Lothrop Stoddard, A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard)
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY
(1922)
PART II -
The Ebbing Tide of White
CHAPTER VI:
THE WHITE FLOOD
The
world-wide expansion of the white race during the four centuries between 1500
and 1900 is the most prodigious phenomenon in all recorded history. In my
opening pages I sketched both the magnitude of this expansion and its ethnic
and political implications. I there showed that the white stocks together
constitute the most numerous single branch of the human species, nearly
one-third of all the human souls on earth to-day being whites. I also showed
that white men racially occupy four-tenths of the entire habitable land-area of
the globe, while nearly nine-tenths of this area is under white political
control. Such a situation is unprecedented. Never before has a race acquired
such combined preponderance of numbers and dominion.
This white
expansion becomes doubly interesting when we realize how sudden was its
inception and how rapid its evolution. A single decade before the voyage of
Columbus, he would have been a bold prophet who should have predicted this high
destiny. At the close of the fifteenth century the white race was confined to
western and central Europe, together with Scandinavia and the northwestern
parts of European Russia. The total white race-area was then not much aver
2,000,000 square miles - barely one-tenth its area to-day. And in numbers the
proportion was almost as unfavorable. At that moment (say, A. D. 1480) England
could muster only about 2,000,000 inhabitants, the entire population of the
British Isles not much exceeding 3,000,000 souls. To be sure, the continent was
relatively better peopled. Still, the population of Europe in 1480 was probably
not one-sixth that of 1914.
Furthermore,
population had dwindled notably in the preceding one hundred and fifty years.
During the fourteenth century Europe had been hideously scourged by the
"Black Death" (bubonic plague), which carried off fully one-half of
its inhabitants, while thereafter a series of great wars had destroyed immense
numbers of people. These losses had not been repaired. Mediaeval society was a
static, equilibrated affair, which did not favor rapid human multiplication. In
fact, European life had been intensive and recessive ever since the fall of the
Roman Empire a thousand years before. Europe's one mediaeval attempt at
expansion (the Crusades) had utterly failed. In fact, far from expanding, white
Europe had been continuously assailed by brown and yellow Asia. Beginning with
the Huns in the last days of Rome, continuing with the Arabs, and ending with
the Mongols and Ottoman Turks, Europe had undergone a millennium of Asiatic
aggression; and though Europe had substantially maintained its freedom, many of
its outlying marches had fallen under Asiatic domination. In 1480, for example,
the Turk was marching triumphantly across southeastern Europe, embryonic Russia
was a Tartar dependency, while the Moor still clung to southern Spain.
The outlook
for the white race at the cIose of the fifteenth century thus seemed gloomy
rather than bright. With a stationary or declining population, exposed to the
assaults of powerful external foes, and racked by internal pains betokening the
demise of the mediaeval order, white Europe's future appeared a far from happy
one.
Suddenly, in
two short years, all was changed. In 1492 Columbus discovered America, and in
1494 Vasco da Gama, doubling Africa, found the way to India. The effect of
these discoveries cannot be overestimated. We can hardly conceive how our
mediaeval forefathers viewed the ocean. To them the ocean was a numbing,
constricting presence; the abode of darkness and horror. No wonder mediaeval
Europe was static, since it faced on ruthless, aggressive Asia, and backed on
nowhere. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, dead-end Europe became mistress of
the ocean - and thereby mistress of the world.
No such
strategical opportunity had, in fact, ever been vouchsafed. From classic times
down to the end of the fifteenth century, white Europe had confronted only the
most martial and enterprising of Asiatics. With such peoples war and trade had
alike to be conducted on practically equal terms, and by frontal assault no
decisive victory could be won. But, after the great discoveries, the white man
could flank his old opponents. Whole new worlds peopled by primitive races were
unmasked, where the white man's weapons made victory certain, and whence he
could draw stores of wealth to quicken his home life and initiate a progress
that would soon place him immeasurably above his once-dreaded assailants.
And the
white man proved worthy of his opportunity. His inherent racial aptitudes had
been stimulated by his past. The hard conditions of mediaeval life had
disciplined him to adversity and had weeded him by natural selection. The
hammer of Asiatic invasion, clanging for a thousand years on the brown-yellow
anvil, had tempered the iron of Europe into the finest steel. The white man
could think, could create, could fight superlatively well. No wonder that
redskins and negroes feared and adored him as a god, while the somnolent races
of the Farther East, stunned by this strange apparition rising from the
pathless ocean, offered no effective opposition.
Thus began
the swarming of the whites, like bees from the hive, to the uttermost ends of
the earth. And, in return, Europe was quickened to intenser vitality. Goods,
tools, ideas, men: all were produced at an unprecedented rate. So, by action
and reaction, white progress grew by 1eaps and bounds. The Spanish and
Portuguese pioneers presently showed signs of lassitude, but the northern
nations - even more vigorous and audacious - instantly sprang to the front and
carried forward the proud oriflamme of white expansion and world-dominion. For
four hundred years the pace never slackened, and at the close of the nineteenth
century the white man stood the indubitable master of the world.
Now four
hundred years of unbroken triumph naturally bred in the white race an
instinctive belief that its expansion would continue indefinitely, leading
automatically to ever higher and more splendid destinies. Before the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904 the thought that white expansion could be stayed,
much less reversed, never entered the head of one white man in a thousand. Why
should it, since centuries of experience had taught the exact contrary? The settlement
of America, Australasia, and Siberia, where the few colored aborigines vanished
like smoke before the white advance; the conquest of brown Asia and the
partition of Africa, where colored millions bowed with only sporadic resistance
to mere handfuls of whites; both sets of phenomena combined to persuade the
white man that he was invincible, and that the colored types would everywhere
give way before him and his civilization. The continued existence of dense
colored populations in the tropics was ascribed to climate; and even in the
tropics it was assumed that whites would universally form a governing caste,
directing by virtue of higher intelligence and more resolute will, and
exploiting natural resources to the incalculable profit of the whole white
race. Indeed, some persons believed that the tropics would become available for
white settlement as soon as science had mastered tropical diseases and had
prescribed an adequate hygiene.
This
uncritical optimism, suggested by experience, was fortified by ill-assimilated
knowledge. During the closing decades of the past century, not only were
biology and economics less advanced than to-day, but they were also infinitely
less widely understood, exact knowledge being confined to academic circles. The
general public had only a vulgarized smattering, mostly crystallizing about
catchwords into which men read their prepossessions and their prejudices. For
instance: biologists had recently formulated the law of the "Survival of
the Fittest." This sounded very well. Accordingly, the public, in
conformity with the prevailing optimism, promptly interpreted
"fittest" as synonymous with "best," in utter disregard of
the grim truth that by "fittest" nature denotes only the type best
adapted to existing conditions of environment, and that if the environment
favors a low type, this low type (unless humanly prevented) will win,
regardless of all other considerations. So again with economics. A generation
ago relatively few persons realized that low-standard men would drive out high
standard men as inevitably as bad money drives out good, no matter what the
results to society and the future of mankind. These are but two instances of
that shallow, cock-sure nineteenth-century optimism, based upon ignorance and
destined to be so swiftly and tragically disillusioned.
However, for
the moment, ignorance was bliss. Accordingly, the fin de siecle white world,
having partitioned Africa and fairly well dominated brown Asia, prepared to
extend its sway over the one portion of the colored world which had hitherto
escaped subjection - the yellow Far East. Men began speaking glibly of
"manifest destiny" or piously of "the white man's burden."
European publicists wrote didactically on "the break-up of China,"
while Russia, bestriding Siberia, dipped behemoth paws in Pacific waters and
eyed Japan.
Such was the
white world's confident, aggressive temper at the close of the last century. To
be sure, voices were occasionally raised warning that all was not well. Such
were the writings of Professor Pearson and Meredith Townsend. But the white
world gave these Cassandras the reception always accorded prophets of evil in
joyous times - it ignored them or laughed them to scorn. In fact, few of the
prophets displayed Pearson's immediate certainty. Most of them qualified their
prophecies with the comforting assurance that the ills predicted were
relatively remote.
Meredith
Townsend is a good case in point. The reader may recall his prophecy of white
expulsion from Asia, quoted in my second chapter. (p. 22.) That prophecy occurs
in the preface to the fourth edition, published in 1911, and written in the
light of the Russo-Japanese War. Now, of course, Mr. Townsend's main thesis -
Europe's inability permanently to master and assimilate Asia - had been
elaborated by him long before the close of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, the preface to the fourth edition speaks of Europe's failure to
conquer Asia as absolute and eviction from present holdings as probable within
a relatively short time; whereas, in his original introduction, written in
1899, he foresaw a great European assault upon Asia, which would probably
succeed and from which Asia would shake itself free only after the lapse of
more than a century.
In fact, Mr.
Townsend's words of 1899 so exactly portray white confidence at that moment
that I cannot do better than quote him. His object in publishing his book is,
he says, "to make Asia stand out clearer in English eyes, because it is
evident to me that the white races under the pressure of an entirely new
impulse are about to renew their periodic attempt to conquer or at least to
dominate that vast continent.... So grand is the prize that failures will not
daunt the Europeans, still less alter their conviction. If these movements
follow historic lines they will recur for a time upon a constantly ascending
scale, each repulse eliciting a greater effort, until at last Asia like Africa
is 'partitioned,' that is, each section is left at the disposal of some white
people. If Europe can avoid internal war, or war with a much-aggrandized
America, she will by A. D. 2000 be mistress in Asia, and at liberty, as her
people think, to enjoy." (Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 1-4) If the
reader will compare these lines with Mr. Townsend's 1911 judgment, he will get
a good idea of the momentous change wrought in white minds by Asia's awakening
during the first decade of the twentieth century as typified by the
Russo-Japanese War.
1900 was,
indeed, the high-water mark of the white tide which had been flooding for four
hundred years. At that moment the white man stood on the pinnacle of his
prestige and power. Pass four short years, and the flash of the Japanese guns
across the murky waters of Port Arthur harbor revealed to a startled world -
the beginning of the ebb.
CHAPTER VII:
THE BEGINNING OF THE EBB
THE
Russo-Japanese War is one of those landmarks in human history whose
significance increases with the lapse of time. That war was momentous, not only
for what it did, but even more for what it revealed. The legend of white
invincibility was shattered, the veil of prestige that draped white
civilization was torn aside, and the white world's manifold ills were laid bare
for candid examination.
Of course
previous blindness to the trend of things had not been universal. The white
world had had its Cassandras, while keen-sighted Asiatics had discerned
symptoms of white weakness. Nevertheless, so imposing was the white world's
aspect and so unbroken its triumphant progress that these seers had been a
small and discredited minority. The mass of mankind, white and non-white alike,
remained oblivious to signs of change.
This, after
all, was but natural. Not only had the white advance been continuous, but its
tempo had been ever increasing. The nineteenth century, in particular,
witnessed an unprecedented outburst of white activity. We have already surveyed
white territorial gains, both as to area of settlement and sphere of political
control. But along many other lines white expansion was equally remarkable.
