If the human races were equal, the course of history would form an affecting, glorious, and magnificent picture. The races would all have been equally intelligent, with a keen eye for their true interests and the same aptitude for conquest and domination. Early in the world’s history, they would have gladdened the face of the earth with a crowd of civilizations, all flourishing at the same time, and all exactly alike. At the moment when the most ancient Sanscrit peoples were founding their empire, and, by means of religion and the sword, were covering Northern India with harvests, towns, palaces, and temples; at the moment when the first Assyrian Empire was crowning the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates with its splendid buildings, and the chariots and horsemen of Nimroud were defying the four winds, we should have seen, on the African coast, among the tribes of the prognathous negroes, the rise of an enlightened and cultured social state, skilful in adapting means to ends, and in possession of great wealth and power.
The Celts, in the course of their migrations, would have carried with them to the extreme west of Europe the necessary elements of a great society, as well as some tincture of the ancient wisdom of the East; they would certainly have found, among the Iberian peoples spread over the face of Italy, in Gaul and Spain and the islands of the Mediterranean, rivals as well schooled as themselves in the early traditions, as expert as they in the arts and inventions required for civilization.
Mankind, at one with itself, would have nobly walked the earth, rich in understanding, and founding everywhere societies resembling each other. All nations would have judged their needs in the same way, asked nature for the same things, and viewed her from the same angle. A short time would have been sufficient for them to get into close contact with each other and to form the complex network of relations that is everywhere so necessary and profitable for progress.
The tribes that were unlucky enough to live on a barren soil, at the bottom of rocky gorges, on the shores of ice-bound seas, or on steppes for ever swept by the north winds—these might have had to battle against the unkindness of nature for a longer time than the more favoured peoples. But in the end, having no less wisdom and understanding than the others, they would not have been backward in discovering that the rigours of a climate has its remedies. They would have shown the intelligent activity we see to-day among the Danes, the Norwegians, and the Icelanders. They would have tamed the rebellious soil, and forced it, in spite of itself, to be productive. In mountainous regions, we should have found them leading a pastoral life, like the Swiss, or developing industries like those of Cashmere. If their climate had been so bad, and its situation so unfavourable, that there was obviously nothing to be done with it, then the thought would have struck them that the world was large, and contained many valleys and kindly plains; they would have left their ungrateful country, and soon have found a land where they could turn their energy and intelligence to good account.
Then the nations of the earth, equally enlightened and equally rich, some by the commerce of their seething maritime cities, some by the agriculture of their vast and flourishing prairies, others by the industries of a mountainous district, others again by the facilities for transport afforded them by their central position—all these, in spite of the temporary quarrels, civil wars, and seditions inseparable from our condition as men, might soon have devised some system of balancing their conflicting interests. Civilizations identical in origin would, by a long process of give and take, have ended by being almost exactly alike; one might then have seen established that federation of the world which has been the dream of so many centuries, and which would inevitably be realized if all races were actually gifted, in the same degree, with the same powers.
But we know that such a picture is purely fantastic. The first peoples worthy of the name came together under the inspiration of an idea of union which the barbarians who lived more or less near them not only failed to conceive so quickly, but never conceived at all. The early peoples emigrated from their first home and came across other peoples, which they conquered; but these again neither understood nor ever adopted with any intelligence the main ideas in the civilization which had been imposed on them. Far from showing that all the tribes of mankind are intellectually alike, the nations capable of civilization have always proved the contrary, first by the absolutely different foundations on which they based their states, and secondly by the marked antipathy which they showed to each other. The force of example has never awakened any instinct, in any people, which did not spring from their own nature. Spain and the Gauls saw the Phœnicians, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians, set up flourishing towns, one after the other, on their coasts. But both Spain and the Gauls refused to copy the manners and the government of these great trading powers. When the Romans came as conquerors, they only succeeded in introducing a different spirit by filling their new dominions with Roman colonies. Thus the case of the Celts and the Iberians shows that civilization cannot be acquired without the crossing of blood.
