The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History
9781465673145
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The following pages are devoted to an attempt to elucidate the meaning of history in terms of race; that is, by the physical and psychical characters of the inhabitants of Europe instead of by their political grouping or by their spoken language. Practically all historians, while using the word race, have relied on tribal or national names as its sole definition. The ancients, like the moderns, in determining ethnical origin did not look beyond a man’s name, language or country and the actual information furnished by classic literature on the subject of physical characters is limited to a few scattered and often obscure remarks. Modern anthropology has demonstrated that racial lines are not only absolutely independent of both national and linguistic groupings, but that in many cases these racial lines cut through them at sharp angles and correspond closely with the divisions of social cleavage. The great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses. This continuity of inheritance has a most important bearing on the theory of democracy and still more upon that of socialism, for it naturally tends to reduce the relative importance of environment. Those engaged in social uplift and in revolutionary movements are therefore usually very intolerant of the limitations imposed by heredity. Discussion of these limitations is also most offensive to the advocates of the obliteration, under the guise of internationalism, of all existing distinctions based on nationality, language, race, religion and class. Those individuals who have neither country, nor flag, nor language, nor class, nor even surnames of their own and who can only acquire them by gift or assumption, very naturally decry and sneer at the value of these attributes of the higher types. Democratic theories of government in their modern form are based on dogmas of equality formulated some hundred and fifty years ago and rest upon the assumption that environment and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development. Philanthropy and noble purpose dictated the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the document which to-day constitutes the actual basis of American institutions. The men who wrote the words, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” were themselves the owners of slaves and despised Indians as something less than human. Equalityin their minds meant merely that they were just as good Englishmen as their brothers across the sea. The words “that all men are created equal” have since been subtly falsified by adding the word “free,” although no such expression is found in the original document and the teachings based on these altered words in the American public schools of to-day would startle and amaze the men who formulated the Declaration. It will be necessary for the reader to divest his mind of all preconceptions as to race, since modern anthropology, when applied to history, involves an entire change of definition. We must, first of all, realize that race pure and simple, the physical and psychical structure of man, is something entirely distinct from either nationality or language. Furthermore, race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons of the past and the laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in the phenomena of inanimate nature.