White race-increase - the basis of all else - was truly phenomenal. In the year
1500 the white race (then confined to Europe) could not have numbered more than
70,000,000. In 1800 the population of Europe was 150,000,000, while the whites
living outside Europe numbered over 10,000,000. The white race had thus a
trifle more than doubled its numbers in three centuries. But in the year 1900
the population of Europe was nearly 450,000,000, while the extra European
whites numbered fully 100,000,000. Thus the whites had increased threefold in
the European homeland, while in the new areas of settlement outside Europe they
had increased tenfold. The total number of whites at the end of the nineteenth
century was thus nearly 550,000,000 - a gain in numbers of almost 400,000,000,
or over 400 per cent. This spelled an increase six times as great as that of
the preceding three centuries.
White
race-growth is most strikingly exemplified by the increase of its most
expansive and successful branch - the Anglo-Saxons. In 1480, as already seen,
the population of England proper was not much over 2,000,000. Of course this
figure was abnormally low even for mediaeval times, it being due to the
terrible vital losses of the Wars of the Roses, then drawing to a close. A century
later, under Elizabeth, the population of England had risen to 4,000,000. In
1900 the population of England was 31,000,000, and in 1910 it was 35,000,000,
the population of the British Isles at the latter date being 45,500,000. But in
the intervening centuries British blood had migrated to the ends of the earth,
so that the total number of Anglo-Saxons in the world to-day cannot be much
less than 100,000,000. This figure includes Scotch and Scotch Irish strains
(which are of course identical with English in the Anglo-Saxon sense), and
adopts the current estimate that some 50,000,000 of people in the United States
are predominantly of Anglo-Saxon origin. Thus, in four centuries, the
Anglo-Saxons multiplied between forty and fifty fold.
The
prodigious increase of the white race during the nineteenth century was due not
only to territorial expansion but even more to those astounding triumphs of
science and invention which gave the race unprecedented mastery over the
resources of nature. This material advance is usually known as the
"industrial revolution." The industrial revolution began in the later
decades of the eighteenth century, but it matured during the first half of the
nineteenth century, when it swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things.
This
transformation was, indeed, absolutely unprecedented in the world's history.
Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the
exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since
very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was
merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the
wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark
before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon
the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed. Steam,
electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature's hidden powers,
conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human
hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in
kind from that of previous generations.
When I say
"Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the
white man. It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this, and it
was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two outstanding
features of the new order were the rise of machine industry with its
incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative development
of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favored a prodigious
increase in population, particularly in Europe, since Europe became the
workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was
transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of industry,
gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest
corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new
fabrication and exchange. The amount of wealth amassed by the white world in general
and by Europe in particular since the beginning of the nineteenth century is
simply incalculable. Some faint conception of it can be gathered from the
growth of world-trade. In the year 1818 the entire volume of international
commerce was valued at only $2,000,000,000. In other words, after countless
millenniums of human life upon our globe, man had been able to produce only
that relatively modest volume of world-exchange. In 1850 the volume of
world-trade had grown to $4,000,000,000. In 1900 it had increased to
$20,000,000,000, and in 1913 it swelled to the inconceivable total of
$40,000,000,000-a twentyfold increase in a short hundred years.
Such were
the splendid achievements of nineteenth century civilization. But there was a
seamy side to this cloth of gold. The vices of our age have been portrayed by a
thousand censorious pens, and there is no need here to recapitulate them. They
can mostly be summed up by the word "Materialism." That absorption in
material questions and neglect of idealistic values which characterized the
nineteenth century has been variously accounted for. But, after all, was it not
primarily due to the profound disturbance caused by drastic environmental
change? Civilized man had just entered a new material world, differing not
merely in degree but in kind from that of his ancestors. It is a scientific
truism that every living organism, in order to survive, must adapt itself to
its environment. Therefore any change of environment must evoke an immediate
readjustment on the part of the organism, and the more pronounced the
environmental change, the more rapid and thoroughgoing the organic readjustment
must be. Above all, speed is essential. Nature brooks no delay, and the
disharmonic organism must attune itself or perish.
Now, is not
readaptation precisely the problem with which civilized man has been
increasingly confronted for the past hundred years? No one surely can deny that
our present environment differs vastly from that of our ancestors. But if this
be so, the necessity for profound and rapid adaptation becomes equally true. In
fact, the race has instinctively sensed this necessity, and has bent its best
energies to the task, particularly on the materialistic side. That was only
natural. The pioneer's preoccupation with material matters in opening up new
country is self-evident, but what is not so generally recognized is the fact
that nineteenth-century Europe and the eastern United States are in many
respects environmentally "newer" than remote backwoods settlements.
Of course
the changed character of our civilization called for idealistic adaptations no
less sweeping. These were neglected, because their necessity was not so
compellingly patent. Indeed, man was distinctly attached to his existing
idealistic outfit, to the elaboration of which he had so assiduously devoted
himself in former days, and which had fairly served the requirements of his
simpler past. Therefore nineteenth century man concentrated intensively,
exclusively upon materialistic problems, feeling that he could thus concentrate
because he believed that the idealistic conquests of preceding epochs had given
him sound moral bases upon which to build the new material edifice.
Unfortunately,
that which had at first been merely a means to an end presently became an end
in itself.
Losing sight
of his idealisms, nineteenth-century man evolved a thoroughly materialistic
philosophy. The upshot was a warped, one-sided development which quickly
revealed its unsoundness. The fact that man was much less culpable for his
errors than many moralists aver is quite beside the point, so far as
consequences are concerned. Nature takes no excuses. She demands results, and
when these are not forthcoming she inexorably inflicts her penalties.
As the
nineteenth century drew toward its close the symptoms of a profound malaise
appeared on every side. Even those most fundamental of all factors, the
vitality and quality of the race, were not immune. Vital statistics began to
display features highly disquieting to thoughtful minds. The most striking of
these phenomena was the declining birth-rate which affected nearly all the
white nations toward the close of the nineteenth century and which in France
resulted in a virtually stationary population.
Of course
the mere fact of a lessened birth-rate, taken by itself, is not the unmixed
evil which many persons assume. Man's potential reproductive capacity, like
that of all other species, is very great. In fact, the whole course of
biological progress has been marked by a steady checking of that reproductive
exuberance which ran riot at the beginning of life on earth. As Havelock Ellis
well says: "Of one minute organism it is estimated that, if its
reproduction were not checked by death or destruction, in thirty days it would
form a mass a million times larger than the sun.
The
conger-eel lays 15,000,000 eggs, and if they all grew up, and reproduced
themselves on the same scale, in two years the whole sea would become a
wriggling mass of fish. As we approach the higher forms of life reproduction
gradually dies down. The animals nearest to man produce few offspring, but they
surround them with parental care, until they are able to lead independent lives
with a fair chance of surviving. The whole process may be regarded as a
mechanism for slowly subordinating quantity to quality, and so promoting the
evolution of life to ever higher stages." [Havelock Ellis, Essays in
War-Time, p. 198, American Edition, Boston, 1917]
While man's
reproductive power is slight from the standpoint of bacteria and conger-eels,
it is yet far from negligible, as is shown by the birth-rate of the
less-advanced human types at all times, and by the birth-rate of the higher
types under exceptionally favorable circumstances. The nineteenth century was
one of these favorable occasions. In the new areas of settlement outside
Europe, vast regions practically untenanted by colored competitors invited the
white colonists to increase and multiply; while Europe itself, though
historically "old country," was so transformed environmentally by the
industrial revolution that it suddenly became capable of supporting a much
larger population than heretofore. By the close of the century, however, the
most pressing economic stimuli to rapid multiplication had waned in Europe and
in many of the race dependencies.
Therefore
the rate of increase, even under the most favorable biological circumstances,
should have shown a decline.
The trouble
was that this diminishing human output was of less and less biological value.
Wherever one looked in the white world, it was precisely those peoples of
highest genetic worth whose birth-rate fell off most sharply, while within the
ranks of the several peoples it was those social classes containing the highest
proportion of able strains which were contributing the smallest quotas to the
population. Everywhere the better types (on which the future of the race
depends) were numerically stationary or dwindling, while conversely, the lower
types were gaining ground, their birth-rate showing relatively slight
diminution.
This
"dysgenic" trend, so ominous for the future of the race, is a
melancholy commonplace of our time, and many efforts have been made to measure
its progress in economic or social terms. One of the most striking and easily
measured examples, however, is furnished by the category of race. As explained
in the Introduction, the white race divides into three main sub-species - the
Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. All three are good stocks,
ranking in genetic worth well above the various colored races. However, there
seems to be no question that the Nordic is far and away the most valuable type;
standing, indeed, at the head of the whole human genus. As Madison Grant well
expresses it, the Nordic is "The Great Race."
Now it is
the Nordics who are most affected by the dysgenic aspects of our civilization.
In the newer areas of white settlement like our Pacific coast or the Canadian
Northwest, to be sure, the Nordics even now thrive and multiply. But in all
those regions which typify the transformation of the industrial revolution, the
Nordics do not fit into the altered environment as well as either Alpines or
Mediterraneans, and hence tend to disappear. Before the industrial revolution
the Nordic's chief eliminator was war. His pre-eminent fighting ability,
together with the position of leadership which he had generally acquired, threw
on his shoulders the brunt of battle and exposed him to the greatest losses,
whereas the more stolid Alpine and the less robust Mediterranean stayed at home
and reproduced their kind. The chronic turmoil of both the mediaeval and modern
periods imposed a perpetual drain on the Nordic stock, while the era of
discovery and colonization which began with the sixteenth century further
depleted the Nordic ranks in Europe, since it was adventurous Nordics who
formed the overwhelming majority of explorers and pioneers to new lands. Thus,
even at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was much less Nordic than it
had been a thousand years before.
Nevertheless,
down to the close of the eighteenth century, the Nordics suffered from no other
notable handicaps than war and migration, and even enjoyed some marked
advantages. Being a high type, the Nordic is naturally a "high
standard" man. He requires healthful living conditions, and quickly pines
when deprived of good food, fresh air, and exercise. Down to the close of the
eighteenth century, Europe was predominantly agricultural. In cool northern and
central Europe, therefore, environment actually favored the big, blond Nordics,
especially as against the slighter, less muscular Mediterranean; while in the
hotter south the Nordic upper class, being the rulers, were protected from
field labor, and thus survived as an aristocracy. In peaceful times, therefore,
the Nordics multiplied and repaired the gaps wrought by proscription and war.
The
industrial revolution, however, profoundly modified this state of things.
Europe was transformed from an agricultural to an urbanized, industrial area.
Numberless cities and manufacturing centres grew up, where men were close
packed and were subjected to all the evils of congested living. Of course such
conditions are not ideal for any stock. NevertheIess, the Nordic suffered more
than any one else. The cramped factory and the crowded city weeded out the big,
blond Nordic with portentous rapidity, whereas the little brunet Mediterranean,
in particular, adapted himself to the operative's bench or the clerk's stool,
prospered - and reproduced his kind.
The result
of these new handicaps, combined with the continuance of the traditional
handicaps (war and migration), has been a startling decrease of Nordics all
over Europe throughout the nineteenth century, with a corresponding resurgence
of the Alpine, and still more of the Mediterranean, elements. In the United
States it has been the same story. Our country, originally settled almost
exclusively by Nordics, was toward the close of the nineteenth century invaded
by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic
elements like Levantines and Jews. As a result, the Nordic native American has
been crowded out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens, and
after two short generations he has in many of our urban areas become almost
extinct.
