian differences and
traditional feuds. Lastly, the religious brotherhoods cover the Islamic world
with a network of far-flung associations, quickening the zeal of their myriad
members and co-ordinating their energies for potential action.
The greatest
of these brotherhoods (though there are others of importance) is the famous
Senussiyah, and its history well illustrates Islam's evolution during the past
hundred years. Its founder, Seyyid Mahommed ben Senussi, was born in Algeria
about the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was of high Arab lineage,
tracing his descent from Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet. In early youth he
went to Arabia and there came under the influence of the Wahabee movement. In
middle life he returned to Africa, settling in the Sahara Desert, and there
built up the fraternity which bears his name. Before his death the order had
spread to all parts of the Mohammedan world, but it is in northern Africa that
it has attained its peculiar pro-eminence. The Senussi Order is divided into
local "Zawias" or lodges, all absolutely dependent upon the Grand
Lodge, headed by The Master, El Senussi. The Grand Mastership still remains in
the family, a grandson of the founder being the order's present head. The
Senussi stronghold is an oasis in the very heart of the Sahara. Only one
European eye has ever seen this mysterious spot. Surrounded by absolute desert,
with wells many leagues apart and the routes of approach known only to
experienced Senussi guides, every one of whom would suffer a thousand deaths
rather than betray him, El Senussi, The Master, sits serenely apart, sending
his orders throughout North Africa.
The Sahara
itself is absolutely under Senussi control, while " Zawias" abound in
distant regions like Morocco, Lake Chad, and Somaliland. These local Zawias are
more than mere "lodges." Their spiritual and secular heads, the
"Mokaddem" or priest and the "Wekil" or civil governor,
have discretionary authority not merely over the Zawia members, but also over
the community at large - at least, so great is the awe inspired by the Senussi
throughout North Africa that a word from Wekil or Mokaddem is always listened
to and obeyed. Thus, beside the various European authorities, British, French
or Italian as the case may be, there exists an occult government with which the
colonial authorities are careful not to come into conflict.
On their
part, the Senussi are equally careful to avoid a downright breach with the
European Powers. Their long-headed, cautious policy is truly astonishing. For
more than half a century the order has been a great force, yet it has never
risked the supreme adventure. In all the numerous fanatic risings against
Europeans which have occurred in various parts of Africa, local Senussi have
undoubtedly taken part, but the order has never officially entered the lists.
These Fabian
tactics as regards open warfare do not mean that the Senussi are idle. Far from
it. On the contrary, they are ceaselessly at work with the spiritual arms of
teaching, discipline, and conversion. The Senussi programme is the welding,
first of Moslem Africa, and later of the whole Moslem world, into the revived
"Imamat" of Islam's early days; into a great theocracy, embracing all
true believers - in other words, Pan-Islamism. But they believe that the
political liberation of Islam from Christian domination must be preceded by a
profound spiritual regeneration, thereby engendering the moral forces necessary
both for the war of liberation and for the fruitful reconstruction which should
follow thereafter. This is the secret of the order's extraordinary
self-restraint. This is the reason why, year after year, and decade after
decade, the Senussi advance slowly, calmly, coldly, gathering great latent
power but avoiding the temptation to expend it one instant before the proper
tune. Meanwhile they are covering Africa with their lodges and schools,
disciplining the people to the voice of their Mokaddems and Wekils - and
converting millions of pagan negroes to the faith of Islam.
And what is
true of the Senussi holds equally for the other wise leaders who guide the
Pan-Islamic movement. They know both Europe's strength and their own weakness.
They know the peril of premature action. Feeling that time is on their side,
they are content to await the hour when internal regeneration and external
pressure shall have filled to overflowing the cup of wrath. This is why Islam
has offered only local resistance to the unparalleled white aggressions of the
last twenty years. This is the main reason why there was no real "Holy
War" in 1914. But the materials for a Holy War have long been piling high,
as a retrospective glance will show.
Europe's
conquests of Africa and Central Asia toward the close of the last century, and
the subsequent Anglo-French agreement mutually appropriating Egypt and Morocco,
evoked murmurs of impotent fury from the Moslem world. Under such circumstances
the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 sent a feverish tremor throughout Islam. The
Japanese might be idolaters, but the traditional Moslem loathing of idolaters
as beings much lower than Christians and Jews (recognized by Mohammed as
"Peoples of The Book") was quite effaced by the burning sense of subjugation
to the Christian yoke. Accordingly, the Japanese were hailed as heroes
throughout Islam. Here we see again that tendency toward an understanding
between Asiatic and African races and creeds (in other words, a
"Pan-Colored" alliance against white domination) which has been so
patent in recent years. The way in which Islamic peoples began looking to Japan
is revealed by this editorial in a Persian newspaper, written in the year 1906:
"Desirous of becoming as powerful as Japan and of safeguarding its national
independence, Persia should make common cause with it. An alliance becomes
necessary. There should be a Japanese ambassador at Teheran. Japanese
instructors should be chosen to reorganize the army. Commercial relations
should also be developed." (F. Farjanel, "Le Japon et l'Islam,"
Revue du Monde Musulman, November, 1906.) Indeed, some pious Moslems hoped to
bring this heroic people within the Islamic fold. Shortly after the
Russo-Japanese War a Chinese Mohammedan sheikh wrote: "If Japan thinks of
becoming some day a very great power and making Asia the dominator of the other
continents, it will be only by adopting the blessed religion of Islam."
(Farjanel, supra.) And Al Mowwayad, an Egyptian Nationalist journal, remarked:
"England, with her 60,00O,000 Indian Moslems, dreads this conversion. With
a Mohammedan Japan, Mussulman policy would change entirely." (Ibid.) As a
matter of fact, Mohammedan missionaries actually went to Japan, where they were
smilingly received. Of course the Japanese had not the faintest intention of
turning Moslems, but these spontaneous approaches from the brown world were
quite in line with their ambitious plans, which, as the reader will remember,
were just then taking concrete shape.
However, it
soon became plain that Japan had no present intention of going so far afield as
Western Asia, and Islam presently had to mourn fresh losses at Christian hands.
In 1911 came Italy's barefaced raid on Turkey's African dependency of Tripoli.
So bitter was the anger in all Mohammedan lands at this unprovoked aggression
that many European observers became seriously alarmed. "Why has Italy
found 'defenseless' Tripoli such a hornet's nest?" queried Gabriel
Hanotaux, a former French minister of foreign affairs. "It is because she
has to do, not merely with Turkey, but with Islam as well. Italy has set the
ball rolling - so much the worse for her - and for us all." (Gabriel
Hanotaux, "La Crise mediterraneenne et l'Islam," Revue Hebdomadaire,
April 13, 1912.) But the Tripoli expedition was only the beginning of the
Christian assault, for next year came the Balkan War, which sheared away
Turkey's European holdings to the walls of Constantinople and left her crippled
and discredited. At those disasters a cry of wrathful anguish swept the world
of Islam from end to end. Here is how a leading Indian Moslem interpreted the
Balkan conflict:
"The
King of Greece orders a new crusade. From the London Chancelleries rise calls
to Christian fanaticism, and Saint Petersburg already speaks of the planting of
the cross on the dome of Sant' Sophia. To-day they speak thus; to-morrow they
will thus speak of Jerusalem and the Mosque of Omar. Brothers! Be ye of one
mind, that it is the duty of every true beIiever to hasten beneath the
Khalifa's banner and to sacrifice his life for the safety of the falth."
(Arminius Vambery, "Die turkische Katastrophe und die Islamwelt,"
Deutsche Revue, July, 1913.) And another Indian Moslem leader thus adjured the
British authorities: "I appeal to the present government to change its
anti-Turkish attitude before the fury of millions of Moslem fellow subjects is
kindled to a blaze and brings disaster." (Shab Mohammed Naimatullah,
"Recent Turkish Events, and Moslem India," Asiatic Review, October,
1913.)
Still more
significant were the appeals made by the Indian Moslems to their Brahman fellow
countrymen, the traditionally despised "Idolaters." These appeals
betokened a veritable revolution in outlook, as can be gauged from the text of
one of them, significantly entitled "The Message of the East."
"Spirit of the East," reads this noteworthy document, "arise and
repel the swelling flood of Western aggression! Children of Hindustan, aid us
with your wisdom, culture, and wealth; lend us your power, the birthright and
heritage of the Hindu! Let the Spirit Powers hidden in the Himalayan
mountain-peaks, arise. Let prayers to the god of battles float upward; prayers
that right may triumph over might; and call to your myriad gods to annihilate
the armies of the foe!" (Vambery, supra.) In China also the same
fraternizing spirit was visible. During the Republican Revolution the Chinese
Mohammedans, instead of holding jealously aloof, co-operated wholeheartedly
with their Buddhist and Confucian fellow citizens, and Doctor Sun-Yat-Sen, the
Republican leader, announced gratefully: "The Chinese will never forget
the assistance which their Moslem compatriots have rendered in the interest of
order and liberty." (Arminius Vambery, "An Approach Between Moslems
and Buddhists," Nineteenth Century, April, 1912.) The Great War thus found
Islam deeply stirred against European aggression, keenly conscious of its own
solidarity, and frankly reaching out for colored allies in the projected
struggle against white domination.
Under these
circumstances it may at first sight appear strange that no general Islamic
explosion occurred when Turkey entered the lists at the close of 1914 and the
Sultan-Khalifa issued a formal summons to the Holy War. Of course this summons
was not the flat failure which Allied reports led the West to believe at the
time. As a matter of fact there was trouble in practically every Mohammedan
land under Allied control. To name only a few of many instances: Egypt broke
into a tumult smothered only by overwhelming British reinforcements, Tripoli
burst into a flame of insurrection that drove the Italians headlong to the
coast, Persia was prevented from joining Turkey only by prompt Russian
intervention, and the Indian Northwest Frontier was the scene of fighting that
required the presence of a quarter of a million Anglo-Indian troops. The
British Government has officially admitted that during 1915 the Allies' Asiatic
and African possessions stood within a hand's breadth of a cataclysmic
insurrection.
That
insurrection would certainly have taken place if Islam's leaders had everywhere
spoken the fateful word. But the word was not spoken. Instead, influential
Moslems outside of Turkey generally condemned the latter's action and did all
in their power to calm the passions of the fanatic multitude. The attitude of
these leaders does credit to their discernment.
They
recognized that this was neither the time nor the occasion for a decisive
struggle with the West. They were not yet materially prepared, and they had not
perfected their understandings either among themselves or with their
prospective non-Moslem allies. Above all, the moral urge was lacking. They knew
that athwart the Khalifa's writ was stencilled "Made in Germany."
They knew that the "Young Turk" clique which had engineered the coup
was made up of Europeanized renegades, many of them not even nominal Moslems,
but atheistic Jews. Far-sighted Moslems had no intention of pulling Germany's
chestnuts out of the fire, nor did they wish to further Prussian schemes of
world-dominion which for themselves would have meant a mere change of masters.
Far better to let the white world fight out its desperate feud, weaken itself,
and reveal fully its future intentions. Meanwhile Islam could bide its time,
grow in strength, and await the morrow.