Consider the position of the American Indians at the present day. They live side by side with a people which always wishes to increase in numbers, to strengthen its power. They see thousands of ships passing up and down their waterways. They know that the strength of their masters is irresistible. They have no hope whatever of seeing their native land one day delivered from the conqueror; their whole continent is henceforth, as they all know, the inheritance of the European. A glance is enough to convince them of the tenacity of those foreign institutions under which human life ceases to depend, for its continuance, on the abundance of game or fish. From their purchases of brandy, guns, and blankets, they know that even their own coarse tastes would be more easily satisfied in the midst of such a society, which is always inviting them to come in, and which seeks, by bribes and flattery, to obtain their consent. It is always refused. They prefer to flee from one lonely spot to another; they bury themselves more and more in the heart of the country, abandoning all, even the bones of their fathers. They will die out, as they know well; but they are kept, by a mysterious feeling of horror, under the yoke of their unconquerable repulsion from the white race, and although they admire its strength and general superiority, their conscience and their whole nature, in a word, their blood, revolts from the mere thought of having anything in common with it.
In Spanish America less aversion is felt by the natives towards their masters. The reason is that they were formerly left by the central Government under the rule of their Caciques. The Government did not try to civilize them; it allowed them to keep their own laws and customs, and, provided they became Christians, merely required them to pay tribute. There was no question of colonization. Once the conquest was made, the Spaniards showed a lazy tolerance to the conquered, and only oppressed them spasmodically. This is why the Indians of South America are less unhappy than those of the north, and continue to live on, whereas the neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons will be pitilessly driven down into the abyss.
Civilization is incommunicable, not only to savages, but also to more enlightened nations. This is shown by the efforts of French goodwill and conciliation in the ancient kingdom of Algiers at the present day, as well as by the experience of the English in India, and the Dutch in Java. There are no more striking and conclusive proofs of the unlikeness and inequality of races.
We should be wrong to conclude that the barbarism of certain tribes is so innate that no kind of culture is possible for them. Traces may be seen, among many savage peoples, of a state of things better than that obtaining now. Some tribes, otherwise sunk in brutishness, hold to traditional rules, of a curious complexity, in the matter of marriage, inheritance, and government. Their rites are unmeaning to-day, but they evidently go back to a higher order of ideas. The Red Indians are brought forward as an example; the vast deserts over which they roam are supposed to have been once the settlements of the Alleghanians.[107] Others, such as the natives of the Marianne Islands, have methods of manufacture which they cannot have invented themselves. They hand them down, without thought, from father to son, and employ them quite mechanically.
When we see a people in a state of barbarism, we must look more closely before concluding that this has always been their condition. We must take many other facts into account, if we would avoid error.
Some peoples are caught in the sweep of a kindred race; they submit to it more or less, taking over certain customs, and following them out as far as possible. On the disappearance of the dominant race, either by expulsion, or by a complete absorption in the conquered people, the latter allows the culture, especially its root principles, to die out almost entirely, and retains only the small part it has been able to understand. Even this cannot happen except among nations related by blood. This was the attitude of the Assyrians towards the Chaldean culture, of the Syrian and Egyptian Greeks towards the Greeks of Europe, of the Iberians, Celts, and Illyrians in face of the Roman ideas. If the Cherokees, the Catawhas, the Muskhogees, the Seminoles, the Natchez, and the like, still show some traces of the Alleghanian intelligence, I cannot indeed infer that they are of pure blood, and directly descended from the originating stock—this would mean that a race that was once civilized can lose its civilization;—I merely say that if any of them derives from the ancient conquering type as its source, the stream is a muddy one, and has been mingled with many tributaries on the way. If it were otherwise, the Cherokees would never have fallen into barbarism. As for the other and less gifted tribes, they seem to represent merely the dregs of the indigenous population, which was forced by the foreign conquerors to combine together to form the basic elements of a new social state. It is not surprising that these remnants of civilization should have preserved, without understanding them, laws, rites, and customs invented by men cleverer than themselves; they never knew their meaning or theoretical principles, or regarded them as anything but objects of superstitious veneration. The same argument applies to the traces of mechanical skill found among them. The methods so admired by travellers may well have been ultimately derived from a finer race that has long disappeared. Sometimes we must look even further for their origin. Thus, the working of mines was known to the Iberians, Aquitanians, and the Bretons of the Scilly Isles; but the secret was first discovered in Upper Asia, and thence brought long ago by the ancestors of the Western peoples in the course of their migration.