The racial
displacements induced by a changed economic or social environment are, indeed,
almost incalculable. Contrary to the popular belief, nothing is more unstable
than the ethnic make-up of a people. Above all, there is no more absurd fallacy
than the shibboleth of the "melting-pot." As a matter of fact, the
melting-pot may mix but does not melt. Each race-type, formed ages ago, and
"set" by millenniums of isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly
persistent entity. Each type possesses a special set of characters: not merely
the physical characters visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual, and
spiritual characters as well. All these characters are transmitted
substantially unchanged from generation to generation. To be sure, where
members of the same race-stock intermarry (as English and Swedish Nordics, or
French and British Mediterraneans), there seems to be genuine amalgamation. In
most other cases, however, the result is not a blend but a mechanical mixture.
Where the parent stocks are very diverse, as in matings between whites,
negroes, and Amerindians, the offspring is a mongreI - a walking chaos, so
consumed by his jarring heredities that he is quite worthless. We have already
viewed the mongrel and his works in Latin America.
Such are the
two extremes. Where intermarriage takes place between stocks relatively near
together, as in crossings between the main divisions of the white species, the
result may not be bad, and is sometimes distinctly good. Nevertheless, there is
no true amalgamation. The different race-characters remain distinct in the
mixed offspring. If the race-types have generally intermarried, the country is
really occupied by two or more races, the races always tending to sort
themselves out again as pure types by Mendelian inheritance. Now one of these
race-types will be favored by the environment, and it will accordingly tend to
gain at the other's expense, while conversely the other types will tend to be
bred out and to disappear. Sometimes a modification of the environment through
social changes will suddenly reverse this process and will penalize a hitherto
favored type. We then witness a "resurgence," or increase, of the
previously submerged element.
A striking
instance of this is going on in England. England is inhabited by two
race-stocks - Nordics and Mediterraneans. Down to the eighteenth century,
England, being an agricultural country with a cool climate, favored the
Nordics, and but for the Nordic handicaps of war and migration the
Mediterraneans might have been entirely eliminated. Two hundred years ago the
Mediterranean element in England was probably very small. The industrial
revolution, however, reversed the selective process, and today the small, dark
types in England increase noticeably with every generation. The swart
"cockney" is a resurgence of the primitive Mediterranean stock, and
is probably a faithful replica of his ancestors of Neolithic times.
Such was the
ominous "seamy side" of nineteenth-century civilization. The
regressive trend was, in fact, a vicious circle. An ill-balanced, faulty
environment penalized the superior strains and favored the inferior types;
while, conversely, the impoverishing race-stocks, drained of their geniuses and
overloading with dullards and degenerates, were increasingly unable to evolve
environmental remedies.
Thus, by
action and reaction, the situation grew steadily worse, disclosing its parlous
state by numberless symptoms of social ill-health. All the unlovely fin de
siecle phenomena, such as the decay of ideals, rampant materialism, political
disruption, social unrest, and the "decadence" of art and literature,
were merely manifestations of the same basic ills.
Of course a
thoughtful minority, undazzled by the prevalent optimism, pointed out evils and
suggested remedies. Unfortunately these "remedies" were superficial,
because the reformers confused manifestations with causes and combated symptoms
instead of fighting the disease. For example: the white world's troubles were
widely ascribed to the loss of its traditional ideals, especially the decay of
religious faith. But, as the Belgian sociologist Rene Gerard acutely remarks,
"to reason in this manner is, we think, to mistake the effect for the
cause. To believe that philosophic and religious doctrines create morals and
civilizations is a seductive error, but a fatal one. To transplant the beliefs
and the institutions of a people to new regions in the hope of transplanting
thither their virtues and their civilization as well is the vainest of
follies.... The greater or less degree of vigor in a people depends on the
power of its vital instinct, of its greater or less faculty for adapting itself
to and dominating the conditions of the moment. When the vital instinct of a
people is healthy, it readily suggests to the people the religious and moral
doctrines which assure its survival. It is not, therefore, because a people
possesses a definite belief that it is healthy and vigorous, but rather because
the people is healthy and vigorous that it adopts or invents the belief which
is useful to itself. In this way, it is not because it ceases to believe that
it falls into decay, it is because it is in decay that it abandons the fertile
dream of its ancestors without replacing this by a new dream, equally
fortifying and creative of energy." (Rene Gerard, "Civilization in
Danger," The Hibbert Journal, January, 1912.)
Thus we
return once more to the basic principle of race. For what is "vital
instinct" but the imperious urge of superior heredity? As Madison Grant
well says: " The lesson is always the same, namely, that race is
everything. Without race there can be nothing except the slave wearing his
master's clothes, stealing his master's proud name, adopting his master's
tongue, and living in the crumbling ruins of his master's palace." (Grant,
op. cit., p. 100.)
The
disastrous consequences of failure to realize this basic truth is nowhere more
strikingly exemplified than in the field of white world-politics during the
half-century preceding the Great War. That period was dominated by two
antithetical schools of political thinking: national-imperialism and
internationalism. Swayed by the ill-balanced spirit of the times, both schools
developed extremist tendencies; the former producing such monstrous aberrations
as Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, the latter evolving almost equally vicious
concepts like cosmopolitanism and proletarianism. The adherents of these rival
schools combated one another and wrangled among themselves. They both
disregarded the basic significance of race, together with its immediate
corollary, the essential solidarity of the white world.
As a matter
of fact, white solidarity has been one of the great constants of history. For
ages the white peoples have possessed a true "symbiosis" or common
life, ceaselessly mingling their bloods and exchanging their ideas.
Accordingly, the various white nations which are the race's political
expression may be regarded as so many planets gravitating about the sun of a
common civilization. No such sustained and intimate race-solidarity has ever
before been recorded in human annals. Not even the solidarity of the yellow
peoples is comparable in scope.
Of course
the white world's internal frictions have been legion, and at certain times
these frictions have become so acute that white men have been led to disregard
or even to deny their fundamental unity. This is perhaps also because white
solidarity is so pervasive that we live in it, and thus ordinarily do not
perceive it any more than we do the air we breathe. Should white men ever
really lose their instinct of race-solidarity, they would asphyxiate racially
as swiftly and surely as they would asphyxiate physically if the atmospheric
oxygen should suddenly be withdrawn. However, down to 1914 at least, the white
world never came within measurable distance of this fatal possibility. On the
contrary, the white peoples were continually expressing their fundamental
solidarity by various unifying concepts like the "Pax Romana" of
antiquity, the "Civitas Dei" or Christian commonwealth of the Middle
Ages, and the "European Concert" of nineteenth-century diplomacy.
It was
typical of the malaise which was overtaking the white world that the close of
the nineteenth century should have witnessed an ominous ignoring of white
solidarity; that national-imperialists should have breathed mutual slaughter
while internationalists caressed visions of " human solidarity "
culminating in universal race-amalgamation; lastly, that Asia's incipient
revolt against white supremacy, typified by the Russo-Japanese War, should have
found zealous white sponsors and abetters.
Nothing,
indeed, better illustrates the white world's unsoundness at the beginning of
the present century than its reaction to the Russo-Japanese conflict. The
tremendous significance of that event was no more lost upon the whites than it
was upon the colored peoples. Most far-seeing white men recognized it as an
omen of evil import for their race-future. And yet, even in the first access of
apprehension, these same persons generally admitted that they saw no prospect
of healing, constructive action to remedy the ills which were driving the white
world along the downward path. Analyzing the possibility of Europe's presenting
a common front to the perils disclosed by the Japanese victories, the French
publicist Rene Pinon sadly concluded in the negative, believing that political
passions, social hates, and national rivalries would speak louder than the
general interest. "Contemporary Europe," he wrote, in 1905, "is
probably not ready to receive and understand the lesson of the war. What are
the examples of history to those gigantic commercial houses, uneasy for their
New Year's balances, which are our modern nations? It is in the nature of
States founded on mercantilism to content themselves with a hand-to-mouth
policy, without general views or idealism, satisfied with immediate gains and
unable to prepare against a distant future.
"Whence,
in the Europe of to-day, could come the principle of an entente, and on what
could it be based? Too many divergent interests, too many rival ambitions, too
many festering hates, too many 'dead who speak,' are present to stifle the
voice of Europe's conscience.
"However
menacing the external danger, we fear that political rancors would not down;
that the enemy from without would find accomplices, or at least unconscious
auxiliaries, within. Far more than in its regiments and battleships, the power
of Japan lies in our discords, in the absence of an ideal capable of lifting
the European peoples above the daily pursuit of immediate interests, capable of
stirring their hearts with the thrill of a common emotion. The true 'Yellow
Peril' lies within us." (Rene Pinon, "La Lutte pour le
Pacifique," pp. 184-185.)
Rene Pinon
was a true prophet. Not only was the "writing on the wall" not taken
to heart, the decade following the Russo-Japanese conflict witnessed a
prodigious aggravation of all the ills which had afflicted white civilization
during the nineteenth century. As if scourged by a tragic fate, the white world
hurtled along the downward path, until it entered the fell shadow of - the
modern Peloponnesian War.
CHAPTER
VIII: THE MODERN PELOPONNESIAN WAR
The
Peloponnesian War was the suicide of Greek civilization. It is the saddest page
of history. In the brief Periclean epoch preceding the catastrophe Hellas had
shone forth with unparalleled splendor, and even those wonderful achievements
seemed but the prelude to still loftier heights of glory. On the eve of its
self-immolation the Greek race, far from being exhausted, was bubbling over
with exuberant vitality and creative genius.
But the
half-blown rose was nipped by the canker of discord. Jealous rivalries and mad
ambitions smouldered till they burst into a consuming flame. For a generation
Hellas tore itself to pieces in a delirium of fratricidal strife. And even this
was not the worst. The "peace" which closed the Peloponnesian War was
no peace. It was a mere truce, dictated by the victors of the moment to sullen
and vengeful enemies. Imposed by the sword and infused with no healing or
constructive virtue, the Peloponnesian War was but the first of a war cycle
which completed Hellas's ruin.
The
irreparable disaster had, indeed, occurred: the gulfs of sundering hatred had
become fixed, and the sentiment of Greek race-unity was destroyed. Having lost
its soul, the Greek race soon lost its body as well.
Drained of
its best strains, the diminished remnant bowed to foreign masters and
bastardized its blood with the hordes of inferior aliens who swarmed into the
land. By the time of the Roman conquest the Greeks were degenerate, and the
Roman epithet "Graeculus" was a term of deserved contempt.
Thus
perished the Greeks - the fairest slip that ever budded on the tree of life.
They perished by their own hands, in the flower of their youth, carrying with
them to the grave, unborn, potencies which might have blessed and brightened
the world for ages. Nature is inexorable. No living being stands above her law;
and protozon or demigod, if they transgress, alike must die.
The Greek
tragedy should be a warning to our own day. Despite many unlikenesses, the
nineteenth century was strangely reminiscent of the Periclean age. In creative
energy and fecund achievement, surely, its like had not been seen since
"the glory that was Greece," and the way seemed opening to yet higher
destinies.
But the
brilliant sunrise was presently dimmed by gathering clouds. The birth of the
twentieth century was attended with disquieting omens. The ills which had
afflicted the preceding epoch grew more acute, synchronizing into an
all-pervading, militant unrest. The spirit of change was in the air. Ancient
ideals and shibboleths withered before the fiery breath of a destructive
criticism, while the solid crust of tradition cracked and heaved under the
premonitory tremors of volcanic forces working far below. Everywhere were seen
bursting forth increasingly acute eruptions of human energy: a triumph of the
dynamic over the static elements of life; a growing preference for violent and
revolutionary, as contrasted with peaceful and evolutionary, solutions, running
the whole politico-social gamut from "Imperialism" to
"Syndicalism." Everywhere could be discerned the spirit of unrest
setting the stage for the great catastrophe.
