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.