The natives of the Caroline Islands are almost the most interesting in Polynesia. Their looms, their carved canoes, their taste for trade and navigation put a deep barrier between them and the other negroes. It is not hard to see how they come to have these powers. They owe them to the Malay blood in their veins; and as, at the same time, their blood is far from being pure, their racial gifts have survived only in a stunted and degraded form.
We must not therefore infer, from the traces of civilization existing among a barbarous people, that it has ever been really civilized. It has lived under the dominion of another tribe, of kindred blood but superior to it; or perhaps, by merely living close to the other tribe, it has, feebly and humbly, imitated its customs. The savage races of to-day have always been savage, and we are right in concluding, by analogy, that they will continue to be so, until the day when they disappear.
Their disappearance is inevitable as soon as two entirely unconnected races come into active contact; and the best proof is the fate of the Polynesians and the American Indians.
The preceding argument has established the following facts:
(i) The tribes which are savage at the present day have always been so, and always will be, however high the civilizations with which they are brought into contact.
(ii) For a savage people even to go on living in the midst of civilization, the nation which created the civilization must be a nobler branch of the same race.
(iii) This is also necessary if two distinct civilizations are to affect each other to any extent, by an exchange of qualities, and give birth to other civilizations compounded from their elements. That they should ever be fused together is of course out of the question.
(iv) The civilizations that proceed from two completely foreign races can only touch on the surface. They never coalesce, and the one will always exclude the other. I will say more about this last point, as it has not been sufficiently illustrated.
The fortune of war brought the Persian civilization face to face with the Greek, the Greek with the Roman, the Egyptian with both Roman and Greek; similarly the modern European civilization has confronted all those existing to-day in the world, especially the Arabian.
The relations of Greek with Persian culture were manifold and inevitable. A large part of the Hellenic population—the richest, if not the most independent—was concentrated in the towns of the Syrian littoral, and in the colonies of Asia Minor and the Euxine. These were, soon after their foundation, absorbed in the dominions of the Great King; the inhabitants lived under the eye of the satrap, though to a certain extent they retained their democratic institutions. Again, Greece proper, the Greece that was free, was always in close contact with the cities of the Asiatic coast.
Were the civilizations of the two countries ever fused into one? We know they were not. The Greeks regarded their powerful enemies as barbarians, and their contempt was probably returned with interest. The two nations were continually coming into contact, but their political ideas, their private habits, the inner meaning of their public rites, the scope of their art, and the forms of their government, remained quite distinct. At Ecbatana only one authority was recognized; it was hereditary, and limited in certain traditional ways, but was otherwise absolute. In Hellas the power was subdivided among a crowd of different sovereigns. The government was monarchical at Sparta, democratic at Athens, aristocratic at Sicyon, tyrannic in Macedonia—a strange medley! Among the Persians, the State religion was far nearer to the primitive idea of emanation; it showed the same tendency to unity as the government itself did, and had a moral and metaphysical significance that was not without a certain philosophic depth. The Greek symbolism, on the other hand, was concerned merely with the various outward appearances of nature, and issued in a glorification of the human form. Religion left the business of controlling a man’s conscience to the laws of the State; as soon as the due rites were performed, and his meed of honour paid to the local god or hero, the office of faith was complete. Further, the rites themselves, the gods, and the heroes, were different in places a few miles apart. If, in some sanctuaries like Olympia or Dodona, we seem to find the worship, not of some special force of nature, but of the cosmic principle itself, such a unity only makes the diversity of the rest more remarkable; for this kind of worship was confined to a few isolated places. Besides, the oracle of Dodona and the cult of the Olympian Zeus were foreign importations.