Grave
disorders were simply inevitable. They might perhaps have been localized. They
might even have taken other forms. But the ills of our civilization were too
deep-seated to have avoided grave disturbances. The Prussian plotters of
"Weltmacht" did, indeed, precipitate the impending crisis in its most
virulent and concentrated form, yet after all they were but sublimations of the
abnormal trend of the times.
The best
proof of this is the white world's acutely pathological condition during the
entire decade previous to the Great War. That fierce quest after alliances and
mad piling-up of armaments; those paroxysmal "crises" which racked
diplomacy's feverish frame; those ferocious struggles which desolated the
Balkans: what were all these but symptoms denoting a consuming disease? To-day,
by contrast, we think of the Great War as having smitten a world basking in
profound peace. What a delusion! Cast back the mind's eye, and recall how
hectic was the eve of the Great War, not merely in politics but in most other
fields as well. Those opening months of 1914! Why, Europe seethed from end to
end! When the Great War began, England was on the verge of civil strife, Russia
was in the throes of an acute social revolt, Italy had just passed through a
"red week" threatening anarchy, and every European country was
suffering from grave internal disorders. It was a strange, nightmarish time,
that early summer of 1914, to-day quite overshadowed by subsequent events, but
which later generations will assign a proper place in the chain of
world-history.
Well,
Armageddon began and ran its horrid course. With the grim chronology of those
dreary years this book is not concerned. It is with the aftermath that we here
deal. And that is a sufficiently gloomy theme. The material losses are
prodigious, the vital losses appalling, while the spiritual losses have
well-nigh bankrupted the human soul.
Turning
first to the material losses, they are of course in the broadest sense
incalculable, but approximate estimates have been made. Perhaps the best of
them is the analysis made by Professor Ernest L. Bogert, who places the direct
costs of the war at $186,000,000,000 and the indirect costs at
$151,000,000,000, thus arriving at the stupendous total of $337,000,000,000.
These well-nigh inconceivable estimates still do not adequately represent the
total losses, figured even in monetary terms, for, as Professor Bogert remarks:
"The
figures presented in this summary are both incomprehensible and appalling, yet
even these do not take into account the effect of the war on life, human
vitality, economic well-being, ethics, morality, or other phases of human
relationships and activities which have been disorganized and injured. It is
evident from the present disturbances in Europe that the real costs of the war
cannot be measured by the direct money outlays of the belligerents during the
five years of its duration, but that the very breakdown of modern economic
society might be the price exacted."
Yet
prodigious as has been the destruction of wealth, the destruction of life is
even more serious. Wealth can sooner or later be replaced, while vital losses
are, by their very nature, irreparable. Never before were such masses of men
arrayed for mutual slaughter. During the late war nearly 60,000,000 soldiers
were mobilized, and the combatants suffered 33,O00,000 casualties, of whom
nearly 8,000,000 were killed or died of disease, nearly 19,000,000 were
wounded, and 7,000,000 taken prisoners. The greatest sufferer was Russia, which
had over 9,000,000 casualties, while next in order came Germany with 6,000,000
and France with 4,500,000 casualties. The British Empire had 3,000,000
casualties. America's losses were relatively slight, our total casualties being
a trifle under 300,000.
And this is
only the beginning of the story. The figures just quoted refer only to fighting
men. They take no account of the civilian population. But the civilian losses
were simply incalculable, especially in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
It is estimated that for every soldier killed, five civilians perished by
hunger, exposure, disease, massacre, or heightened infant mortality. The
civilian deaths in Poland and Russia are placed at many millions, while other
millions died in Turkey and Serbia through massacre and starvation. One item
alone will give some idea of the wastage of human life during the war. The
deaths beyond the normal mortality due to influenza and pneumonia induced by
the war are estimated at 4,000,000. The total loss of life directly
attributable to the war is probably fully 40,000,000, while if decreased
birth-rates be added the total would rise to nearly 50,000,000. Furthermore, so
far as civilian deaths are concerned, the terrible conditions prevailing over a
great part of Europe since the close of 1918 have caused additional losses
relatively as severe as those during the war years.
The way in
which Europe's population has been literally decimated by the late war is shown
by the example of France. In 1914 the population of France was 39,700,000. From
this relatively moderate population nearly 8,000,000 men were mobilized during
the war. Of these, nearly 1,400,000 were killed, 3,000,000 were wounded, and
more than 400,000 were made prisoners. Of the wounded, between 800,000 and
900,000 were left permanent physical wrecks. Thus fully 2,000,000 men - mostly
drawn from the flower of French manhood - were dead or hopelessly
incapacitated.
Meanwhile,
the civilian population was also shrinking. Omitting the civilian deaths in the
northern departments under German occupation, the excess of deaths over births
was more than 50,000 for 1914, and averaged nearly 300,000 for the four
succeeding war years. And the most alarming feature was that these losses were
mainly due, not to deaths of adults, but to a slump in the birth-rate. French
births, which had been 600,000 in 1913, dropped to 315,000 in 1916 and 343,000
in 1917. All told, it seems probable that between 1913 and 1919 the population
of France diminished by almost 3,000,000-nearly one-tenth of the entire
population.
France's
vital losses are only typical of what has to a greater or less extent occurred
all over Europe. The dysgenic effect of the Great War is simply appalling. The
war was nothing short of a headlong plunge into white race-suicide. It was
essentially a civil war between closely related white stocks; a war wherein
every physical and mental effective was gathered up and hurled into a hell of
lethal machinery which killed out unerringly the youngest, the bravest, and the
best.
Even in the
first frenzied hours of August, 1914, wise men realized the horror that stood
upon the threshold. The crowd might cheer, but the reflective already mourned
in prospect the losses which were in store. As the English writer Harold Begbie
then said: "Remember this. Among the young conscript soldiers of Europe
who will die in thousands, and perhaps millions, are the very flower of
civilization; we shall destroy brains which might have discovered for us in ten
or twenty years easements for the worst of human pains and solutions for the
worst of social dangers. We shall blot those souls out of our common existence.
We shall destroy utterly those splendid burning spirits reaching out to
enlighten our darkness. Our fathers destroyed those strange and valuable creatures
whom they called 'witches.' We are destroying the brightest of our
angels." (The Literary Digest, August 29, 1914, p. 346.)
But it is
doubtful if any of these seers realized the full price which the race was
destined to pay during more than four long, agonizing years. Never before had
war shown itself such an unerring gleaner of the best racial values. As early
as the summer of 1915 Mr. Will Irwin, an American war correspondent, remarked
the growing convictions among all classes, soldiers as well as civilians, that
the war was fatally impoverishing the race. "I have talked," he
wrote," with British officers and British Tommies, with English ladies of
fashion and English housewives, with French deputies and French cabmen, and in
all minds alike I find the same idea fixed - what is to become of the French
race and the British race, yes, and the German race, if this thing keeps
up?"
Mr. Irwin
then goes on to describe the cumulative process by which the fittest were
selected - for death.
"I take
it for granted," he says, "that, in a general way, the bravest are
the best, physically and spiritually. Now, in this war of machinery, this
meat-mill, it is the bravest who lead the charges and attempt the daring feats,
and, correspondingly, the loss is greatest among those bravest.
"So
much when the army gets into line. But in the conscript countries, like France
and Germany, there is a process of selection in picking the army by which the
best - speaking in general terms - go out to die, while the weakest remain. The
undersized, the undermuscled, the underbrained, the men twisted by hereditary
deformity or devitalized by hereditary disease - they remain at home to
propagate the breed. The rest - all the rest - go out to take chances.
"Furthermore,
as modern conscript armies are organized, it is the youngest men who sustain
the heaviest losses - the men who are not yet fathers. And from the point of
view of the race, that is, perhaps, the most melancholy fact of all.
"All
the able-bodied men between the ages of nineteen and forty-five are in the
ranks. But the older men do not take many chances with death.... These European
conscript armies are arranged in classes according to age, and the younger
classes are the men who do most of the actual fighting. The men in their late
thirties or their forties, the 'territorials,' guard the lines, garrison the
towns, generally attend to the business of running up the supplies. When we
come to gather the statistics of this war we shall find that an overwhelming
majority of the dead were less than thirty years old, and probably that the
majority were under twenty-five. Now, the territorial of forty or forty-five
has usually given to the state as many children as he is going to give, while
the man of twenty-five or under has usually given the state no children at
all." (The Literary Digest, August 7, 1915.)
Mr. Irwin
was gauging the racial cost by the criterion of youth. A leading English
scholar, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, obtained equally alarming results by applying the
test of genius. He analyzed the casualty lists "filled with names which,
but for the fatal accidents of war, would certainly have been made illustrious
for splendid service to the great cause of life.... A government actuated by a
cold calculus of economic efficiency would have made some provision for
sheltering from the hazards of war young men on whose exceptional intellectual
powers our future progress might be thought to depend. But this has not been
done, and it is impossible to estimate the extent to which the world will be
impoverished in quality by the disappearance of so much youthful genius and
talent.... The spiritual loss to the universe cannot be computed, and probably
will exceed the injury inflicted on the world by the wide and protracted
prevalence of the celibate orders in the Middle Ages." (Ibid., August 11,
1917.)
The American
biologist S. K. Humphrey did not underestimate the extent of the slaughter of
genius-bearing strains when he wrote: "It is safe to say that among the
millions killed will be a million who are carrying superlatively effective
inheritances - the dependence of the race's future. Nothing is more absurd than
the notion that these inheritances can be replaced in a few generations by
encouraging the fecundity of the survivors. They are gone forever. The
survivors are going to reproduce their own less-valuable kind. Words fail to
convey the appalling nature of the loss." [S. K. Humphrey, Mankind: Racial
Values and the Racial Prospect, p. 132 (New York, 1917]
It is the
same melancholy tale when we apply the test of race. Of course the war bore
heavily on all the white race-stocks, but it was the Nordics - the best of all
human breeds - who suffered far and away the greatest losses. War, as we have
seen, was always the Nordic's deadliest scourge, and never was this truer than
in the late struggle. From the racial standpoint, indeed, Armageddon was a
Nordic civil war, most of the officers and a large proportion of the men on
both sides belonging to the Nordic race. Everywhere it was the same story: the
Nordic went forth eagerly to battle, while the more stolid Alpine and, above
all, the little brunet Mediterranean either stayed at home or even when at the
front showed less fighting spirit, took fewer chances, and oftener saved their
skins.
The Great
War has thus unquestionably left Europe much poorer in Nordic blood, while
conversely it has relatively favored the Mediterraneans. Madison Grant well
says: "As in all wars since Roman times, from the breeding point of view
the little dark man is the final winner." (Grant, p. 74.)
Furthermore,
it must be remembered that those dysgenic effects which I have been discussing
refer solely to losses inflicted upon the actual combatants. But we have
already seen that for every soldier killed the war took five civilian lives. In
fact, the war's profoundly devitalizing effects upon the general population can
hardly be overestimated. Those effects include not merely such obvious matters
as privation and disease, but also obscurer yet highly destructive factors like
nervous shock and prolonged overstrain. To take merely one instance, consider
Havelock Ellis's remarks concerning "the ever-widening circles of anguish
and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity."