The
Versailles Peace Conference was just such a revelation of European intentions
as the Pan-Islamic leaders had been awaiting in order to perfect their
programmes and enlist the moral solidarity of their peoples. At Versailles the
European Powers showed unequivocally that they had no intention of relaxing
their hold upon the Near and Middle East. By a number of secret treaties
negotiated during the war the Ottoman Empire had been virtually partitioned
between the victorious Allies, and these secret treaties formed the basis of
the Versailles settlement. Further more, Egypt had been declared a British
protectorate at the very beginning of the European struggle, while the
Versailles Conference had scarcely adjourned before England announced an
"agreement" with Persia which made that country another British
protectorate, in fact, if not in name. The upshot was, as already stated, that
the Near and Middle East were subjected to European political domination as
never before.
But there
was another side to the shield. During the war years the Allied statesmen had
officially proclaimed times without number that the war was being fought to
establish a new world-order based on such principles as the rights of small
nations and the liberty of all peoples. These pronouncements had been treasured
and memorized throughout the East. When, therefore, the East saw a peace
settlement based, not upon these high professions, but upon the imperialistic
secret treaties, it was fired with a moral indignation and sense of outraged
justice never known before. A tide of impassioned determination began rising
which has already set the entire East in tumultuous ferment, and which seems
merely the premonitory ground-swell of a greater storm. Many European students
of Eastern affairs are gravely alarmed at the prospect. Here, for example, is
the judgment of Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta, an Italian authority on
Oriental and Mohammedan questions. Speaking in the spring of 1919 on the war's
effect on the East, he said: "The convulsion has shaken Islamitic and
Oriental civilization to its foundations. The entire Oriental world, from China
to the Mediterranean, is in ferment. Everywhere the hidden fire of
anti-European hatred is burning. Riots in Morocco, risings in Algiers,
discontent in Tripoli, so-called Nationalist attempts in Egypt, Arabia, and
Lybia, are all different manifestations of the same deep sentiment, and have as
their object the rebellion of the Orienta1 world against European
civilization." (Special cable to the New York Times, dated Rome, May 28,
1919.)
The state of
affairs in Egypt is a typical illustration of what has been going on in the
East ever since the close of the late war. Egypt was occupied by England in
1882, and British rule has conferred immense material benefits, raising the country
from anarchic bankruptcy to ordered prosperity. Yet British rule was never
really popular, and as the years passed a "Nationalist" movement
steadily grew in strength, having for its slogan the phrase "Egypt for the
Egyptians," and demanding Britain's complete evacuation of the country.
This demand Great Britain refused even to consider. Practically all Englishmen
are agreed that Egypt with the Suez Canal is the vital link between the eastern
and western halves of the British Empire, and they therefore consider the
permanent occupation of Egypt an absolute necessity. There is thus a clear
deadlock between British imperial and Egyptian national convictions.
Some years
before the war Egypt became so unruly that England was obliged to abandon all
thoughts of conciliation and initiated a regime of frank repression enforced by
Lord Kitchener's heavy hand. The European War and Turkey's adhesion to the
Teutonic Powers caused fresh outbreaks in Egypt, but these were quickly
repressed and England took advantage of Ottoman belligerency to abolish the
fiction of Turkish overlordship and declare Egypt a protectorate of the British
Empire.
During the
war Egypt, flooded with British troops, remained quiet, but the end of the war
gave the signal for an unparalleled outburst of Nationalist activity. Basing
their claims on such doctrines as the "rights of small nations" and
the "self-determination of peoples," the Nationalists demanded
immediate independence and attempted to get Egypt's case before the Versailles
Peace Conference. In defiance of English prohibitions, they even held a popular
plebiscite which upheld their claims. When the British authorities answered
this defiance by arresting Nationalist leaders, Egypt flamed into rebellion
from end to end. Everywhere it was the same story. Railways and telegraph lines
were systematically cut. Trains were stalled and looted. Isolated British
officers and soldiers were murdered. In Cairo alone, thousands of houses were
sacked by the mob. Soon the danger was rendered more acute by the irruption out
of the desert of swarms of Bedouin Arabs bent on plunder. For a few days Egypt
trembled on the verge of anarchy, and the British Government admitted in
Parliament that all Egypt was in a state of insurrection.
The British
authorities, however, met the crisis with vigor and determination. The number
of British troops in Egypt was very large, trusty black regiments were hurried
up from the Sudan, and the well-disciplined Egyptian native police generally
obeyed orders. The result was that after several weeks of sharp fighting,
lasting through the spring of 1919, Egypt was again gotten under control. The
outlook for the future is, however, ominous in the extreme. Order is indeed
restored, but only the presence of massed British and Sudanese black troops
guarantees that order will be maintained. Even under the present regime of
stern martial law hardly a month passes without fresh rioting and heavy loss of
life. Egypt appears Nationalist to the core, its spokesmen swear they will accept
nothing short of independence, and in the long run Britain will realize the
truth of that pithy saying: "You can do everything with bayonets except
sit on them."
India is
likewise in a state of profound unrest. The vast peninsula has been controlled
by England for almost two centuries, yet here again the last two decades have
witnessed a rapidly increasing movement against British rule. This movement was
at first confined to the upper-class Hindus, the great Mohammedan element
preserving its traditional loyalty to the British "Raj," which it
considered a protection against the Brahmanistic Hindu majority. But, as
already seen, the Pan-Islamic leaven presently reached the Indian Moslems,
European aggressions on Islam stirred their resentment, and at length Moslem
and Hindu adjourned their ancient feud in their new solidarity against European
tutelage.
The Great
War provoked relatively little sedition in India. Groups of Hindu extremists to
be sure, hatched terroristic plots and welcomed German aid, but India as a
whole backed England and helped win the war with both money and men. At the
same time, Indians gave notice that they expected their loyalty to be rewarded,
and at the close of the war various memorials were drawn up calling for drastic
modifications of the existing governmental regime.
India is
to-day governed by an English Civil Service whose fairness, honesty, and
general efficiency no informed person can seriously impugn. But this no longer
contents Indian aspirations. India desires not merely good government but
self-governnent. The ultimate goal of all Indian reformers is emancipation from
European tutelage, though they differ among themselves as to how and when this
emancipation is to be attained. The most conservative would be content with
self-government under British guidance, the middle group asks for the full
status of a Dominion of the British Empire like Canada and Australia, while the
radicals demand complete independence. Even the most conservative of these
demands would, however, involve great changes of system and a diminution of
British control. Such demands arouse in England mistrust and apprehension.
Englishmen point out that India is not a nation but a congeries of diverse
peoples spiritually sundered by barriers of blood, language, culture, and
religion, and they conclude that, if England's control were really relaxed,
India would get out of hand and drift toward anarchy. As for Indian
independence, the average Englishman cannot abide the thought, holding it fatal
both for the British Empire and for India itself. The result has been that
England has failed to meet Indian demands, and this, in turn, has roused an
acute recrudescence of dissatisfaction and unrest. The British Government has
countered with coercive legislation like the Rowlatt Acts and has sternly
repressed rioting and terrorism. British authority is still supreme in India.
But it is an authority resting more and more upon force. In fact, some
Englishmen have long considered British rule in India, despite its imposing
appearance, a decidedly fragile affair. Many years ago Meredith Townsend, who
certainly knew India well, wrote:
"The
English think they will rule India for many centuries or forever. I do not
think so, holding rather the older belief that the empire which came in a day
will disappear in a night.... Above all this inconceivable mass of humanity,
governing all, protecting all, taxing all, rises what we call here 'the
Empire,' a corporation of less than l,500 men, partly chosen by examination,
partly by co-optation, who are set to govern, and who protect themselves in
governing by finding pay for a minute white garrison of 65,000 men, one-fifth
of the Roman legions - though the masses to be controlled are double the
subjects of Rome. That corporation and that garrison constitute the 'Indian
Empire.' There is nothing else. Banish those 1,500 men in black, defeat that
slender garrison in red, and the empire has ended, the structure disappears,
and brown India emerges, unchanged and unchangeable. To support the official
world and its garrison - both, recollect, smaller than those of Belgium - there
is, except Indian opinion, absolutely nothing. Not only is there no white race
in India, not only is there no white colony, but there is no white man who
purposes to remain.... There are no white servants, not even grooms, no white
policemen, no white postmen, no white anything. If the brown men struck for a
week, the 'Empire' would collapse like a house of cards, and every ruling man
would be a starving prisoner in his own house. He could not move or feed
himself or get water." (Townsend, op. cit., pp. 82-87.)
These words
aptly illustrate the truth stated at the beginning of this book that the basic
factor in human affairs is not politics but race, and that the most imposing
political phenomena, of themselves, mean nothing. And that is just the fatal
weakness underlying the white man's present political domination over the brown
world. Throughout that entire world there is no settled white population save
in the French colonies of Algeria and Tunis along the Mediterranean seaboard,
where whites form perhaps one-sixth of the total. Elsewhere, from Morocco to
the Dutch Indies, there is in the racial sense, as Townsend well says, "no
white anything," and if white rule vanished to-morrow it would not leave a
human trace behind. White rule is therefore purely political, based on
prescription, prestige, and lack of effective opposition. These are indeed
fragile foundations. Let the brown world once make up its mind that the white
man must go, and he will go, for his position will have become simply
impossible. It is not solely a question of a "Holy War"; mere passive
resistance, if genuine and general, would shake white rule to its foundations.
And it is precisely the determination to get rid of white role which seems to
be spreading like wild-fire over the brown world to-day. The unrest which I
have described in Egypt and India merely typify what is going on in Morocco,
Central Asia, the Dutch Indies, the Philippines, and every other portion of the
brown world whose inhabitants are above the grade of savages.
Another
factor favoring the prospects of brown emancipation is the lack of sustained
resistance which the white world would probably offer. For the white world's
interests in these regions, though great, are not fundamental; that is to say,
racial. However grievously they might suffer politically and economically,
racially the white peoples would lose almost nothing. Here again we see the
basic importance of race in human affairs. Contrast, for example, England's
attitude toward an insurgent India with France's attitude toward an insurgent
North Africa. England, with nothing racial at stake, would hesitate before a
reconquest of India involving millions of soldiers and billions of treasure.
France, on the other hand, with nearly a million Europeans in her North African
possessions, half of those full-blooded Frenchmen, might risk her last franc
and her last poilu rather than see these blood-brothers slaughtered and enslaved.
Assuming,
then, what to-day seems probable, that white political control over the brown
worId is destined to be sensibly curtailed if not generally eliminated, what
are the larger racial implications? Above all: will the browns tend to impinge
on white race-areas as the yellows show signs of doing? Probably, no; at least,
not to any great extent. In the first place, the brown world has within its
present confines plenty of room for potential race-expansion. Outside India,
Egypt, Java, and a few lesser spots, there is scarcely a brown land where
natural improvements such as irrigation would not open up extensive settlement
areas. Mesopotamia alone, now almost uninhabited, might support a vast
population, while Persia could nourish several times its present inhabitants.
India, to be
sure, is almost as congested as China, and the spectre of the Indian coolie has
lately alarmed white lands like Canada and South Africa almost as much as the
Chinese coolie has done. But an independent India would fall under the same
political blight as the rest of the brown world - the blight of internecine
dissensions and wars. The brown world's present growing solidarity is not a
positive but a negative phenomenon. It is an alliance, against a common foe, of
traditional enemies who, once the bond was loosed in victory, would inevitably
quarrel among themselves. Turk would fly at Arab and Turkoman at Persian, as of
yore, while India would become a welter of contending Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs,
Gurkhas, and heaven knows what, until perchance disciplined anew by the
pressure of a Yellow Peril. In Western Asia it is possible that the spiritual
and cultural bonds of Islam might temper these struggles, but Western Asia is
precisely that part of the brown world where population - pressure is absent.