As for the private customs of the Greeks, it is hardly necessary to show how much they differed from those of the Persians. For a rich, pleasure-loving, and cosmopolitan youth to imitate the habits of rivals far more luxurious and outwardly refined than the Greeks, was to bring himself into public contempt. Until the time of Alexander—in other words, during the great, fruitful and glorious period of Hellenism—Persia, in spite of its continual pressure, could not convert Greece to its civilization.
With the coming of Alexander, this was curiously confirmed. Men believed for a moment, when they saw Hellas conquering the kingdom of Darius, that Asia was about to become Greek, or, still better, that the acts of violence wrought in the madness of a single night by the conqueror against the monuments of the country were, in their very excess, a proof of contempt as well as hatred. But the burner of Persepolis soon changed his mind. The change was so complete that his design at last became apparent; it was to substitute himself purely and simply for the dynasty of the Achaemenidae, and to rule like his predecessor or the great Xerxes, with Greece as an appanage of his empire. In this way, the Persian social system might have absorbed that of the Greeks.
In spite, however, of all Alexander’s authority, nothing of the kind happened. His generals and soldiers never became used to seeing him in his long clinging robe, wearing a turban on his head, surrounded by eunuchs and denying his country. After his death, his system was continued by some of his successors; they were, however, forced to mitigate it. And why, as a fact, were they able to find the middle term which became the normal condition of the Asiatics of the coast and the Græco-Egyptians? Simply because their subjects consisted of a mixed population of Greeks, Syrians, and Arabs, who had no reason to refuse the compromise. Where, however, the races remained distinct, all terms of union were impossible, and each country held to its national culture.
Similarly, right up to the last days of the Roman Empire, the hybrid civilization that was dominant all over the East, including Greece proper, had become much more Asiatic than Greek, owing to the great preponderance of Asiatic blood in the mass of the people. The intellectual life, it is true, took pride in being Hellenic. But it is not hard to find, in the thought of the time, an Oriental strain vitalizing all the products of the Alexandrian school, such as the “centralized state” idea of the Græco-Syrian jurists. We see how the different racial elements were balanced, and to which side the scale inclined.
Other civilizations may be compared in the same way; and before ending this chapter, I will say a few words about the relation between Arab culture and our own.
No one can doubt their mutual repulsion. Our mediæval ancestors had opportunities of seeing at close quarters the marvels of the Mussulman State, when they willingly sent their sons to study in the schools of Cordova. Yet nothing Arabian remains in Europe outside the nations that have a tinge of Ishmaelitish blood. Brahmanic India showed no more eagerness than ourselves to come to terms with Islam, and has, like us, resisted all the efforts of its Mohammedan masters.
To-day, it is our turn to deal with the remains of Arab civilization. We harry and destroy the Arabs, but we do not succeed in changing them, although their civilization is not itself original, and so should have less power of resistance. It is notorious that the Arabian people, itself weak in numbers, continually incorporated the remnants of the races it had conquered by the sword. The Mussulmans form a very mixed population, with an equally hybrid culture, of which it is easy to disentangle the elements. The conquering nucleus did not, before Mohammed, consist of a new or unknown people. Its traditions were held in common with the Semite and Hamite families from which it was originally derived. It was brought into conflict with the Phœnicians and the Jews, and had the blood of both in its veins. It played a middleman’s part in their Red Sea trade, and on the eastern coasts of India and Africa. It did the same, later, for the Persians and the Romans. Many Arab tribes took part in the political life of Persia under the Arsacidæ and Sassanidæ, while some of their princes, like Odenathus,[108] were proclaimed Cæsar, some of their princesses, like Zenobia, daughter of Amru and Queen of Palmyra, won a glory that was distinctively Roman, and some of their adventurers, like Philip, even raised themselves to the Imperial purple. Thus this hybrid nation had never ceased, from the most ancient times, to make itself felt among the powerful societies among which it lived. It had associated itself with their work, and like a body half sunk in water, half exposed to the sun, contained at one and the same time elements of barbarism and of an advanced civilization.