He concludes: "It is probable that for every 10,000,000 soldiers who fall
on the field, 50,000,000 other persons at home are plunged into grief, or
poverty, or some form of life-diminishing trouble." (Ellis, p. 32.)
Most serious
has been the war's effect upon the children. At home, as at the front, it is
the young who have been sacrificed. The heaviest civilian losses have come
through increased infant mortality and decreased birth-rates. The
"slaughter of the innocents" has thus been twofold: it has slain millions
of those already alive, and it has prevented millions more from being born or
conceived. The decreased fecundity of women during the war even under good
material conditions apparently shows that war's psychological reflexes tend to
induce sterility.
An Italian
savant, Professor Sergi, has elaborated this hypothesis in considerable detail.
He contends that "war continued for a long time is the origin of this
phenomenon (relative sterility), not only in the absolute sense of the loss of
men in battle, but also through a series of special conditions which arise
simultaneously with an unbalancing of vital processes and which create in the
latter a complex phenomenon difficult to examine in every one of its elements.
"The
biological disturbance does not derive solely from the destruction of young
lives, the ones best adapted to fecundity, but also from the unfavorable
conditions into which a nation is unexpectedly thrown; from these come
disorders of a mental and sentimental nature, nervousness, anxiety, grief, and
pain of all kinds, to which the serious economic conditions of wartime also
contribute; all these things have a harmful effect on the general organic
economy of nations." [New York Times Current History, vol. IX, p. 272;
October-December, 1916]
From the
combination of these losses on the battlefield and in the cradle arises what
the biologist Doctor Saleeby terms "the menace of the dearth of
youth." The European populations to-day contain an undue proportion of
adults and the aged, while "the younger generation is no longer knocking
at the door. We senescents may grow old in peace; but the facts bode ill for
our national future." [Current Opinion, April, 1919, p. 237.)
Furthermore,
this "dearth of youth" will not be easily repaired. The war may be
over, but its aftermath is only a degree less unfavorable to human
multiplication, especially of the better kinds. Bad industrial conditions and
the fearfully high cost of living continue to depress the birth-rate of all
save the most reckless and improvident elements, whose increase is a curse
rather than a blessing.
To show only
one of the many causes that to-day keep down the birth-rate, take the crushing
burden of taxation, which hits especially the increase of the upper classes.
The London Saturday Review recently explained this very clearly when it wrote:
"From a man with Pound2,000 a year the tax-gatherer takes Pound600. The
remaining Pound1,400, owing to the decreased value of money, has a purchasing
power about equal to Pound700 a year before the war. No young man will
therefore think of marrying on less than Pound2,000 a year. We are thinking of
the young man in the upper and middle classes. The man who starts with nothing
does not, as a rule, arrive at Pound2,000 a year until he is past the marrying
age. So the continuance of the species will be carried on almost exclusively by
the class of manual workers of a low average caliber of brain. The matter is
very serious. Reading the letters and memoirs of a hundred years ago, one is
struck by the size of the families of the aristocracy. One smiles at reading of
the overflowing nurseries of Edens, and Cokes, and Fitzgeralds. Fourteen or
fifteen children were not at all unusual amongst the county families."
(Saturday Review, November 1, 1919, p. 407.)
Europe's
convalescence must, at the very best, be a slow and difficult one. Both
materially and spiritually the situation is the reverse of blight. To begin
with, the political situation is highly unsatisfactory. The diplomatic
arrangements made by the Versailles Peace Conference offer neither stability
nor permanence. In the next chapter I shall have more to say about the
Versailles Conference. For the moment, let me quote the observations of the
well-known British publicist J. L. Garvin, who adequately summarizes the
situation when he says: "As matters stand, no great war ever was followed
by a more disquieting and limited peace. Everywhere the democratic atmosphere
is charged with agitation. There is still war or anarchy, or both, between the
Baltic and the Pacific across a sixth part of the whole earth. Without a
restored Russia no outlook can be confident. Either a Bolshevist or reactionary
or even a patriotic junction between Germany and Russia might disrupt
civilization as violently as before or to even worse effect." (. L.
Garvin, "The Economic Foundations of Peace," page xiv (London,
1919).)
Political
uncertainty is a poor basis on which to rebuild Europe's shattered economic
life. And this economic reconstruction would, under the most favorable circumstances,
be very difficult. We have already seen how, owing to the industrial
revolution, Europe became the world's chief workshop, exporting manufactured
products in return for foodstuffs to feed its workers and raw materials to feed
its machines, these imports being drawn from the four quarters of the globe. In
other words, Europe had ceased to be self-sufficing, the very life of its
industries and its urban populations being dependent upon foreign importations
from the most distant regions. Europe's prosperity before the war was due to
the development of a marvellous system of world-trade; intricate, nicely
adjusted, functioning with great efficiency, and running at high speed.
Then down
upon this delicately organized mechanism crashed the trip-hammer of the Great
War, literally smashing it to pieces. To reconstruct so intricate a fabric
takes time. Meanwhile, how are the huge urban masses to live, unfitted and
unable as they are to draw their sustenance from their native soil? If their
sufferings become too great there is a real danger that all Europe may collapse
into hopeless chaos. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip did not overstate the danger when
he wrote: "I believe it is possible that there may be let loose in Europe
forces that will be more terribly destructive than have been the forces of the
Great War." (Frank A. Vanderlip, "Political and Economic Conditions
in Europe," The American Review of Reviews, July, 1919, p. 42.)
The best
description of Europe's economic situation is undoubtedly that of Mr. Herbert
Hoover, who, from his experience as inter-Allied food controller, is peculiarly
qualified to pass authoritative judgment. Says Mr. Hoover:
"The
economic difficulties of Europe as a whole at the signature of peace may be
almost summarized in the phrase 'demoralized productivity.' The production of
necessaries for this 450,000,000 population (including Russia) has never been
at so low an ebb as at this day.
"A
summary of the unemployment bureaus in Europe will show that 15,000,000
families are receiving unemployment allowances in one form or another, and are,
in the main, being paid by constant inflation of currency. A rough estimate
would indicate that the population of Europe is at least 100,000,000 greater
than can be supported without imports, and must live by the production and
distribution of exports; and their situation is aggravated not only by lack of
raw materials, and imports, but also by low production of European raw
materials. Due to the same low production, Europe is to-day importing vast quantities
of certain commodities which she formerly produced for herself and can again
produce. Generally, in production, she is not only far below even the level of
the time of the signing of the armistice, but far below the maintenance of life
and health without an unparalleled rate of import....
"From
all these causes, accumulated to different intensity in different localities,
there is the essential fact that, unless productivity can be rapidly increased,
there can be nothing but political, moral, and economic chaos, finally
interpreting itself in loss of life on a scale hitherto undreamed of."
(Herbert Hoover, "The Economic Situation in Europe," World's Work,
November, 1919, pp. 98-99.)
Such are the
material and vital losses inflicted by the Great War. They are prodigious, and
they will not easily be repaired. Europe starts its reconstruction under heavy
handicaps, not the least of these being the drain upon its superior stocks,
which has deprived it of much of the creative energy that it so desperately
needs. Those 16,000,000 or more dead or incapacitated soldiers represented the
flower of Europe's young manhood - the very men who are especially needed
to-day. It is young men who normally alone possess both maximum driving power
and maximum plasticity of mind. All the European belligerents are dangerously
impoverished in their stock of youth. The resultant handicap both to Europe's
working ability and Europe's brain-activity is only too plain.
Moreover,
material and even vital losses do not tell the whole story. The moral and
spiritual losses, though not easily measured, are perhaps even more appalling.
In fact, the darkest cloud on the horizon is possibly the danger that
reconstruction will be primarily material at the expense of moral and spiritual
values, thus leading to a warped development even more pronounced than that of
the nineteenth century and leading inevitably to yet more disastrous
consequences.
The danger
of purely material reconstruction is of course the peril which lurks behind every
great war, and which in the past has wrought such tragic havoc. At the
beginning of the late war we heard much talk of its morally
"regenerative" effects, but as the grim holocaust went on year after
year, far-sighted moralists warned against a fatal drain of Europe's idealistic
forces which might break the thin crust of European civilization so painfully
wrought since the Dark Ages.
That these
warning voices were not without reason is proved by the chaos of spiritual,
moral, and even intellectual values which exists in Europe to-day, giving play
to such monstrous insanities as Bolshevism. The danger is that this chaos may
be prolonged and deepened by the complex of two concurrent factors: spiritual
drain during the war, and spiritual neglect in the immediate future due to
overconcentration upon material reconstruction.
Many of the
world's best minds are seriously concerned at the outlook. For example, Doctor
Gore, the Bishop of Oxford, writes: "There is the usual depression and
lowering of moral aims which always follows times of war. For the real terror
of the time of war is not during the war; then war has certain very ennobling
powers. It is after-war periods which are the curse of the world, and it looks
as if the same severe going to prove true of this war. I own that I never felt
anxiety such as I do now. I think the aspect of things has never been so dark
as at this moment. I think the temper of the nations has degraded since the
declaration of the armistice to a degree that is almost terrifying." (The
Literary Digest, May 3, 1919, pp. 39-40.)
The
intellectual impoverishment wrought by the war is well summarized by Professor
C. G. Shawl " We did more before the war than we shall do after it,"
he writes. "War will have so exhausted man's powers of action and thought
that he will have little wit or will left for the promotion of anything over
and above necessary repair." (Current Opinion, April, 1919, p. 248.)
Europe's
general impoverishment in all respects was vividly portrayed by a leading article
of the London Saturday Review entitled "The True Destructiveness of
War." Pointing to the devastated areas of northern France as merely
symptomatic of the devastation wrought in spiritual as well as material fields,
it said:
"Reflection
only adds to the effect upon us of these miles of wasted country and ruined
towns. All this represents not a thousandth part of the desolation which the
war has brought upon our civilization. These devastated areas scarring the face
of Europe are but a symbol of the desolation which will shadow the life of the
world for at least a generation. The coming years will be bleak, in respect of
all the generous and gracious things which are the products of leisure and of
minds not wholly taken up by the necessity to live by bread alone. For a
generation the world will have to concentrate upon material problems.
"The
tragedy of the Great War - a tragedy which enhances the desolation of Rheims -
is that it should have killed almost everything which the best of our soldiers
died to preserve, and that it should have raised more problems than it has
solved.
"We
would sacrifice a dozen cathedrals to preserve what the war has destroyed in
England .... We would readily surrender our ten best cathedrals to be battered
by the artillery of Hindenburg as a ransom. Surely it would be better to lose
Westminster Abbey than never again to have anybody worthy to be buried
there." (Quoted from The Living Age, June 21, 1919, pp. 722-4.)
Europe is,
indeed, passing through the most critical spiritual phase of the war's
aftermath - what I may term the zero hour of the spirit. When the trenches used
to fill with infantry waiting in the first cold flicker of the dawn for the
signal to go "over the top," they called it the "zero hour."
Well, Europe now faces the zero hour of peace. It is neither a pleasant nor a
stimulating moment. The "tumult and the shouting" have died. The
captains, kings - and presidents - have departed. War's hectic urge wanes,
losses are counted, the heroic pose is dropped. Such is the moment when the
peoples are bidden to go "over the top" once more, this time toward
peace objectives no less difficult than those of the battle-field. Weakened,,
tired Europe knows this, feels this - and dreads the plunge into the unknown.