India, the overpeopled brown land, would undergo such a cycle of strife as
would devour its human surplus and render distant aggressions impossible.
A potential
brown menace to white race-areas would, indeed, arise in case of a brown-yellow
alliance against the white peoples. But such an alliance could occur only in
the first stages of a pan-colored war of liberation while the pressure of white
world-predominance was still keenly felt and before the divisive tendencies
within the brown world had begun to take effect.
Short of
such an alliance (wherein the browns would abet the yellows' aggressive, racial
objectives in return for yellow support of their own essentially defensive,
political ends), the brown world's emancipation from white domination would
apparently not result in more than local pressures on white race areas. It
would, however, affect another sphere of white political control - black
Africa. The emancipation of brown, Islamic North Africa would inevitably send a
sympathetic thrill through every portion of the Dark Continent and would stir
both Mohammedan and pagan negroes against white rule. Islam is, in fact, the
intimate link between the brown and black worlds. But this subject, with its
momentous implications, will be discussed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER IV:
BLACK MAN'S LAND
BLACK MAN'S
LAND is primarily Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Here dwell the bulk of all
the 150,000,000 black men on earth. The negro and negroid population of Africa
is estimated at about 120,000,000 - four-fifths of the black race-total.
Besides its African nucleus the black race has two distant outposts: the one in
Australasia, the other in the Americas. The Eastern blacks are found mainly in
the archipelagoes lying between the Asiatic land-mass and Australia. They are
the Oriental survivors of the black belt which in very ancient times stretched
uninterruptedly from Africa across southern Asia to the Pacific Ocean. The
Asiatic blacks were overwhelmed by other races ages ago, and only a few wild
tribes like the "Negritos" of the Philippines and the jungle-dwellers
of Indo-China and southern India survive as genuine negroid stocks. All the
peoples of southern Asia, however, are darkened by this ancient negroid strain.
The peoples of south India are notably tinged with black blood. As for the pure
blacks of the Australasian archipelagoes, they are so few in numbers (about
3,000,000) and so low in type that they are of negligible importance. Quite
otherwise are the blacks of the Far West. In the western hemisphere there are
some 25,000,000 persons of more or less mixed black blood, brought thither in
modern times as slaves by the white conquerors of the New World. Still,
whatever may be the destiny of these transplanted black folk, the black man's chief
significance, from the world aspect, must remain bound up with the great
nucleus of negro population in the African homeland.
Black
Africa, as I have said, lies south of the Sahara Desert. Here the negro has
dwelt for unnumbered ages. The key-note of black history, like yellow history,
has been isolation. Cut off from the Mediterranean by the desert which he had
no means of crossing, and bounded elsewhere by oceans which he had no skill in
navigating, the black man vegetated in savage obscurity, his habitat being well
named the "Dark Continent."
Until the
white tide began breaking on its seafronts four centuries ago, the black
world's only external stimuli had come from brown men landing on its eastern
coasts or ascending the valley of the Nile. As time passed, both brown and
white pressures became more intense, albeit the browns long led in the process
of penetration. Advancing from the east and trickling across the desert from
the north, Arab or Arabized adventurers conquered black Africa to the equator;
and this political subjugation had also a racial side, for the conquerors sowed
their blood freely and set a brownish stamp on many regions. As for the whites,
they long remained mere birds of passage. Half a century ago they possessed
little more than trading-posts along the littorals, their only real settle-
ment lying in the extreme south.
Then,
suddenly, all was changed. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century,
Europe turned its gaze full upon the Dark Continent, and within a generation
Africa was partitioned between the European Powers. Negro and Arab alike fell
under European domination. Only minute Liberia and remote Abyssinia retained a
qualified independence. Furthermore, white settlement also made distinct
progress. The tropical bulk of Africa defied white colonization, but the
continent's northern and southern extremities were climatically "white
man's country." Accordingly, there are today nearly a million whites
settled along the Algerian and Tunisian seaboard, while in South Africa, Dutch
and British blood has built up a powerful commonwealth containing fully one and
one-half million white souls. In Africa, unlike Asia, the European has taken
root, and has thus gained at least local tenures of a fundamental nature.
The crux of
the African problem therefore resolves itself into the question whether the
white man, through consolidated racial holds north and south, will be able to
perpetuate his present political control over the intermediate continental mass
which climate debars him from populating. This is a matter of great importance,
for Africa is a land of enormous potential wealth, the natural source of
Europe's tropical raw materials and foodstuffs. Whether Europe is to retain
possession depends, in the last analysis on the character of the inhabitants.
It is, then, to the nature of the black man and his connection with the brown
world that we must direct our attention.
From the
first glance we see that, in the negro, we are in the presence of a being
differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from those human
types which we discovered in our surveys of the brown and yellow worlds. The
black man is, indeed, sharply differentiated from the other branches of
mankind. His outstanding quality is superabundant animal vitality. In this he
easily surpasses all other races. To it he owes his intense emotionalism. To
it, again, is due his extreme fecundity, the negro being the quickest of
breeders. This abounding vitality shows in many other ways, such as the negro's
ability to survive harsh conditions of slavery under which other races have
soon succumbed. Lastly, in ethnic crossings, the negro strikingly displays his
prepotency, for black blood, once entering a human stock, seems never really
bred out again.
Negro
fecundity is a prime factor in Africa's future. In the savage state which until
recently prevailed, black multiplication was kept down by a wide variety of
checks. Both natural and social causes combined to maintain an extremely high
death-rate. The negro's political ineptitude, never rising above the tribal
concept, kept black Africa a mosaic of peoples, warring savagely among
themselves and widely addicted to cannibalism. Then, too, the native religions
were usually sanguinary, demanding a prodigality of human sacrifices. The
killings ordained by negro wizards and witch-doctors sometimes attained
unbelievable proportions. The combined result of all this was a wastage of life
which in other races would have spelled a declining population. Since the establishment
of white political control, however, these checks on black fecundity are no
longer operative. The white rulers fight filth and disease, stop tribal wars,
and stamp out superstitious abominations. In consequence, population increases
by leaps and bounds, the latent possibilities being shown in the native
reservations in South Africa, where tribes have increased as much as tenfold in
fifty or sixty years. It is therefore practically certain that the African
negroes will multiply prodigiously in the next few decades.
Now, what
will be the attitude of these augmenting black masses toward white political
dominion? To that momentous query no certain answer can be made. One thing,
however, seems clear: the black world's reaction to white ascendancy will be
markedly different from those of the brown and yellow worlds, because of the
profound dissimilarities between negroes and men of other stocks. To begin
with, the black peoples have no historic pasts. Never having evolved
civilizations of their own, they are practically devoid of that accumulated
mass of beliefs, thoughts, and experiences which render Asiatics so
impenetrable and so hostile to white influences. Although the white race
displays sustained constructive power to an unrivalled degree, particularly in
its Nordic branches, the brown and yellow peoples have contributed greatly to
the civilization of the world and have profoundly influenced human progress.
The negro, on the contrary, has contributed virtually nothing. Left to himself,
he remained a savage, and in the past his only quickening has been where brown
men have imposed their ideas and altered his blood. The originating powers of
the European and the Asiatic are not in him.
This lack of
constructive originality, however, renders the negro extremely susceptible to
external influences. The Asiatic, conscious of his past and his potentialities,
is chary of foreign innovations and refuses to recognize alien superiority. The
negro, having no past, weIcomes novelty and tacitly admits that others are his
masters. Both brown and white men have been so accepted in Africa. The
relatively faint resistance offered by the naturally brave blacks to white and
brown conquest, the ready reception of Christianity and Islam, and the
extraordinary personal ascendancy acquired by individual Arabs and Europeans,
all indicate a willingness to accept foreign tutelage which in the Asiatic is
wholly absent.
The Arab and
the European are, in fact, rivals for the mastership of black Africa. The Arab
had a long start, but the European suddenly overtook him and brought not only
the blacks but the African Arabs themselves under his sway. It remains to be
seen whether the Arab, allying himself with the blacks, can oust his white
rival. That some such move will be attempted, in view of the brown worId's
renaissance in general and the extraordinary activity of the Arab peoples in
particular, seems a foregone conclusion. How the matter will work out depends
on three things:
1. the brown
man's inherent strength in Africa;
2. the
possibilities of black disaffection against white tutelage;
3. the white
man's strength and power of resistance.
The seat of
brown power in Africa is of course the great belt of territory north of the
Sahara. From Egypt to Morocco the inhabitants are Arabized in culture and
Mohammedan in faith, while Arab blood has percolated ever since the Moslem
conquest twelve centuries ago. In the eastern half of this zone Arabization has
been complete, and Egypt, Tripoli, and the Sudan can be considered as unalterably
wedded to the brown Islamic world. The zone's western half, however, is in
different case. The majority of its inhabitants are Berbers, an ancient stock
generally considered white, with close affinities to the Latin peoples across
the Mediterranean. As usual, blood tells. The Berbers have been under Arab
tutelage for over a thousand years, yet their whole manner of life remains
distinct, they have largely kept their language, and there has been
comparatively little intermarriage. Pure-blooded Arabs abound, but they are
still, in a way, foreigners. To-day the entire region is under white, French,
rule. Algeria, in particular, has been politically French for almost a hundred
years. Europeans have come in and number nearly a million souls. The Arab element
shows itself sullen and refractory, but the Berbers display much less aversion
to French rule, which, as usual, is considerate of native susceptibilities. The
French colonial authorities are alive to the Berber's ethnic affinities and
tactfully seek to stimulate his dormant white consciousness. In Algeria
intermarriage between Europeans and Berbers has actually begun. Of course the
process is merely in its first stages. Still, the blood is there, the leaven is
working, and in time Northwest Africa may return to the white world, where it
was in Roman days and where it racially belongs. In the anti-European
disturbances now taking place in Algeria and Tunis it is safe to say that the
Arab element is making most of the trouble.
It is
Northeast Africa, then, which is the real nucleus of Arabism. Here Arabism and
Islam rule unchecked, and in the preceding chapter we saw how the Senussi Order
was marshalling the fierce nomads of the desert. These tribesmen are relatively
few in numbers, but more splendid fighting material does not exist in the wide
world. Furthermore, the Arab-negroid peoples which have developed along the
southern edge of the desert so blend the martial qualities of both strains that
they frequently display an almost demoniacal fighting-power. It is
Pan-Islamism's hope to use these Arab or Arabized fanatics as an officers'
corps for the black millions whom it is converting to the faith.
Concerning
Islam's steady progress in black Africa there can be no shadow of a doubt.
Every candid European observer tells the same story. "Mohammedanism,"
says Sir Charles Elliott, " can still give the natives a motive for
animosity against Europeans and a unity of which they are otherwise
incapable." (A. R. Colquhoun, "Pan-Islam," North American
Review, June, 1906.) Twenty years ago another English observer, T. R.
Threlfall, wrote: "Mohammedanism is making marvellous progress in the
interior of Africa. It is crushing paganism out. Against it the Christian
propaganda is a myth.... The rapid spread of militant Mohammedanism among the
savage tribes to the north of the equator is a serious factor in the fight for
racial supremacy in Africa. With very few exceptions the colored races of
Africa are preeminently fighters. To them the law of the stronger is supreme; they
have been conquered, and in turn they conquered. To them the fierce, warlike
spirit inherent in Mohammedanism is infinitely more attractive than is the
gentle, peace-loving, high moral standard of Christianity: hence, the rapid
headway the former is making in central Africa, and the certainty that it will
soon spread to the south of the Zambezi." (T. R. Threlfall, "Senussi
and His Threatened Holy War," Nineteenth Century, March, 1900.)