Hence the malaise of the zero hour.
The
extraordinary turmoil of the European soul is strikingly set forth by the
French thinker Paul Valery.
"We
civilizations," he writes, "now know that we are mortal. We had heard
tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires gone to the bottom with all their
engines; sunk to the inexplorable bottom of the centuries with their gods and
their laws, their academies, their science, pure and applied; their grammars,
their dictionaries, their classics, their romantics and their symbolists, their
critics and their critics' critics. We knew well that all the apparent earth is
made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the mists
of history, phantoms and huge ships laden with riches and spiritual things. We
could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours.
"Elam,
Nineveh, Babylon were vague and lovely names, and the total ruin of these
worlds meant as little to us as their very existence. But France, England,
Russia - these would also be lovely names. Lusitania also is a lovely name. And
now we see that the abyss of history is large enough for every one. We feel
that a civilization is as fragile as a life. Circumstances which would send the
works of Baudelaire and Keats to rejoin the works of Menander are no longer in
the least inconceivable; they are in all the newspapers...
"Thus
the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa. All is not
lost, but everything has felt itself perish.
"An
extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe. It has felt,
in all its thinking substance, that it recognized itself no longer, that it no
longer resembled itself, that it was about to lose consciousness - a
consciousness acquired by centuries of tolerable disasters, by thousands of men
of the first rank, by geographical, racial, historical chances innumerable. . .
"The
military crisis is perhaps at an end; the economic crisis is visibly at its
zenith; but the intellectual crisis - it is with difficulty that we can seize
its true centre, its exact phase. The facts, however, are clear and pitiless:
there are thousands of young writers and young artists who are dead. There is
the lost illusion of a European culture, and the demonstration of the impotence
of knowledge to save anything whatever; there is science, mortally wounded in
its moral ambitions, and, as it were, dishonored by its applications; there is
idealism, victor with difficulty, grievously mutilated, responsible for its
dreams; realism, deceived, beaten, with crimes and misdeeds heaped upon it;
covetousness and renunciation equally put out; religions confused among the
armies, cross against cross, crescent against crescent; there are the sceptics
themselves, disconcerted by events so sudden, so violent, and so moving, which
play with our thoughts as a cat with a mouse - the sceptics lose their doubts,
rediscover them, lose them again, and can no longer make use of the movements
of their minds.
"The
rolling of the ship has been so heavy that at the last the best-hung lamps have
been upset.
"From
an immense terrace of Elsinore which extends from Basle to Cologne, and touches
the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the chalk of Champagne, and
the granite of Alsace, the Hamlet of Europe now looks upon millions of
ghosts." (Quoted from The Living Age, May 10, 1919, pp. 365-368.)
Such is
Europe's deplorable condition as she staggers forth from the hideous ordeal of
the Great War; her fluid capital dissipated, her fixed capital impaired, her
industrial fabric rent and tattered, her finances threatened with bankruptcy,
the flower of her manhood dead on the battle-field, her populations devitalized
and discouraged, her children stunted by malnutrition. A sombre picture.
And Europe
is the white homeland, the heart of the white world. It is Europe that has
suffered practically all the losses of Armageddon, which may be considered the
white civil war. The colored world remains virtually unscathed.
Here is the
truth of the matter: The white world to-day stands at the crossroads of life
and death. It stands where the Greek world stood at the close of the
Peloponnesian War. A fever has racked the white frame and undermined its
constitution. The unsound therapeutics of its diplomatic practitioners retard
convalescence and endanger real recovery. Worst of all, the instinct of
race-solidarity has partially atrophied.
Grave as is
the situation, it is not yet irreparable, any more than Greece's condition was
hopeless after Aegospotami. It was not the Peloponnesian War which sealed
Hellas's doom, but the cycle of political anarchy and moral chaos of which the
Peloponnesian War was merely the opening phase. Our world is too vigorous for
even the Great War, of itself, to prove a mortal wound.
The white
world thus still has its choice. But it must be a positive choice. Decisions -
firm decisions - must be made. Constructive measures - drastic measures - must
be taken. Above all: time presses, and drift is fatal. The tide ebbs. The
swimmer must put forth strong strokes to reach the shore. Else - swift oblivion
in the dark ocean.
CHAPTER IX:
THE SHATTERING OF WHITE SOLIDARITY
THE
instinctive comity of the white peoples is, as I have already said, perhaps the
greatest constant of history. It is the psychological basis of white
civilization. Cohesive instinct is as vital to race as gravitation is to
matter. Without them, atomic disintegration would alike result. In speaking of
race-instinct, I am not referring merely to the ethnic theories that have been
elaborated at various times. Those theories were, after all, but attempts to
explain intellectually the urge of that profound emotion known to sociologists
as the "consciousness of kind."
White
race-consciousness has been of course perturbed by numberless internal
frictions, which have at times produced partial inhibitions of unitary feeling.
Nevertheless, when really faced by non-white opposition, white men have in the
past instinctively tended to close their ranks against the common foe. One of
the Great War's most deplorable results has been an unprecedented weakening of
white solidarity which, if not repaired, may produce the most disastrous
consequences.
During the
nineteenth century the sentiment of white solidarity was strong. The great
explorers and empire-builders who spread white ascendancy to the ends of the
earth felt that they were apostles of their race and civilization as well as of
a particular country. Rivalries might be keen and colonial boundary questions
acute; nevertheless, in their calmer moments, the white peoples felt that the
expansion of one white nation buttressed the expansion of all.
Professor
Pearson undoubtedly voiced the spirit of the day when he wrote (about 1890)
that it would be well "if European statesmen could understand that the
wars which carry desolation into civilized countries are allowing the lower
races to recruit their numbers and strength. Two centuries hence it may be
matter of serious concern to the world if Russia has been displaced by China on
the Amoor, if France has not been able to colonize North Africa, or if England
is not holding India. For civilized men there can be only one fatherland, and
whatever extends the influence of those races that have taken their faith from
Palestine, their laws of beauty from Greece, and their civil law from Rome,
ought to be matter of rejoicing to Russian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Frenchman
alike." (Pearson, pp. 14-15.)
The progress
of science also fortified white race-consciousness with its sanctions. The
researches of European scholars identified the founders of our civilization
with a race of tall, white-skinned barbarians, possessing regular features,
brown or blond hair, and light eyes. This was, of course, what we now know as
the Nordic type. At first the problem was ill understood, the tests applied
being language and culture rather than physical characteristics. For these
reasons the early "Caucasian" and "Aryan" hypotheses were
self-contradictory and inadequate. Nevertheless, the basis was sound, and the
effects on white popular psychology were excellent.
Particularly
good were the effects upon the peoples predominantly of Nordic blood. Obviously
typifying as they did the prehistoric creators of white civilization, Nordics
everywhere were strengthened in consciousness of genetic worth, feeling of
responsibility for world-progress, and urge toward fraternal collaboration. The
supreme value of Nordic blood was clearly analyzed by the French thinker Count
Arthur de Gobineau as early as 1854 (His book De Inegalite des Races
Humaines" first appeared at that date.) (albeit Gobineau employed the
misleading "Aryan" terminology) and his thesis was subsequently
elaborated by many other writers, notably by Englishmen, Germans, and
Scandinavians.
The results
of all this were plainly apparent by the closing years of the nineteenth
century. Quickened Nordic race-consciousnees played an important part in
stimulating Anglo-American fraternization , and induced acts like the Oxford
Scholarship legacy of Cecil Rhodes. The trend of this movement, though crosscut
by nationalistic considerations, was clearly in the direction of a Nordic
entente - a Pan-Nordic syndication of power for the safeguarding of the
race-heritage and the harmonious evolution of the whole white world. It was a glorious
aspiration, which, had it been realized, would have averted Armageddon.
Unfortunately
the aspiration remained a dream. The ill-balanced tendencies of the late
nineteenth century were against it, and they ultimately prevailed. The abnormal
growth of national-imperialism, in particular, wrought fatal havoc. The
exponents of imperialistic propagandas like Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism put
forth literally boundless pretensions, planning the domination of the entire
planet by their special brand of national-imperialism. Such men had scant
regard for race-lines. All who stood outside their particular nationalistic
group were vowed to the same subjection.
Indeed, the
national-imperialists presently seized upon race teachings, and prostituted
them to their own ends. A notable example of this is the extreme Pan-German
propaganda of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Especially as expounded in
Chamberlain's chief work, "Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts" ("The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century").) and
his fellows. Chamberlain makes two cardinal assumptions: he conceives modern
Germany as racially almost purely Nordic; and he regards all Nordics outside
the German linguistic-cultural group as either unconscious or renegade Teutons
who must at all costs be brought into the German fold. To any one who
understands the scientific realities of race, the monstrous absurdity of these
assumptions is instantly apparent. The fact is that modern Germany, far from
being purely Nordic, is mainly Alpine in race. Nordic blood preponderates only
in the northwest, and is merely veneered over the rest of Germany, especially
in the upper classes. While the Germania of Roman days was unquestionably a
Nordic land, it has been computed that of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the
German Empire in 1914, only 9,000,000 were purely Nordic in character. This
displacement of the German Nordics since classic times is chiefly due to
Germany's troubled history, especially to the horrible Thirty Years' War which
virtually annihilated the Nordics of south Germany. This racial displacement
has wrought correspondingly profound changes in the character of the German
people.
The truth of
the matter is, of course, that the Pan-Germans were thinking in terms of
nationality instead of race, and that they were using pseudo-racial arguments
as camouflage for essentially political ends. The pity of it is that these
arguments have had such disastrous repercussions in the genuine racial sphere.
The late war has not only exploded Pan-Germanism, it has also discredited
Nordic race-feeling, so unjustly confused by many persons with Pan-German
nationalistic propaganda. Such persons should remember that the overwhelming
majority of Nordics live outside of Germany, being mainly found in Scandinavia,
the Anglo-Saxon countries, northern France, the Netherlands, and Baltic Russia.
To let Teuton propaganda gull us into thinking of Germany as the Nordic
fatherland is both a danger and an absurdity.
While
Pan-Germanism was mainly responsible for precipitating Armageddon with all its
disastrous consequences, it was Russian Pan-Slavism which dealt the first
shrewd blow to white solidarity. Toward the close of the nineteenth century,
Pan-Slavism's "Eastern" wing led by Prince Ukhtomsky and other
chauvinists of his ilk, went so far in its imperialistic obsession as actually
to deny Russia's white blood. These Pan-Slavists boldly proclaimed the morbid,
mystical dogma that Russia was Asiatic, not European, and thereupon attempted
to seize China as a lever for upsetting, first the rest of Asia, and then the
non-Russian white world - elegantly described as "the rotten west."
The white Power immediately menaced was, of course, England, who in acute fear
for her Indian Empire, promptly riposted by allying herself with Japan. Russia
was diplomatically isolated and militarily beaten in the Russo-Japanese War.
Thus the Russo-Japanese War, that destroyer of white prestige whose ominous
results we have already noted, was precipitated mainly by the reckless
short-sightedness of white men themselves.