The way in
which Islam is marching southward is dramatically shown by a recent incident. A
few years ago the British authorities suddenly discovered that Mohammedanism
was pervading Nyassaland. An investigation brought out the fact that it was the
work of Zanzibar Arabs. They began their propaganda about 1900. Ten years later
almost every village in southern Nyassaland had its Moslem teacher and its
mosque-hut. Although the movement was frankly anti-European, the British
authorities did not dare to check it for fear of repercussions elsewhere.
Another interesting fact, probably not unconnected, is that Nyassaland has
lately been the theatre of an anti-white "Christian" propaganda - the
so-called "Ethiopian Church," of which I shall presently speak.
Islam has
thus two avenues of approach to the African negro - his natural preference for
a militant faith and his resentment at white tutelage. It is the disinclination
of the more martial African peoples for a pacific creed which perhaps accounts
for Christianity's slow progress among the very warlike tribes of South Africa,
such as the Zulus and the Matabele. Islam is as yet unknown south of the
Zambezi, but white men universally dread the possibility of its appearance,
fearing its effect upon the natives. Of course Christianity has made distinct
progress in the Dark Continent. The natives of the South African Union are
predominantly Christianized. In east-central Africa Christianity has also
gained many converts, particularly in Uganda, while on the West African Guinea
coast Christian missions have long been established and have generally
succeeded in keeping Islam away from the seaboard. Certainly, all white men,
whether professing Christians or not, should welcome the success of missionary
efforts in Africa. The degrading fetishism and demonology which sum up the
native pagan cults cannot stand, and all negroes will some day be either
Christians or Moslems. In so far as he is Christianized, the negro's savage
instincts will be restrained and he will be disposed to acquiesce in white
tutelage. In so far as he is Islamized, the negro's warlike propensities will
be inflamed, and he will be used as the tool of Arab Pan-Islamism seeking to
drive the white man from Africa and make the continent its very own.
As to
specific anti-white sentiments among negroes untouched by Moslem propaganda,
such sentiments undoubtedly exist in many quarters. The strongest
manifestations are in South Africa, where interracial relations are bad and
becoming worse, but there is much diffused, half-articulate dislike of white
men throughout central Africa as well. Devoid though the African savage is of
either national or cultural consciousness, he could not be expected to welcome
a tutelage which imposed many irksome restrictions upon him. Furthermore, the
African negro does seem to possess a certain rudimentary sense of
race-solidarity. The existence of both these sentiments is proved by the way in
which the news of white military reverses have at once been known and rejoiced
in all over black Africa; spread, it would seem, by those mysterious methods of
communication employed by negroes everywhere and called in our Southern States
"grape-vine telegraph." The Russo-Japanese War, for example, produced
all over the Dark Continent intensely exciting effects.
This
generalized anti-white feeling has, during the past decade, taken tangible form
in South Africa.
The white
population of the Union, though numbering 1,500,000, is surrounded by a black
population four times as great and increasing more rapidly, while in many
sections the whites are outnumbered ten to one. The result is a state of
affairs exactly paralleling conditions in our own South, the South African
whites feeling obliged to protect their ascendancy by elaborate legal
regulations and social taboos. The negroes have been rapidly growing more restive
under these discriminations, and unpleasant episodes like race-riots, rapings,
and lynchings are increasing in South Africa from year to year.
One of the
most significant, not to say ominous, signs of the times is the "Ethiopian
Church" movement. The movement began about fifteen years ago, some of its
founders being Afro-American Methodist preachers - a fact which throws a
curious light on possible American negro reflexes upon their ancestral
homeland. The movement spread rapidly, many native mission congregations
cutting loose from white ecclesiastical control and joining the negro
organization. It also soon displayed frankly anti-white tendencies, and the
government became seriously alarmed at its unsettling influence upon the native
mind. It was suspected of having had a hand in the Zulu rising which broke out
in Natal in 1907 and which was put down only after many whites and thousands of
natives had lost their lives. Shortly afterward the authorities outlawed the
Ethiopian Church and forbade Afro-American preachers to enter South Africa, but
the movement, though legally suppressed, lived surreptitiously on and appeared
in new quarters.
In 1915 a
peculiarly fanatical form of Ethiopianism broke out in Nyassaland. Its leader
was a certain John Chilembwe, an Ethiopian preacher who had been educated in
the United States. His propaganda was bitterly anti-white, asserting that
Africa belonged to the black man, that the white man was an intruder, and that
he ought to be killed off until he grew discouraged and abandoned the country.
Chilembwe plotted a rising all over Nyassaland, the killing of the white men,
and the carrying off of the white women. In January, 1915, the rising took
place. Some plantations were sacked and several whites killed, their heads being
carried to Chilembwe's "church," where a thanksgiving service for
victory was held. The whites, however, acted with great vigor, the poorly armed
insurgents were quickly scattered, and John Chilembwe himself was soon hunted
down and killed. In itself, the incident was of slight importance, but, taken
in connection with much else, it does not augur well for the future. (For
details, see The Annual Register for 1915 and 1916.)
An
interesting indication of the growing sense of negro race-solidarity was the
"Pan-African Congress" held at Paris early in 1919. Here delegates
from black communities throughout the world gathered to discuss matters of
common interest. Most of the delegates were from Africa and the Americas, but
one delegate from New Guinea was also present, thus representing the
Australasian branch of the black race. The Congress was not largely attended
and was of a some what provisional character but arrangements for the holding
of subsequent congresses were made.
Here, then,
is the African problem's present status: To begin with, we have a rapidly
growing black population, increasingly restive under white tutelage and
continually excited by Pan-Islamic propaganda with the further complication of
another anti-white propaganda spread by negro radicals from America.
The African
situation is thus somewhat analogous to conditions in Asia. But the analogy
must not be pressed too far. In Asia white hegemony rests solely on political
bases, while the Asiatics themselves, browns and yellows alike, display
constructive power and possess civilizations built up by their own efforts from
the remote past. The Asiatics are to-day once more displaying their innate
capacity by not merely adopting, but adapting, white ideas and methods. We
behold an Asiatic renaissance, whose genuineness is best attested by the fact
that there have been similar movements in past times.
None of this
applies to Africa. The black race has never shown real constructive power. It
has never built up a native civilization. Such progress as certain negro groups
have made has been due to external pressure and has never long outlived that
pressure's removal, for the negro, when left to himself, as in Haiti and
Liberia, rapidly reverts to his ancestral ways. The negro is a facile, even
eager, imitator; but there he stops. He adopts; but he does not adapt,
assimilate, and give forth creatively again.
The whole of
history testifies to this truth. As the Englishman Meredith Townsend says:
"None of the black races, whether negro or Australian, have shown within
the historic time the capacity to develop civilization. They have never passed
the boundaries of their own habitats as conquerors, and never exercised the
smallest influence over peoples not black. They have never founded a stone city,
have never built a ship, have never produced a literature, have never suggested
a creed.... There seams to be no reason for this except race. It is said that
the negro has been buried in the most 'massive' of the four continents, and has
been, so to speak, lost to humanity; but he was always on the Nile, the
immediate road to the Mediterranean, and in West and East Africa he was on the
sea. Africa is probably more fertile, and almost certainly richer than Asia,
and is pierced by rivers as mighty, and some of them at least as navigable.
What could a singularly healthy race, armed with a constitution which resists
the sun and defies malaria, wish for better than to be seated on the Nile, or
the Congo, or the Niger, in numbers amply sufficient to execute any needed
work, from the cutting of forests and the making of roads up to the building of
cities? How was the negro more secluded than the Peruvian; or why was he 'shut
up' worse than the Tartar of Samarcand, who one day shook himself, gave up all
tribal feuds, and, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic and southward to the
Nerbudda, mastered the worId? . . . The negro went by himself far beyond the
Australian savage. He learned the use of fire, the fact that sown grain will
grow, the value of shelter, the use of the bow and the canoe, and the good of
clothes; but there to all appearances he stopped, unable, until stimulated by
another race like the Arab, to advance another step." (Townsend, op. cit.
pp. 92, 356-8.)
Unless,
then, every lesson of history is to be disregarded, we must conclude that black
Africa is unable to stand alone. The black man's numbers may increase
prodigiously and acquire alien veneers, but the bIack man's nature will not
change. Black unrest may grow and cause much trouble. Nevertheless, the white
man must stand fast in Africa. No black "renaissance " impends, and
Africa, if abandoned by the whites, would merely fall beneath the onset of the
browns. And that would be a great calamity. As stated in the preceding chapter,
the brown peoples, of themselves, do not directly menace white race-areas,
while Pan-Islamism is at present an essentially defensive movement. But Islam
is militant by nature, and the Arab is a restless and warlike breed.
Pan-Islamism once possessed of the Dark Continent and fired by militant
zealots, might forge black Africa into a sword of wrath, the executor of
sinister adventures.
Fortunately
the white man has every reason for keeping a firm hold on Africa. Not only are
its central tropics prime sources of raw materials and foodstuffs which white
direction can alone deveIop, but to north and south the white man has struck
deep roots into the soil. Both extremities of the continent are "white
man's country," where strong white peoples should ultimately arise. Two of
the chief white Powers, Britain and France, are pledged to the hilt in this
racial task and will spare no effort to safeguard the heritage of their
pioneering children. Brown influence in Africa is strong, but it is supreme
only in the northeast and its line of communication with the Asiatic homeland
runs over the narrow neck of Suez. Should stern necessity arise, the white
world could hold Suez against Asiatic assault and crush brown resistance in
Africa.
In short,
the real danger to white control of Africa lies, not in brown attack or black
revolt, but in possible white weakness through chronic discord within the white
world itself. And that subject must be reserved for later chapters.
CHAPTER V:
RED MAN'S LAND
RED MAN'S
LAND is the Americas between the Rio Grande and the tropic of Capricorn. Here
dwells the "Amerindian" race. At the time of Columbus the whole
western hemisphere was theirs, but the white man has extirpated or absorbed
them to north and south, so that to-day the United States and Canada in North
America and the southern portions of South America are genuine "white
man's country." In the intermediate zone above mentioned, however, the
Amerindian has survived and forms the majority of the population, albeit
considerably mixed with white and to a lesser degree with negro blood. The
total number of "Indians," including both full-bloods and mixed
types, is about 40,000,000 - more than two-thirds of the whole population. In
addition, there are several million negroes and mulattoes, mostly in Brazil.
The white population of the intermediate zone, even if we include
"near-whites," does not average more than 10 per cent, though it
varies greatly with different regions. The reader should remember that neither
the West India Islands nor the southern portion of the South American continent
are included in this gener- alization. In the West Indies the Amerindian has
com- pletely died out and has been replaced by the negro, while southern South
America, especially Argentina and Uruguay, are genuine white man's country in
which there is little Indian and no negro blood. Despite these exceptions,
however, the fact remains that, taken as a whole, "Latin America,"
the vast land-block from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, is racially not
"Latin" but Amerindian or negroid, with a thin Spanish or Portuguese
veneer. In other words, though commonly considered part of the white world,
most of Latin America is ethnically colored man's land, which has been growing
more colored for the past hundred years.