A second
blow to white solidarity was presently administered - this time by England in
concluding her second alliance-treaty with Japan. The original alliance, signed
in 1902, was negotiated for a definite, limited objective - the checkmating of
Russia's overweening imperialism. Even that instrument was dangerous, but under
the circumstances it was justifiable and inevitable. The second
alliance-treaty, however, was so general and far-reaching in character that
practically all white men in the Far East, including most emphatically
Englishmen themselves, pronounced it a great disaster.
Meanwhile,
German imperialism was plotting even deadlier strokes at white race-comity, not
merely by preparing war against white neighbors in Europe, but also by
ingratiating itself with the Moslem East and by toying with schemes for
building up a black military empire in central Africa.
Lastly,
France was actually recruiting black, brown, and yellow hordes for use on
European battle-fields; while Italy, by her buccaneering raid on Tripoli,
outraged Islam's sense of justice and strained its patience to the
breaking-point.
Thus, in the
years preceding Armageddon, all the European Powers displayed a reckless
absorption in particularistic ambitions and showed a callous indifference to
larger race-interests. The rapid weakening of white solidarity was clearly
apparent.
However,
white solidarity, though diplomatically compromised, was emotionally not yet
really undermined. Those dangerous games above mentioned were largely the work
of cynical chancelleries and ultra-imperialist propagandas. The average
European, whatever his nationality, still tended to react instinctiveIy against
such practices. This was shown by the sharp criticism which arose from the most
varied quarters. For example: Russia and Britain were alike sternly taken to
task both at home and abroad for their respective Far Eastern policies;
proposed German alliances with Pan-Islamism and Japan preached by disciples of
Machtpolitik were strenuously opposed as race-treason by powerful sections of
German thought; while Italy's Tripolitan imbroglio was generally denounced as
the most foolhardy trifling with the common European interest.
A good
illustration of instinctive white solidarity in the early years of the
twentieth century is a French journalist's description of the attitude of the
white spectators (of various nationalities) gathered to watch the landing in
Japan of the first Russian prisoners taken in the Russo-Japanese War. This
writer depicts in moving language the literally horrifying effect of the
spectacle upon himself and his fellows. "What a triumph," he
exclaims, "what a revenge for the little Nippons to see thus humiliated
these big, splendid men who, for them, represented, not only Russians, but
those Europeans whom they so detest! This scene tragic in its simplicity, this
grief passing amid joy, these whites, vanquished and captives, defiling before
those free and triumphant yellows - this was not Russia beaten by Japan, not
the defeat of one nation by another; it was something new, enormous,
prodigious; it was the victory of one world over another; it was the revenge
which effaced the centuries of humiliations borne by Asia; it was the awakening
hope of the Oriental peoples; it was the first blow given to the other race, to
that accursed race of the West, which, for so many years, had triumphed without
out even having to struggle. And the Japanese crowd felt all this, and the few
other Asiatics who found themselves there shared in this triumph. The
humiliation of these whites was solemn, frightful. I completely forgot that
these captives were Russians, and I would add that the other Europeans there,
though anti-Russian, felt the same malaise: they also were forced to feel that
these captives were their own kind. When we took the train for Kobe, an
instinctive solidarity drove us huddling into the same compartment."
(Pinon, La Lutte pour le Pacifique, p. 165.)
Thus white
solidarity, while unquestionably weakened, was still a weighty factor down to
August, 1914. But the first shots of Armageddon saw white solidarity literally
blown from the muzzles of the guns. An explosion of internecine hatred burst
forth more intense and general than any ever known before. Both sets of
combatants proclaimed a duel to the death; both sides vowed the enemy to
something near annihilation; while even scientists and litterateurs, disrupting
the ancient commonwealths of wisdom and beauty, put one another furiously to
the ban.
In their
savage death-grapple neither side hesitated for an instant to grasp at any
weapon, whatever the ultimate consequences to the race. The Allies poured into
white Europe colored hordes of every pigment under the sun; the Teutonic Powers
wielded Pan-Islam as a besom of wrath to sweep clean every white foothold in
Hither Asia and North Africa; while far and wide over the Dark Continent black
armies fought for their respective masters - and learned the hidden weakness of
the white man's power. In the Far East, Japan, left to her own devices, bent
amorphous China to her imperious will, thereby raising up a potential menace
for the entire earth. Every day the tide of intestine hatred within the white
world rose higher, until the very concept of a common blood and cultural past
seemed in danger of being blotted out.
A symposium
of the "hate literature" of the Great War is fortunately no part of
my task, but the reader will readily recall both its abysmal fury and its
irreconcilable implications. The most appalling feature was the way in which
many writers assumed that this state of mind would be permanent; that the end
of the Great War might be only the beginning of a war-cycle leading to the
utter disruption of white solidarity and civilization. In the spring of 1916,
the London Nation remarked gloomily: "Europe is now being mentally
conceived as inevitably and permanently dual. We are ceasing to think of
Europe. The normal end of war (which is peace) is to be submerged in the idea
of a war-series indefinitely prolonged. Soon the entire Continent will have but
one longing - the longing for rest. The cup is to be dashed from its lips! For
a world steeped in fear and ruled by the barren logomachy of hate, diplomatic
intercourse would almost cease to be possible.... In the matter of culture,
modern Europe would tend to relapse to a state inferior even to that of
mediaeval Europe, and to sink far below that of the Renaissance." [The
Nation (London), April 8,1916, pp. 32-33]
In similar
vein, the noted German historian Eduard Meyer (Eduard Meyer, "England: Its
Political Organization and Development and the War against Germany"
(English translation, Boston, 1916).) predicted that Armageddon was only the
first of a long series of Anglo-German "Punic Wars" in which modern civilization
would retrograde to a condition of semi-barbarism. Germany, according to this
prophecy, would be the victo r- but a Pyrrhic victor, for the colored races,
taking advantage of white decadence, would destroy European supremacy and
involve all the white nations in a common ruin.
The
ulcerated state of European war-psychology did, in fact, lend ominous emphasis
to these gloomy prognostications. Before 1914, as we have seen, imperialistic
trafficking with common race-interests usually roused wide-spread criticism,
while even more, the use of colored troops in white quarrels always roused
bitter popular condemnation. In the darkest hours of the Boer War, English
public opinion had refused to sanction the use of either black African or brown
Indian troops against the white foe, while French plans for raising black
armies of African savages for use in Europe were almost universally reprobated.
Before Armageddon there thus existed a genuine moral repugnance against
settling domestic differences by calling in the alien without the gates.
The Great
War, however, sent all such scruples promptly into the discard. Not only did
the belligerent governments use all the colored troops they could equip, but
the belligerent peoples hailed this action with unqualified approval. The Allies
were of course the more successful in practice, but the Germans were just as
eager, and the exertions of the Prussian General Liman von Sanders actually got
Turkish divisions to the European battle-fronts.
The
psychological effect of these colored auxiliaries in deepening the hatred of
the white combatants was deplorable. Germany's use of Turks raised among the
Allies wrathful emotions reminiscent of the Crusades, while the havoc wrought
in the Teutonic ranks by black Senegalese and yellow Gurkhas, together with
Allied utterances like Lord Curzon's wish to see Bengal lancers on the Unter
den Linden and Gurkhas camping at Sans Souci, so maddened the German people
that the very suggestion of white solidarity was jeeringly scoffed at as the
most idiotic sentimentality.
Here is a
German officer's account of a Senegalese attack on his position, which vividly
depicts the mingled horror and fury awakened in German hearts by these black
opponents: "They came. First singly, at wide intervals. Feeling their way,
like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish. Eager, grasping, like the claws of a
mighty monster. Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing
in the cloud. Entire bodies and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare,
now sinking in the shadows, came nearer and nearer. Strong, wild fellows, their
log-like, fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing their
grinning teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and their necks
stretched forward. Some with bayonets on their rises. Many only armed with
knives. Monsters all, in their confused hatred. Frightful their distorted, dark
grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally wideopened, burning, bloodshot eyes. Eyes
that seem like terrible beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born beings.
Eyes that seemed to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained, no longer to
be restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats spitting and yowling,
with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel dissemblance of their beastly
malice. Behind them came the first wave of the attackers, in close order, a
solid, rolling black wall, rising and falling, swaying and heaving,
impenetrable, endless." (Captain Rheinhold Eichacker, "The Blacks
Attack!" New York, Times Current History, vol. XI, pp. 110-112,
April-June, 1917.)
Here, again,
is the proposal of a British officer, to raise a million black savages from
England's African colonies for use on the Western Front. Major Stuart-Stephens
exults in Britain's "almost unlimited reservoir of African man-power."
In northern Nigeria alone, he remarks, there are to-day more than 700,000
warlike tribesmen. "Let them be used!" says the major. "These
'bonny fechters'' are now engaged in the pastoral arts of peace. But I would
make bold to assert that a couple of hundred thousand could, after six months'
training, be usefully employed in daredevil charges into German trenches."
Major Stuart-Stephens hopes that at least the Sudanese battalions will be
transferred en masse to the Western Front. "This," he concludes,
"would mean the placing at once in the trenches of, say, 70,000 big, lusty
coal-black devils, the time of whose life is the wielding of the bayonet, and
whose advent would not be regarded by the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to
come of the same sort." (Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens, "Our Million
Black Army, English Review, October, 1916.)
The military
possibilities are truly engaging! There are literally tens of millions of
fighting blacks and scores of millions of fighting Asiatics now living under
white rule who could conceivably be armed and shipped to European
battle-fields. After which, of course, Europe, the white homeland, would be - a
queer place.
Fortunately
for our race, the late war did not see this sort of thing carried to its logical
conclusion. But the harm done was bad enough. The white world grew accustomed
to the use of colored mercenaries and to the contracting of alliances with
colored peoples against white opponents as a mere matter of course.
The German
war-mind, in particular, teemed with colored alliance-projects. Unable to
compete with the Allies in getting colored troops to Europe, Germans planned to
revenge themselves in other fields. The Turkish alliance and the resulting
"Holy War" proclamation were hailed with delight. "Over there in
Turkey," wrote the well-known German publicist Ernst Jaeckh, "stretch
Anatolia and Mesopotamia: Anatolia, the 'Land of the Sunrise'; Mesopotamia, the
region of ancient paradise. May these names be to us a sign: may this World War
bring to Germany and Turkey the sunrise and the paradise of a new time; may it
confer upon an assured Turkey and a Greater Germany the blessing of a fruitful
Turco-Teutonic collaboration in peace after a victorious Turco-Teutonic
collaboration in war." (Ernst Jaeckh, Die deutsch-turkische
Waffenbruderschaft, p. 30 (Berlin, 1915).)
The scope of
Germany's Asiatic aspirations during the war is exemplified by an article from
the pen of the learned Orientalist Professor Bernhardt Molden. (Bernhardt
Molden, "Die Bedeutung Asiens im Kampf fr unsere Zukunft,"
Preussische Jahrbcher, December, 1914. See also his article "Europa und
Asien," Preussische Jahrbcher, October, 1915) Germany's aid to Turkey,
contends Professor Molden, is merely symptomatic of her policy to raise the
other Asiatic peoples now crushed beneath English and Russian domination. Thus
Germany will create puissant allies for the "Second Punic War."
Germany must therefore strive to solidify the great Central Asian bloc -
Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China. Professor Molden urges a "Pan-Asian
railroad" from Constantinople to Peking. This should be especially
alluring to Afghanistan, which would thereby become one of the great pivots of
world-politics and trade. In fine: "Germany must free Asia." As
another prominent German writer, Friedrich Delitzsch, wrote in similar vein:
"To renovate the East - such is Germany's mission." (Friedrich
Delitzsch, "Deutschland und Asien" (pamphlet) (Berlin, 1914).)