Latin
America's evolution was predetermined by the Spanish Conquest. That very word
"conquest" tells the story. The United States was settled by
colonists planning homes and bringing their women. It was thus a genuine
migration, and resulted in a full transplanting of white stock to new soil. The
Indians encountered were wild nomads, fierce of temper and few in number. After
sharp conflicts they were extirpated, leaving virtually no ethnic traces
behind. The colonization of Latin America was the exact antithesis. The Spanish
Conquistadores were bold warriors descending upon vast regions inhabited by
relatively dense populations, some of which, as in Mexico and Peru, had
attained a certain degree of civilization. The Spaniards, invincible in their
shining armor, paralyzed with terror the people still dwelling in the age of
bronze and polished stone. With ridiculous ease mere handfuls of whites
overthrew empires and forded it like gods over servile and adoring multitudes.
Cortez marched on Mexico with less than 600 followers, while Pizarro had but
310 companions when he started his conquest of Peru. Of course the fabulous
treasures amassed in these exploits drew swarms of bold adventurers from Spain.
Nevertheless, their numbers were always infinitesimal compared with the vastness
of the quarry, while the proportion of women immigrants continued to lag far
behind that of the men. The breeding of pure whites in Latin America was thus
both scanty and slow.
On the other
hand, the breeding of mixed-bloods began at once and attained notable
proportions. Having slaughtered the Indian males or brigaded them in
slave-gangs, the Conquistadores took the Indian women to themselves. The
humblest man-at-arms had several female attendants, while the leaders became
veritable pashas with great harems of concubines. The result was a prodigious
output of half breed children, known as "mestizos" or
"cholos."
And soon a
new ethnic complication was added. The Indians having developed a melancholy
trick of dying off under slavery, the Spaniards imported African negroes to
fill the servile ranks, and since they took negresses as well as Indian women
for concubines, other half-breeds - mulattoes - appeared. Here and there
Indians and negroes mated on their own account, the offspring being known as
"zambos." In time these various hybrids bred among themselves,
producing the most extraordinary ethnic combinations. As Garcia-Calderon well
puts it: "Grotesque generations with every shade of complexion and every
conformation of skull were born in America - a crucible continually agitated by
unheard-of fusions of races.... But there was little Latin blood to be found in
the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated
America." [F. Garcia-Calderon, Latin America: Its Rise and Progress, p. 49
(English translation, London, 1913)]
To be sure,
this mongrel population long remained politically negligible. The Spaniards
regarded themselves as a master-caste, and excluded all save pure whites from
civic rights and social privileges. In fact, the European-born Spaniards
refused to recognize even their colonial-born kinsmen as their equals, and
"Creoles" (Although loose usage has since obscured its true meaning,
the term "Creole" has to do, not with race, but with birthplace.
"Creole" originally meant "one born in the colonies." Down
to the nineteenth century, this was perfectly clear. Whites were
"Creole" or "European"; negroes were "Creole" or
"African.") could not aspire to the higher distinctions or offices.
This attitude was largely inspired by the desire to maintain a lucrative
monopoly. Yet the European's sense of superiority had some valid grounds. There
can be no doubt that the Creole whites, as a class, showed increasing signs of
degeneracy. Climate was a prime cause in the hotter regions, but there were
many plateau areas, as in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which though
geographically in the tropics had a temperate climate from their elevation.
Even more
than by climate the Creole was injured by contact with the colored races. Pampered
and corrupted from birth by obsequious slaves, the Creole usually led an idle
and vapid existence, disdaining work as servile and debarred from higher
callings by his European-born superiors. As time passed, the degeneracy due to
climate and custom was intensified by degeneracy of blood. Despite legal
enactment and social taboo, colored strains percolated insidiously into the
creole stock. The leading families, by elaborate precautions, might succeed in
keeping their escutcheons clean, but humbler circles darkened significantly
despite fervid protestations of "pure-white" blood. Still, so long as
Spain kept her hold on Latin America, the process of miscegenation, socially
considered, was a slow one. The whole social system was based on the idea of
white superiority, and the colors were carefully graded. "In
America," wrote Humboldt toward the close of Spanish rule, " the more
or less white skin determines the position which a man holds in society."
The
revolution against Spain had momentous consequences for the racial future of
Latin America. In the beginning, to be sure, it was a white civil war - a
revolt of the Creoles against European oppression and discrimination. The
heroes of the revolution - Bolivar, Miranda, San Martin, and the rest - were
aristocrats of pure-white blood. But the revolution presently developed new
features. To begin with, the struggle was very long. Commencing in 1809, it
lasted almost twenty years. The whites were decimated by fratricidal fury and
when the Spanish cause was finally lost, multitudes of loyalists mainly of the
superior social classes left the country. Meanwhile, the half-castes, who had
rallied wholesale to the revolutionary banner, were demanding their reward. The
Creoles wished to close the revolutionary cycle and establish a new society
based, like the old, upon white supremacy, with themselves substituted for the
Spaniards. Bolivar planned a limited monarchy and a white electoral oligarchy.
But this was far from suiting the half-castes. For them the revolution had just
begun. Raising the cry of "democracy," then become fashionable
through the North American and French revolutions, they proclaimed the doctrine
of "equality" regardless of skin. Disillusioned and full of
foreboding, Bolivar, the master-spirit of the revolution, disappeared from the
scene, and his lieutenants, like the generals of Alexander, quarrelled among
themselves, split Latin America into jarring fragments, and waged a long series
of internecine wars. The flood-gates of anarchy were opened, the result being a
steady weakening of the whites and a corresponding rise of the half-castes in
the political and social scale. Everywhere ambitious soldiers led the mongrel
mob against the white aristocracy, breaking its power and making themselves
dictators. These "caudillos" were apostles of equality and
miscegenation. Says Garcia-Calderon: "Tyrants found democracies; they lean
on the support of the people, the half-breeds and negroes, against the
oligarchies; they dominate the colonial nobility, favor the crossing of races,
and free the slaves." (Garcia-Calderon, p. 50.)
The
consequences of all this were lamentable in the extreme. Latin America's level
of civilization fell far below that of colonial days. Spanish rule, though
narrow and tyrannical, had maintained peace and social stability. Now all was a
hideous chaos wherein frenzied castes and colors grappled to the death.
Ignorant mestizos and brutal negroes trampled the fine flowers of culture under
foot, while as by a malignant inverse selection the most intelligent and the
most cultivated perished.
These
deplorable conditions prevailed in Latin America until well past the middle of
the nineteenth century. Of course, here as elsewhere, anarchy engendered
tyranny, and strong caudillos sometimes perpetuated their dictatorship for
decades, as in Paraguay under Doctor Francia and in Mexico under Porfirio Diaz.
However, these were mere interludes, of no constructive import. Always the
aging lion lost his grip, the lurking hyenas of anarchy downed him at Iast, and
the land sank once more into revolutionary chaos. Some parts of Latin America
did, indeed, definitely emerge into the light of stable progress. But those
favored regions owed their deliverance, not to dictatorship, but to race. One
of two factors always operated: either (1) an efficient white oligarchy; or (2)
Aryanization through wholesale European immigration.
Stabilization
through oligarchy is best illustrated by Chile. Chilean history differs widely
from that of the rest of Latin America. A land of cool climate, no gold, and
warlike Araucanian Indians, Chile attracted the pioneering settler rather than
the swashbuckling seeker of treasure-trove. Now the pioneering types in Spain
come mainly from those northern provinces which have retained considerable
Nordic blood. The Chilean colonists were thus largely blond Asturians or
austere, reasonable Basques, seeking homes and bringing their women. Of course
there was crossing with the natives, but the fierce Araucanian aborigines clung
to their wild freedom and kept up an interminable frontier warfare in which the
occasions for race-mixture were relatively few. The country was thus settled by
a resident squirearchy of an almost English type. This ruling gentry jealously
guarded its racial integrity. In fact, it possessed not merely a white but a
Nordic race-consciousness. The Chilean gentry called themselves sons of the
Visigoths, scions of Euric and Pelayo, who had found in remote Araucania a
chance to slake their racial thirst for fighting and freedom.
In Chile, as
elsewhere, the revolution provoked a cycle of disorder. But the cycle was
short, and was more a political struggle between white factions than a social
welter of caste and race. Furthermore, Chile was receiving fresh accessions of
Nordic blood. Many English, Scotch, and Irish gentleman-adventurers, taking
part in the War of Independence, settled down in a land so reminiscent of their
own. Germans also came in considerable numbers, settling especially in the
colder south. Thus the Chilean upper classes, always pure white, became
steadily more Nordic in ethnic character. The political and social results were
unmistakable. Chile rapidly evolved a stable society, essentially oligarchic
and consciously patterned on aristocratic England. Efficient, practical, and
extremely patriotic, the Chilean oligarchs made their country at once the most
stable and the most dynamic factor in Latin America.
The
distinctly "Northern" character of Chile and the Chileans strike
foreign observers. Here, for example, are the impressions of a recent visitor,
the North American sociologist, Professor E. A. Ross. Landing at the port of
Valparaiso, he is "struck by signs of English influence. On the commercial
streets every third man suggests the Briton, while a large proportion of the
business people look as if they have their daily tub. The cleanliness of the
streets, the freshness of the parks and squares, the dressing of the
shop-windows, and the style of the mounted police remind one of England."
(Edward Alsworth Rose, "South of Panama," pp. 97-98 (New York, 1914)
'Ross, p. 109.) As to the Nordic affinities of the upper classes: "One
sees it in stature, eye color, and ruddy complexion.... Among the pupils of
Santiago College there are as many blonds as brunets."2 Even among the
peon or "roto" class, despite considerable Indian crossing, Professor
Ross noted the strong Nordic strain, for he met Chilean peasants "whose
stature, broad shoulders, big faces, and tawny mustaches pro-claimed them as
genuine Norsemen as the Icelanders in our Red River Valley." (Ross, p.
109.)
Chile is
thus the prime example of social stability and progress attained through white
oligarchic rule. Other, though less successful, instances are to be noted in
Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Peru and Colombia, though geographically within
the tropics, have extensive temperate plateaux. Here numerous whites settled
during the colonial period, forming an upper caste over a large Indian
population. Unlike Chile, few Nordics came to leaven society with those
qualities of constructive genius and racial self-respect which are the special
birthright of Nordic man. Unlike Chile again, not only were there dense Indian
masses, but there was also an appreciable negro element. Lastly, the number of
mixed-bloods was very Large. It is thus not surprising that for both Peru and
Colombia the revolution ushered in a period of turmoil from which neither have
even yet emerged. The whites have consistently fought among themselves,
invoking the half-castes as auxiliaries and using Indians and negroes as their
pawns. The whites are still the dominant element, but only the first families
retain their pure blood, and miscegenation creeps upward with every successive
generation. As for Costa Rica, it is a tiny bit of cool hill-country, settled
by whites in colonial times, and to-day rises an oasis of civilization, above
the tropic jungle of degenerate, mongrel Central America.
The second
method of social stabilization in Latin America - Aryanization through
wholesale European immigration - is exemplified by Argentina and Uruguay.
Neither of these lands had very promising beginnings. Their populations, at the
revolution, contained strong Indian infusions and traces of negro blood, while
after the revolution both fell under the sway of tyrannical dictators who
persecuted the white aristocrats and favored miscegenation. However, Argentina
and Uruguay possessed two notable advantages: they were climatically white
man's country, and they at first contained a very small population. Since they
produced neither gold nor tropical luxuries, Spain had neglected them, so that
at the revolution they consisted of little more than the port-towns of Buenos
Aires and Montevideo with a few dependent river-settlements. Their vast
hinterlands of fertile prairie then harbored only wandering tribes of nomad
savages.
During the
last half of the nineteenth century, however, the development of ocean
transport gave these antipodean prairies value as stock-raising and
grain-growing sources for congested Europe, and Europe promptly sent immigrants
to supply her needs. This immigrant stream gradually swelled to a veritable
deluge. The human tide was, on the whole, of sound stock, mostly Spaniards and
north Italians, with some Nordic elements from northern Europe in the upper
strata. Thus Europe locked antipodean America securely to the white world. As
for the colonial stock, it merged easily into the newer, kindred flood. Here
and there signs of former miscegenation still show, the Argentino being
sometimes, as Madison Grant well puts it, "suspiciously swarthy."
[Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, p. 78. (2d edition, New York,
1918)] Nevertheless, these are but vestigial traces which the ceaseless
European inflow will ultimately eradicate. The large impending German
immigration to Argentina and Uruguay should bring valuable Nordic elements.
This same
tide of European immigration has likewise pretty well Aryanized the southern
provinces of Brazil, adjacent to the Uruguayan border. Those provinces were
neglected by Portugal as Argentina and Uruguay were by Spain, and half a
century ago they had a very sparse population. To-day they support millions of
European immigrants, mostly Italians and European Portuguese, but with the
further addition of nearly half a million Germans. Brazil is, in fact, evolving
into two racially distinct communities. The southern provinces are white man's
country, with little Indian or negro blood, and with a distinct "color
line." The tropical north is saturated with Indian and negro strains, and
the whites are rapidly disappearing in a universal mongrelization. Ultimately
this must produce momentous political consequences.
Bearing in
mind the exceptions above noted, let us now observe the vast tropical and
semi-tropical bulk of Latin America. Here we find notable changes since
colonial days. White predominance is substantially a thing of the past. Persons
of unmixed Spanish or Portuguese descent are relatively few, most of the
so-called "whites" being really near-whites, more or less deeply
tinged with colored bloods. It is a striking token of white race-prestige that
these near-whites, despite their degeneracy and inefficiency, are yet the
dominant element; occupying, in fact, much the same status as the aristocratic
Creoles immediately after the War of Independence. Nevertheless, the
near-whites' supremacy is now threatened. Every decade of chronic anarchy
favors the darker halfbreeds, while below these, in turn, the Indian and negro
full-bloods are beginning to stir, as in Mexico to-day.
Most
informed observers agree that the mixed-bloods of Latin America are distinctly
inferior to the whites. This applies to both mestizos and mulattoes, albeit the
mestizo (the cross between white and Indian) seems less inferior than the mulatto-the
cross between white and black. As for the zambo, the Indian-negro cross,
everybody is agreed that it is a very bad one. Analyses of these hybrid stocks
show remarkable similarities to the mongrel chaos of the declining Roman
Empire. Here is the judgment of Garcia-Calderon, a Peruvian scholar and
generally considered the most authoritative writer on Latin America. "The
racial question," he writes, "is a very serious problem in American
history. It explains the progress of certain peoples and the decadence of
others, and it is the key to the incurable disorder which divides America. Upon
it depend a great number of secondary phenomena; the public wealth, the
industrial system, the stability of governments, the solidity of patriotism....
This complication of castes, this admixture of diverse bloods, has created many
problems. For example, is the formation of a national consciousness possible
with such disparate elements? Would such heterogeneous democracies be able to
resist the invasion of superior races? Finally, is the South American
half-caste absolutely incapable of organization and culture?" (Garcia-
Calderon, pp. 351-2.)
While
qualifying his answers to these queries, Garcia-Calderon yet deplores the
half-caste's "decadence." (Ibid., p. 287.) "In the Iberian
democracies," he says, "an inferior Latinity, a Latinity of the
decadence, prevails; verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, oratorical
exaggeration, just as in Roman Spain.... The half-caste loves grace, verbal
elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions and desires do not
move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in polities he disputes
in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish
forefather, stoical and adventurous." (Ibid., p. 360.)
Garcia-Calderon
therefore concludes: "The mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and
negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences.... None of the conditions
established by the French psychologists are realized by the Latin American
democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate. The lower castes
struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly
existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial
scepticism; and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing
its work, and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism."
(Garcia-Calderon, pp. 361-2.) This melancholy fate can, according to
Garcia-Calderon, be averted only by wholesale white immigration: "In South
America civilization is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the
victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the
negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish
the shattered equilibrium of the American races." (Ibid., p. 362.)
Garcia-Calderon's
pronouncements are echoed by foreign observers. During his South American
travels Professor Ross noted the same melancholy symptoms and pointed out the
same unique remedy. Speaking of Ecuador, he says: "I found no foreigners
who have faith in the future of this people. They point out that while this was
a Spanish colony there was a continual flow of immigrants from Spain, many of
whom, no doubt, were men of force. Political separation interrupted this
current, and since then the country has really gone back. Spain had provided a
ruling, organizing element, and, with the cessation of the flow of Spaniards,
the mixed-bloods took charge of things, for the pure-white element is so small
as to be negligible. No one suggests that the mestizos equal the white stock
either in intellect or in character.... Among the rougher foreigners and
Peruvians the pet name for these people is 'monkeys.' The thoughtful often
liken them to Eurasians, clever enough, but lacking in solidity of character.
Natives and foreigners alike declare that a large white immigration is the only
hope for Ecuador." (Ross, South of Panama, pp. 29-30.)
Concerning
Bolivia, Professor Ross writes: "The wisest sociologist in Bolivia told me
that the zambo, resulting from the union of Indian with negro, is inferior to
both the parent races, and that likewise the mestizo is inferior to both white
and Indian in physical strength, resistance to disease, longevity, and brains.
The failure of the South American republics has been due, he declares, to
mestizo domination. Through the colonial period there was a flow of Spaniards
to the colonies, and all the offices down to corregidor and cura were filled by
white men. With independence, the whites ceased coming, and the lower offices
of state and church were filled with mestizos. Then, too, the first crossing of
white with Indian gave a better result than the union between mestizos, so that
the stock has undergone progressive degeneration. The only thing, then, that
can make these countries progress is a large white immigration, something much
talked about by statesmen in all these countries, but which has never
materialized." (Ross, p. 41.)
These
judgments refer particularly to Spanish America. Regarding Portuguese Brazil,
however, the verdict seems to be the same. Many years ago Professor Agassiz
wrote: "Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is
inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them,
come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the
amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world,
and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro,
and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and
mental energy." [A. P. Schultz, Race or Mongrel, p. 155 (Boston, 1908)]
The
mongrel's political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have
been expected. These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a
battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic
violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is
anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters.
Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes:
"Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast
territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and
agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole
expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical disoourses; in these
regions anarchy is sovereign mistress." (Garcia-Calderon, p. 222.) The
tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward "atomic
disintegration.... Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from
neurosis." (Ibid., p. 336.)
The stock
feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the "revolution." These
senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as
comic opera, but the grim truth of the matter is that few Latin American
revolutions are laughing matters. The numbers of men engaged may not be very
large according to our standards, but measured by the scanty populations of the
countries concerned, they lay a heavy blood-tax on the suffering peoples. The
tatter-demalion "armies" may excite our mirth, but the battles are
real enough, often fought out to the death with razor-edged machetes and rusty
bayonets, and there is no more ghastly sight than a Latin American
battle-field. The commandeerings, burnings, rapings, and assassinations
inflicted upon the hapless civilian population cry to heaven. There is always
wholesale destruction of property, frequently appalling loss of life, and a
general paralysis of economic and social activity. These wretched lands have
now been scourged by the revolutionary plague for a hundred years, and W. B.
Hale does not overstate the consequences when he says: "Most of the
countries clustering about the Caribbean have sunk into deeper and deeper mires
of misrule, unmatched for profligacy and violence anywhere on earth. Revolution
follows revolution; one band of brigands succeeds another; atrocities revenge
atrocities; the plundered people grow more and more abject in poverty and
slavishness; vast natural resources lie neglected, while populations decrease,
civilization recedes, and the jungle advances." (W. B. Hale, "Our
Danger in Central America," World's Work, August, 1912.) Of course, under
these frightful circumstances, the national character, weak enough at best,
degenerates at an ever-quickening pace. Peaceful effort of any sort appears
vain and ridiculous, and men are taught that wealth is procurable only by
violence and extortion.
Another
important point should be noted. I have said that Latin American anarchy was
restrained by dictatorship. But the reader must not infer that dictatorships
are halcyon times for the dictated. On the contrary, they are usually only a
trifle less wretched and demoralizing than times of revolution. The
"caudillos" are nearly always very sinister figures. Often they are
ignorant brutes; oftener they are bloodthirsty, lecherous monsters; oftenest
they are human spiders who suck the land dry of all fluid wealth, banking it
abroad against the day when they shall fly before the revolutionary blast to
the safe haven of Paris and the congenial debaucheries of Montmartre. The
millions amassed by tyrants like Castro of Venezuela and Zelaya of Nicaragua
are almost beyond belief, considering the backward, bankrupt lands they have
"administered."
Yet how can
it be otherwise? Consider Critchfield's incisive account of a caudillo's
accession to power: "When an ignorant and brutal man, whose entire
knowledge of the world is confined to a few Indian villages, and whose total
experience has been gained in the raising of cattle, doffs his alpagartes, and,
machete in hand, cuts his way to power in a few weeks, with a savage horde at
his back who know nothing of the amenities of civilization and care less than
they know - when such a man comes to power, evil and evil only can result. Even
if the new dictator were well-intentioned, his entire ignorance of law and
constitutional forms, of commercial processes and manufacturing arts, and of
the fundamental and necessary principles underlying all stable and free
governments, would render a successful administration by him extremely
difficult, if not impossible. But he is surrounded by all the elements of vice
and flattery, and he is imbued with that vain and absurd egotism which makes
men of small caliber imagine themselves to be Napoleons or Caesars. Thus do
petty despotisms, unrestrained by constitutional provisions or by anything like
a virile public opinion, lead from absurdity to outrage and crime." [G. W.
Critchfield, American Supremacy, vol. 1, p. 277 (New York, 1908)]
Such is the
situation in mongrel-ruled America: revolution breeding revolution, tyranny
breeding tyranny, and the twain combining to ruin their victims and force them
ever deeper into the slough of degenerate barbarism. The whites have lost their
grip and are rapidly disappearing. The mixed-breeds have had their chance and
have grotesquely failed. The oft quoted panacea - white immigration - is under
present conditions a vain dream, for white immigrants will not expose
themselves (and still less their women) to the horrors of mongrel rule. So far,
then, as internal factors are concerned, anarchy seems destined to continue
unchecked.
In fact, new
conflicts loom on the horizon. The lndian masses, so docile to the genuine
white man, begin to stir. The aureole of white prestige has been besmirched by
the near-whites and half-castes who have traded so recklessly upon its
sanctions. Strong in the poise of normal heredity, the Indian full-blood
commences to despise these chaotic masters who turn his homelands into
bear-gardens and witches' sabbaths. An "Indianista" movement is
to-day on foot throughout mongrel-ruled America. It is most pronounced in
Mexico, whose interminable agony becomes more and more a war of Indian
resurgence, but it is also starting along the west coast of South America. Long
ago, wise old Professor Pearson saw how the wind was blowing. Noting how whites
and near-whites were "everywhere fighting and intriguing for the spoils of
office," he also noted that the Indian masses, though relatively passive
and "seemingly unobservant," were yet "conquering a place for
themselves in other ways than by increasing and multiplying," and he
concluded: "the general level of the autochthonous race is being raised;
it is acquiring riches and self-respect, and must sooner or later get the
country back into its hands." (Pearson, op. cit., p. 60.)