In such a
mood, Germans hailed Japan's absence of genuine hostility with the greatest
satisfaction. The gust of rage which swept Germany at Japan's seizure of
Kiao-chao was soon allayed by numerous writers preaching reconciliation and
eventual alliance with the mistress of the Far East. Typical of this
pro-Japanese propaganda is an article by Herr J. Witte, a former official in
the Far East, which appeared in 1915. Herr Witte chides his countrymen for
their talk about the Yellow Peril. Such a peril may exist in the future, but it
is not pressing at this moment, "at any rate for us Germans, who have no
great territorial possessions in the Far East.... We might permit ourselves to
speak of a Yellow Peril if there was a white solidarity. This, however, does
not exist. We are learning this just now by bitter experience on our own flesh
and blood. Our foes have marshalled peoples of all races against us in battle.
So long as this helps them, all race-antipathies and race-interests are to them
matters of supreme indifference. Under these circumstances, in the midst of a
life-and-death struggle against the peoples of the white race, shall we play
the role of guardian angel of these peoples against the yellow peoples? For us,
as Germans, there is now only one supreme life-interest, to which all other
interests must be subordinated: the safety and advancement of Germany and of
Deutschtum in the world." Herr Witte therefore advocates a "close
political understanding between Germany and Japan. In future we can accomplish
nothing in the teeth of Japan. Therefore we must get on good terms with Japan.
And we can do it, too. Germany is, in fact, the country above all others who in
the future has the best prospect of allying herself advantageously with the Far
Eastern peoples." (Lic. Missioninspektor J. Witte, "Deutschland und
die Volker Ostasiens im Vergangenheit und Zukunft," Preussische
Jahrb'cher, May, 1915.)
And so it
went throughout the war-years: both sides using all possible colored aid to
down the white foe; both sides alike reckless of the ultimate racial
consequences.
In fact,
leaving ultimate consequences aside, many persons feared during the later
phases of the war that Europe might be headed for immediate dissolution. As
early as mid-1916, Lord Loreburn expressed apprehension lest the war was
entailing general bankruptcy and "such a destruction of the male youth of
Europe as will break the thin crust of civilization which has been built up
since the Dark Ages." (The Economist (London), June 17, 1916, p. 1134.)
These fears were intensified by the Russian revolution of 1917, with its
hideous corollary of Bolshevism which definitely triumphed before the close of
that year. The Bolshevik triumph evoked despairing predictions like Lord
Lansdowne's: "We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will
spell ruin for the civilized world." (The Literary Digest, December 15,
1917, p. 14.)
Well, the
war was prolonged for another year, ending in the triumph of the Allies and
America, though leaving Europe in the deplorable condition reviewed in the
preceding chapter. The hopes of mankind were now centred on the Peace
Conference, but these hopes were oversanguine, for the Versailles
"settlement" was riddled with political and economic imperfections
from the Saar to Shantung.
This was
what a skeptical minority had feared from the first. At the very beginning of
the war, for instance, the French publicist Urbain Gohier had predicted that
when the diplomats gathered at the end of the conflict they would find the
problem of constructive settlement insoluble. (The Literary Digest, December
15, 1914, p. 14.)
Most
persons, however, had been more hopeful. Disappointment and disillusionment
were therefore correspondingly intense. The majority of liberal-minded,
forward-looking men and women throughout the world deplored the Versailles
settlement's faulty character, some, however, accepting the situation as the
best of a bad business, others entirely repudiating it on the ground that by
crystallizing an intolerable status it would entail worse disasters in the near
future.
General Smuts,
the South African delegate to the Conference, well represents the first
attitude. In a formal protest against the Versailles settlement, General Smuts
stated: "I have signed the peace treaty, not because I consider it a
satisfactory document, but because it is imperatively necessary to close the
war; because the world needs peace above all, and nothing could be more fatal
than the continuance of the state of suspense between war and peace. The six
months since the armistice was signed have, perhaps, been as upsetting,
unsettling, and ruinous to Europe as the previous four years of war. I look
upon the peace treaty as the close of these two chapters of war and armistice,
and only on that ground do I agree to it. I say this now, not in criticism, but
in faith; not because I wish to find fault with the work done, but rather
because I feel that in the treaty we have not yet achieved the real peace to
which our peoples were looking, and because I feel that the real work of making
peace will only begin after this treaty has been signed, and a definite halt
has thereby been called to the destructive passions that have been desolating
Europe for nearly five years." (Official document.)
The English
economist J. L. Garvin, who, like General Smuts, accepted the treaty faute de
mieux, makes these trenchant comments upon the settlement itself:
"Derisive human genius surveying with pity and laughter the present state
of mankind and some of the obsolete means adopted at Paris to remedy it, might
do most good by another satire like Rabelais, Gulliver, or Candide. But let us
put from us here the temptation to conjure up vistas of the grotesque. Let us
pursue these plain studies in common sense. A treaty even when signed is paper.
It is in itself inoperative without the action or control of living forces
which it seeks to express or repress. Treaties not drawn against sound and
certain assets may be dishonored in the sequel like bad checks or bills. You do
not get peace merely by putting it on paper. And, much more to the point, all
that is called peace does not necessarily spell prosperity any more than all
that glitters is gold. You can 'make a solitude and call it peace.' The
quintessence of death or stupefaction resembles a kind of peace. You can
prolong relative stagnation and depression and yet say that it is peace. But
that would not be the reconciling and lasting, the constructive and the
creative peace, as it was visioned by the Allied peoples in their greatest
moments of insight and inspiration during the war. For that higher and wiser
thing we lavished our pent-up energies and the accumulated treasure of a
hundred years, and sent so many of our best to die." (J. L. Garvin,
"The Heritage of Armageddon," The Observer (London). Reprinted in The
Living Age, September 6, 1919.)
That veteran
student of world-politics Doctor E. J. Dillon put the matter succinctly when he
wrote: "The peace is being made not, as originally projected, on the basis
of the fourteen points, nor on the lines of territorial equilibrium, but by a compromise
which misses the advantage of either, and combines certain evils of both. The
treaty has failed to lay the axe to the roots of war, has perhaps increased
their number while purporting to destroy them. The germs of future conflicts,
not only between the recent belligerents, but also between other groups of
states, are numerous, and if present symptoms may be trusted will sprout up in
the fulness of time." (In the Daily Telegraph (London). Quoted in The
Nation (New York), June 14, 1919, p. 960.)
The badness
of the Versailles treaties is nowhere more manifest than in the way they have
alienated idealistic support and enthusiasm from the inchoate League of
Nations. Multitudes of persons once zealous Leaguers now feel that the League
has no moral foundation. Such persons contend that even were the covenant
theoretically perfect, the League could no more succeed on the basis of the
present peace settlement than a flawlessly designed palace could be erected if
superimposed upon a quicksand.
Europe is thus
in evil case. Her statesmen have failed to formulate a constructive settlement.
Old problems remain unsolved while fresh problems arise. The danger is
redoubled by the fact that both Europe and the entire world are faced with a
new peril - Bolshevism. The menace of Bolshevism is simply incalculable.
Bolshevism is a peril in some ways unprecedented in the world's history. It is
not merely a war against a social system, not merely a war against our
civilization; it is a war of the hand against the brain. For the first time
since man was man there is a definite schism between the hand and the head.
Every principle which mankind has thus far evolved: community of interest, the
solidarity of civilization and culture, the dignity of labor, of muscle, of
brawn, dominated and illumined by intellect and spirit - all these Bolshevism
howls down and tramples in the mud.
Bolshevism's
cardinal tenets - the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the destruction of
the "classes" by social war - are of truly hideous import. The
classes," as conceived by Bolshevism, are very numerous.
They
comprise not merely the "idle rich," but also the whole of the upper
and middle social strata, the landowning country folk, the skilled working men;
in short, all except those who work with their untutored hands, plus the elect
few who philosophize for those who work with their untutored hands.
The effect
of such ideas, if successful, not only on our civilization, but also on the
very fibre of the race, can be imagined. The death or degradation of nearly all
persons displaying constructive ability, and the tyranny of the ignorant and
anti-social elements, would be the most gigantic triumph of dysgenics ever
seen. Beside it the ill effects of war would pale into insignificance. Civilization
would wither like a plant stricken by blight, while the race, summarily drained
of its good blood, would sink like lead into the depths of degenerate
barbarism.
This is
precisely what is occurring in Russia to-day. Bolshevism has ruled Russia less
than three years - and Russia is ruined. She ekes out a bare existence on the
remains of past accumulations, on the surviving scraps of her material and
spiritual capital. Everywhere are hunger, cold, disease, terror, physical and
moral death. The "proletariat" is making its "clean sweep."
The " classes" are being systematically eliminated by execution,
massacre, and starvation. The racial impoverishment is simply incalculable.
Meanwhile Lenine, surrounded by his Chinese executioners, sits behind the
Kremlin walls, a modern Jenghiz Khan plotting the plunder of a world.
Lenine's
Chinese "braves" are merely symptomatic of the intrigues which
Bolshevism is carrying on throughout the non-white world. Bolshevism is, in
fact, as anti-racial as it is anti-social. To the Bolshevik mind, with its
furious hatred of constructive ability and its fanatical determination to
enforce levelling, proletarian equality, the very existence of superior
biological values is a crime. Bolshevism has vowed the proletarianization of the
world, beginning with the white peoples. To this end it not only foments social
revolution within the white world itself, but it also seeks to enlist the
colored races in its grand assault on civilization. The rulers of Soviet Russia
are well aware of the profound ferment now going on in colored lands. They
watch this ferment with the same terrible glee that they watched the Great War
and the fiasco of Versailles - and they plot to turn it to the same profit.
Accordingly,
in every quarter of the globe, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United
States, Bolshevik agitators whisper in the ears of discontented colored men
their gospel of hatred and revenge. Every nationalist aspiration, every
political grievance, every social discrimination, is fuel for Bolshevism's
hellish incitement to racial as well as to class war.
And this
Bolshevik propaganda has not been in vain. Its results already show in the most
diverse quarters, and they are ominous for the future. China, Japan,
Afghanistan, India, Java, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Mexico,
and the "black belts" of our own United States: here is a partial
list of the lands where the Bolshevik leaven in color is clearly at work.
Bolshevism
thus reveals itself as the arch-enemy of civilization and the race. Bolshevism
is the renegade, the traitor within the gates, who would betray the citadel,
degrade the very fibre of our being, and ultimately hurl a rebarbarized,
racially impoverished world into the most debased and hopeless of mongrelizations.
Therefore,
Bolshevism must be crushed out with iron heels, no matter what the cost. If
this means more war, let it mean more war. We know only too well war's dreadful
toll, particularly on racial values. But what war-losses could compare with the
losses inflicted by the living death of Bolshevism? There are some things worse
than war, and Bolshevism stands foremost among those dread alternatives.
So ends our
survey of the white world as it emerges from the Great War. The prospect is not
a brilliant one. Weakened and impoverished by Armageddon, handicapped by an
unconstructive peace, and facing internal Bolshevist disaffection which must at
all costs be mastered, the white world is ill-prepared to confront - the rising
tide of color. What that tide portends will be the subject of the concluding
chapters.