Recent
visitors to the South American west coast note the signs of Indian unrest. Some
years ago Lord Bryce remarked of Bolivia: "There have been Indian risings,
and firearms are more Iargely in their hands than formerly. They so
preponderate in numbers that any movement which united them against the upper
class might, could they find a leader, have serious conse- quences."
(James Bryce, "South America," p. 181 (London, 1912).) Still more
recently Professor Ross wrote concerning Peru: "In Cuzco I met a gentleman
of education and travel who is said to be the only living lineal descendant of
the Incas. He has great influence with the native element and voices their
bitterness and their aspirations. He declares that the politics of Peru is a
struggle between the Spanish mestizos of Lima and the coast and the natives of
Cuzco and the interior, and predicts an uprising unless Cuzco is made the
capital of the nation. He even dreams of a Kechua republic, with Cuzco as its
capital and the United States its guarantor, as she is guarantor of the Cuban
republic." (Ross, op. cit., p. 74.) And of Bolivia, Professor Ross writes:
"Lately there has been a general movement of the Bolivian Indians for the
recovery of the lands of which they have been robbed piecemeal. Conflicts have
broken out and, although the government has punished the ringleaders, there is
a feeling that, so long as the exploiting of the Indian goes on, Bolivians are
living 'in the crater of a slumbering volcano.'" (Ross , p. 89.)
Since the
white man has gone and the Indian is preparing to wrest the sceptre of
authority from the mongrel's worthless hands, let us examine this Indian race,
to see what potentiality it possesses of restoring order and initiating
progress.
To begin
with, there can be no doubt that the Indian is superior to the negro. The
negro, even when quickened by foreign influences, never built up anything
approaching a real civilization; whereas the Indian, though entirely sundered
from the rest of mankind, evolved genuine polities and cultures like the Aztec
of Mexico, the Inca of Peru, and the Maya of Yucatan. The Indian thus possesses
creative capacity to an appreciabIe degree. However, that degree seems strictly
limited. The researches of archaeologists have sadly discounted the glowing
tales of the Conquistadores, and the "Empires" of Mexico and Peru,
though far from contemptible, certainly rank well below the achievements of European
and Asiatic races in mediaeval and even in classic times.
The Indian
possesses notable stability and poise, but the very intensity of these
qualities fetters his progress and renders questionable his ability to rise to
the modern plane. His conservatism is immense. With incredible tenacity he
clings to his ancestral ways and exhibits a dull indifference to alien
innovation. Of course the Indian sub-races differ considerably among
themselves, but the same fundamental tendencies are visible in all of them.
Says Professor Ellsworth Huntington: "The Indians are very backward. They
are dull of mind and slow to adopt new ideas. Perhaps in the future they will
change, but the fact that they have been influenced so little by four hundred
years of contact with the white man does not afford much ground for hope.
Judging from the past, there is no reason to think that their character is
likely to change for many generations. . .
Those who
dwell permanently in the white man's cities are influenced somewhat, but here
as in other cases the general tendency seems to be to revert to the original
condition as soon as the special impetus of immediate contact with the white
man is removed." (Ellsworth Huntington, "The Adaptability of the
White Man to Tropical America," Journal of Race Development, October,
1914.) And Lord Bryce writes in similar vein: " With plenty of stability,
they lack initiative. They make steady soldiers, and fight well under white or
mestizo leaders, but one seldom hears of a pure Indian accomplishing anything
or rising either through war or politics, or in any profession, above the level
of his class...." (Bryce, op. cit., p. 184.)
The truth
about the Indian seems to be substantially this: Left alone, he would probably
have continued to progress, albeit much more slowly than either white or
Asiatic peoples. But the Indian was not left alone. On the contrary, he was
suddenly felled by brutal and fanatical conquerors, who uprooted his native
culture and plunged him into abject servitude. The Indian's spiritual past was
shorn away and his evolution was perverted. Prevented from developing along his
own lines, and constitutionally incapable of adapting himself to the ways of
his Spanish conquerors, the Indian vegetated, learning nothing and forgetting
much that he knew. This has continued for four hundred years. Is it not likely
that his ancestral aptitudes have atrophied or decayed? Slavery and mental
sloth have indeed scarred him with their fell stigmata. Says Garcia-Calderon:
"Without sufficient food, without hygiene, a distracted and laborious
beast, he decays and perishes; to forget the misery of his daily lot he drinks,
becomes an alcoholic, and his numerous progeny present the characteristics of
degeneracy." (Garcia-Calderon, p. 354.)
Furthermore,
the Indian degenerates from another cause - mongrelization. Miscegenation is a
dual process. It works upward and downward at one and the same time. In Latin
America hybridization has been prodigious, the hybrids to-day numbering
millions. In some regions, as in Venezuela and parts of Central America, there
are very few full-blooded Indians left, hybrids forming practically the entire
population. Now, on the whole, the white or "mestizo" crossing seems
hurtful to the Indian, for what he gains in intelligence he more than loses in
character. But the mestizo crossing is not the worst. There is another, much
graver, racial danger. The hot coastlands swarm with negroes, and the zambo or
negro-Indian is universally adjudged the worst of matings. Thus, for the Indian,
white blood appears harmful, while black blood is absolutely fatal. Yet the
mongrelizing tide sweeps steadily on. The Indian draws no "color
Iine," and continually impairs the purity of his blood and the poise of
his heredity.
Bearing all
the above facts in mind, can we believe the Indian capable of drawing
mongrel-ruled America from its slough of despond ? Can he set it on the path of
orderly progress? It does not seem possible. Assuming for the sake of argument
complete freedom from foreign intervention, the Indian might in time displace
his mongrel rulers - provided he himself were not also mongrelized. But the
present "Indianista" movement is not a sign of Indian political
efficiency; not the harbinger of an Indian "renaissance." It is the
instinctive fuming of the harried beast on his tormentor. Maddened by the cruel
vagaries of mongrel rule and increasingly conscious of the mongrel's innate
worthlessness, the Indian at last bares his teeth. Under civilized white
tutelage the "Indianista" movement would have been practically
inconceivable.
However,
guesses as to the final outcome of an Indian-mongrel conflict are academic
speculation, because mongrel America will not be left to itself. Mongrel
America cannot stand alone. Indeed, it never has stood alone, for it has always
been bolstered up by the Monroe Doctrine. But for our protection, outside
forces would have long since rushed into this political and economic vacuum,
and every omen to-day denotes that this vacuum, like all others, will presently
be filled. A world close packed as never before will not tolerate countries
that are a torment to themselves and a dangerous nuisance to their neighbors. A
world half bankrupt will not allow vast sources of potential wealth to lie in
hands which idle or misuse. Thus it is practically certain that mongrel America
will presently pass under foreign tutelage. Exactly how, is not yet clear. It
may be done by the United States alone, or, what is more probable, in
"Pan-American" cooperation with the Iusty young white nations of the
antipodean south. It may be done by an even larger combination, including some
European states. After all, the details of such action do not lie within the
scope of this book, since they fall exclusively within the white man's sphere
of activity.
There is,
however, another dynamic which might transform mongrel America. This dynamic is
yellow Asia. The Far East teems with virile and laborious life. It thrills to
novel ambitions and desires. Avid with the urge of swarming myriads, it
hungrily seeks outlets for its superabundant vitality. We have already seen how
the Mongolian has earmarked the whole Far East for his own, and in subsequent
pages we shall see how he also beats restlessly against the white world's
race-frontiers. But mongrel America! What other field offers such tempting
possibilities for Mongolian race-expansion? Vast regions of incalculable,
unexploited wealth, sparsely inhabited by stagnant populations cursed with
anarchy and feeble from miscegenation - how could such lands resist the
onslaught of tenacious and indomitable millions? The answer is self-evident.
They could not resist; and such an invasion, once begun, would be consummated
with a celerity and thoroughness perhaps unexampled in human history.
Now the yellow
world is alive to this momentous possibility. Japan, in particular, has
glimpsed in Latin America precious avenues to that racial expansion which is
the key-note of Japanese foreign policy. For years Japanese statesmen and
publicists have busied themselves with the problem. The Chinese had, in fact,
already pointed the way, for during the later decades of the nineteenth century
Chinamen frequented Latin America's Pacific coast, economically vanquishing the
natives with ease, and settling in Peru in such numbers that the alarmed
Peruvians hastily stopped the inflow by drastic exclusion acts. The successes
of these Chinese pioneers, humble coolies entirely without official backing,
have fired the Japanese imagination. The Japanese press has long discussed Latin
America in optimistic vein. Count Okuma is a good exemplar of these Japanese
aspirations. Some years ago he told the American sociologist Professor Ross:
"South America, especially the northern part, will furnish ample room for
our surplus." (Ross, p. 90.) To his fellow countrymen Count Okuma was
still more specific. In 1907 he stated in the Tokio Economist that the Japanese
were to overspread the earth like a cloud of locusts, alighting on the North
American coasts, and swarming into Central and South America. Count Okuma
expressed a strong preference for Latin American countries as fields for
Japanese immigration, because most of them were "much easier to include
within the sphere of influence of Japan in the future." (The American
Review of Reviews, November, 1907, p. 622.)
And the
Japanese have supplemented words with deeds. Especially since 1914, Japanese
activity in Latin America has been ubiquitous and striking. The west coast of
South America, in particular, is to-day flooded with Japanese goods, merchants,
commercial missions, and financial agents seeking concessions of every kind.
Our State Department has had to exercise special vigilance concerning Japanese
concession-hunting in Mexico.
Japan's
present activity is of course mere reconnoitering - testings and mappings of
terrain for possible later action on a more extensive scale. One thing alone
gives Japan pause - our veto. Japan knows that real aggression against our
southern neighbors would spell war with the United States. Japan does not
contemplate war with us at present. She has many fish to fry in the Far East.
So in Latin America she plays safe. But she bides her time. In Latin America
itself she has friends - even partisans. Japan seeks to mobilize to her profit
that distrust of the "Yanqui" which permeates Latin America. The
half-castes, in particular, rage at our "color line" and see in the
United States the Nemesis of their anarchic misrule. They flout the Monroe
Doctrine, caress dreams of Japanese aid, and welcome Nippon's pose as the
champion of color throughout the world.
Japanese
activities in Mexico are of especial interest. Here Japan has three strong
strings to her bow:
1.patriotic
dislike of the United States;
2.mestizo
hatred of the white "gringo";
3.the
Indianista movement.
In Mexico
the past decade of revolutionary turmoil has developed into a complicated
race-war of the mestizos against the white or near-white upper class and of the
Indian full-bloods against both whites and mestizos. The one bond of union is
dislike of the gringo, which often rises to fanatical hatred. Our war against
Mexico in 1847 has never been forgotten, and many Mexicans cherish hopes of
revenge and even aspire to recover the territories then ceded to us. During the
early stages of the European War our military unpreparedness and apparent
pacifism actually emboldened some Mexican hotheads to concoct the notorious
"Plan of San Diego." The conspirators plotted to rouse the Mexican
population of our southern border, sow disaffection among our Southern negroes,
and explode the mine at the psychological moment by means of a
"Reconquering Equitable Army" invading Texas. Our whole Southwest was
to be rejoined to Mexico, while our Southern States were to form a black
republic. The projected war was conceived strictly in terms of race, the
reconquering equitable army to be composed solely of "Latins,"
negroes, and Japanese. The racial results were to be decisive, for the entire
white population of both our South and Southwest was to be pitilessly massacred.
Of course the plot completely miscarried, and sporadic attempts to invade Texas
during 1915 were easily repulsed.
Nevertheless,
this incident reveals the trend of many Mexican minds. The framers of the
"Plan of San Diego" were not ignorant peons, but persons of some
standing. The outrages and tortures inflicted upon numerous Americans in Mexico
during recent years are further indications of that wide-spread hatred which
expresses itself in vitriolic outbursts like the following editorial of a
Mexican provincial paper, written during our chase after the bandit Villa in
1916: "Above all, do not forget that at a time of national need, humanity
is a crime and frightfulness is a virtue. Pull out eyes, snatch out hearts,
tear open breasts, drink - if you can - the blood in the skulls of the invaders
from the cities of Yankeeland. In defense of liberty be a Nero, be a Caligula -
that is to be a good patriot. Peace between Mexico and the United States will
be closed in throes of terror and barbarism." (The newspaper was La
Reforma of Saltillo. The editorial was quoted in an Associated Press despatch
dated El Paso, Texas, June 26, 1916. The despatch mentions La Reforma as
"a semi-official paper.")
All this is
naturally grist for the Japanese mill. Especially interesting are Japanese
attempts to play upon Mexican Indianista sentiment. Japanese writers point out
physical and cultural similarities between the Mexican native races and
themselves, deducing therefrom innate racial affinities springing from the
remote and forgotten past. All possible sympathetic changes were rung during
the diplomatic mission of Senor de la Barra to Japan at the beginning of 1914.
His reception in Tokio was a memorable event. Senor de la Barra was greeted by
cheering multitudes, and on every occasion the manifold bonds between the two
peoples were emphasized. This of course occurred before the European War.
During the war Japanese-Mexican relations remained amicable. So far as official
evidence goes, the Japanese Government has never entered into any
understandings with the Mexican Government, though some Mexicans have hinted at
a secret agreement, and one Mexican writer, Gutierrez de Lara, asserts that in
1912 Francisco Madero, then President, "threw himself into the arms of
Japan," and goes on: "We are well aware of the importance of this
statement and of its tremendous international significance, but we make it
deliberately with full confidence in our authority. Not only did Madero enlist
the ardent support of the South American republics in the cause of Mexico's
inviolability, but he entered into negotiations with the Japanese minister in
Mexico City for a close offensive and defensive alliance with Japan to
checkmate United States aggression. When during the fateful twelve days' battle
in Mexico City a rumor of American intervention, more alarming than usual, was
communicated to Madero, he remarked coldly that he was thoroughly anxious for
that intervention, for he was confident of the surprise the American Government
would receive in discovering that they had to deal with Japan." [Gutierrez
de Lara, The Mexican People: Their Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1914)]
But, after
all, an official Japanese-Mexican understanding is not the fundamental issue.
The really significant thing is Mexican popular antagonism to the United
States, which is so wide-spread that Japan could in a crisis probably count on
Mexican benevolent neutrality if not on Mexican support. The present Carranza
government of Mexico is of course notoriously anti-American. Its consistent
policy, notably revealed in its complaisance toward Germany and its intrigues
with other anti-American regimes like those of Colombia and Venezuela, makes
Mexico the centre of anti-Americanism in Latin America. As for the numerous
Japanese residents in Mexico, they have lost no opportunity to abet this
attitude. Here, for instance, is the text of a manifesto signed by prominent
members of the Japanese colony during the American-Mexican crisis of 1916:
"Japanese: Mexico is a friendly nation. Our commercial bonds with her are
great. She is, like us, a nation of heroes who will never consent to the
world-domination of a hard and brutal race, as are the Yankees. We cannot
abandon Mexico in her struggle against a nation supposedly stronger. The Mexicans
know how to defend themselves, but there is lacking aid which we can furnish.
If the Yankees invade Mexico, if they seize the California coasts, Japanese
commerce and the Japanese navy will face a grave peril. The Yankees believe us
impotent because of the European War, and we will be expelled from American
soil and our children from American schools. We will aid the Mexicans. We will
aid Mexico against Yankee rapacity. This great and beautiful country is a
victim of Yankee hatred toward Japan. Our indifference would be a lack of
patriotism, since the Yankees already are against us and our divine Emperor.
They have seized Hawaii, they have seized the Philippine Islands, near our
coasts, and are now about to crush under foot our friend and possible ally, and
injure our commerce and imperil our naval power." (The Literary Digest,
September 16, 1916, p. 662.)
The fact is
that Latin America's attitude toward the yellow world tends everywhere to
crystallize along race lines. The half-castes, naturally hostile to the United
States, see in Japan a welcome offset to the "Colossus of the North."
The self-conscious Indianista elements likewise heed Japanese suggestions of
ethnic affinity. On the other hand, the whites and near-whites instinctively react
against Japanese advances. Even those who have no love for the Yankee see in
the Mongolian the greatest of perils. Garcia-Calderon typifies this point of
view. He dreads our imperialistic tendencies, yet he reproves those Latin
Americans who, in a Japanese-American clash, would favor Japan.
"Victorious," he writes, "the Japanese would invade Western
America and convert the Pacific into a vast closed sea, closed to foreign
ambitions, mare nostrum, peopled with Japanese colonies. The Japanese hegemony
would not be a mere change of tutelage for the nations of America. In spite of
essential differences, the Latins oversea have certain common ties with the
people of the (United) States: a long-established religion, Christianity, and a
coherent, European, Occidental civilization. Perhaps there is some obscure
fraternity between the Japanese and the American Indians, between the yellow
men of Nippon and the copper-colored Quechuas, a disciplined and sober people.
But the ruling race, the dominant type of Spanish origin, which imposes the
civilization of the white man upon America, is hostile to the entire invading
East." (Garcia-Calderon, pp. 329-330.)
White men
throughout Latin America generally echo these sentiments. Chile and Argentina
repulse Oriental immigration, and the white oligarchs of Peru dread keenly
Japanese designs directed so specifically against their country. Very recently
a Peruvian, Doctor Jorge M. Corbacho, (Despatch to La Prensa (New York),
December 13, 1919.) wrote most bitterly about the Japanese infiltration into
Peru and adjacent Bolivia, while some years ago Senor Augustin Edwards, owner
of the leading Chilean periodical, El Mercurio, denounced Count Okuma's menaces
and called for a Pan-American rampart against Asia from Behring Strait to Cape
Horn. "Japanese immigration," asserted Senor Edwards, "must be
firmly opposed, not only in South America, but in the whole American continent.
The same remark applies to Chinese immigration.... In short, these threats of
Okuma should induce the nations of South America to adopt the Monroe Doctrine -
an invincible weapon against the plans and intentions of that 'Empire of the
Orient,' which has so lately risen up to new life, and already manifests so
dire a greed of conquest." (The American Review of Reviews, November,
1907, p. 623.) From Central America similar voices arise. A Salvadorean writer
urges political federation with the United States as the sole refuge against
the "Yellow Peril," to avoid becoming "slaves and utterly
insignificant";(The Literary Digest, December 30, 1911, p. 1222.) and a
well-known Nicaraguan politician, Senor Moncada, [J. M. Moncada, Social and
Political Influences of the United States in Central America" (New York,
1911)] writes in similar vein.
The
momentous implications of Mongolian pressure upon Latin America are admirably
described by Professor Ross. "Provided that no barrier be interposed to
the inflow from man-stifled Asia," he says, "it is well within the
bounds of probability that by the close of this century South America will be
the home of twenty or thirty millions of Orientals and descendants of
Orientals.... But Asiatic immigration of such volume would change profoundly
the destiny of South America. For one thing, it would forestall and frustrate
that great immigration of Europeans which South American statesmen are counting
on to relieve their countries from mestizo unprogressiveness and misgovernment.
The white race would withhold its increase or look elsewhere for outlets; for
those with the higher standard of comfort always shun competition with those of
a lower standard. Again, large areas of South America might cease to be parts
of Christendom. Some of the republics there might come to be as dependent upon
Asiatic Powers as the Cuban republic is dependent upon the United States."
(Ross, pp. 91-92.)
Very
pertinent is Professor Ross's warning as to the fate of the Indian population -
a warning which Indianista believers in Japanese "affinity" should
seriously take to heart. Whatever might be the lot of the Latin American
whites, Professor Ross points out that "an Asiatic influx would seal the
doom of the Indian element in these countries.... The Indians could make no
effective economic stand against the wide-awake, resourceful, and aggressive
Japanese or Chinese. The Oriental immigrants could beat the Indians at every
point, block every path upward, and even turn them out of most of their present
employments. In great part the Indians would become a cringing sudra caste,
tilling the poorer lands and confined to the menial or repulsive occupations.
Filled with despair, and abandoning themselves even more than they do now to
pisco and coca, they would shrivel into a numerically negligible element in the
population." (Ross, PP. 92-93.)
Such are the
underlying factors in the Latin American situation. Once more we see the
essential instability of mere political phenomena. Once more we see the supreme
importance of race. No conquest could have been completer than that of the
Spaniards four centuries ago. The Indians were helpless as sheep before the
mail-clad Conquistadores. And military conquest was succeeded by complete
political domination. The Indian even lost his cultural heritage, and became a
passive tool in the hands of his white masters.
But the
Spaniard did not seal his title-deed with the indelible signet of race. Indian
blood remained numerically predominant, and the conqueror further weakened his
tenure by bringing in black blood - the most irreducible of ethnic factors. The
inflow of white blood was small, and much of what did come lost itself in the
dismal swamp of miscegenation. Lastly, the whites quarrelled among themselves.
The result
was inevitable. The colonial whites triumphed only by aid of the half-castes,
who promptly claimed their reward. A fresh struggle ensued, ending (save in the
antipodean regions) in the triumph of the half-castes. But these, in turn, had
called in the Indians and negroes. Furthermore, the half-castes recklessly
squandered the white political heritage. So the colored full-bloods stirred in
their turn, and a new movement began which, if allowed to run its natural
course, might result in complete de-Aryanization. In other words, the white
race has been going back, and Latin America has been getting more Indian and
negro for the past hundred years.
This cycle,
however, now nears its end. Latin America will be neither red nor black. It
will ultimately be either white or yellow. The Indian is patently unable to
construct a progressive civilization. As for the negro, he has proved as incapable
in the New World as in the Old. Everywhere his presence has spelled regression,
and his one New World field of triumph-- Haiti - has resulted in an abysmal
plunge to the jungle-level of Guinea and the Congo. Thus is created a political
vacuum. And this vacuum unerring nature makes ready to fill.
The Latin
American situation is, indeed, akin to that of Africa. Latin America, like
Africa, cannot stand alone. An inexorable dilemma impends: white or yellow. The
white man has been first in the field and holds the central colored zone
between two strong bases, north and south, where his tenure is the
unimpeachable title of race. The yellow man has to conquer every step, though
he has already acquired footholds and has behind him the welling reservoirs of
Asia. Nevertheless, white victory in Latin America is sure - if internecine
discord does not rob the white world of its strength. In Latin America, as in
Africa, therefore, the whites must stand fast - and stand together.