Mohammed invented the religion that was best fitted to the mental state of his people, where idolatry found many followers, but where Christianity, distorted by heretics and Judaizers, made just as many proselytes. In the religious system of the Prophet of Koresh the reconciliation between the law of Moses and the Christian faith was more complete than in the doctrines of the Church. This problem had greatly exercised the minds of the early Catholics, and was always present to the Oriental conscience. Hence Mohammed’s gift had already an appetizing appearance, and besides, any theological novelty had a good chance of gaining converts among the Syrians and Egyptians. To crown all, the new religion came forward sword in hand; this was another guarantee of success among the masses, who had no common bond of union, other than the strong conviction of their helplessness.
It was thus that Islam came forth from the desert. Arrogant, uninventive, and with a civilization that was already, for the most part, Græco-Asiatic, it found the ground prepared for it. Its recruits, on the East and South coasts of the Mediterranean, had already been saturated with the complex product which it was bringing to them, and which in turn it reabsorbed. The new cult, that had borrowed its doctrines from the Church, the Synagogue, and the garbled traditions of the Hedjaz and the Yemen, extended from Bagdad to Montpellier; and with the cult came its Persian and Roman laws, its Græco-Syrian[109] and Egyptian science, and its system of administration, which was tolerant from the first, as is natural where there is no unity in the State organism. We need not be astonished at the rapid progress in refinement made by the Mussulmans. The greater part of the people had merely changed their habits for the time being. When they began to play the part of apostles in the world, their identity was not at once recognized; they had not been known under their old names for some time. Another important point must be remembered. In this varied collection of peoples, each no doubt contributed its share to the common welfare. But which of them had given the first push to the machine, and which directed its motion for the short time it lasted? Why, the little nucleus of Arab tribes that had come from the interior of the peninsula, and consisted, not of philosophers, but of fanatics, soldiers, conquerors, and rulers.
Arab civilization was merely the old Græco-Syrian civilization, modified by Persian admixture, and revived and rejuvenated by the new, sharp breath of a genius. Hence, although ready to make concessions, it could not come to terms with any form of society that had a different origin from its own, any more than the Greek culture could with the Roman, although these were so near to each other and lived side by side for so many centuries within the same Empire.
The preceding paragraphs are enough to show how impossible it is that the civilizations belonging to racially distinct groups should ever be fused together. The irreconcilable antagonism between different races and cultures is clearly established by history, and such innate repulsion must imply unlikeness and inequality. If it is admitted that the European cannot hope to civilize the negro, and manages to transmit to the mulatto only a very few of his own characteristics; if the children of a mulatto and a white woman cannot really understand anything better than a hybrid culture, a little nearer than their father’s to the ideas of the white race,—in that case, I am right in saying that the different races are unequal in intelligence.
I will not adopt the ridiculous method that is unhappily only too dear to our ethnologists. I will not discuss, as they do, the moral and intellectual standing of individuals taken one by one.
I need not indeed speak of morality at all, as I have already admitted the power of every human family to receive the light of Christianity in its own way. As to the question of intellectual merit, I absolutely refuse to make use of the argument, “every negro is a fool.”[110] My main reason for avoiding it is that I should have to recognize, for the sake of balance, that every European is intelligent; and heaven keep me from such a paradox!
I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea-captains, who declare that some Yolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that some Kaffir dances and plays the violin, and some Bambara knows arithmetic.
I am ready to admit without proof all the marvels of this kind that anyone can tell me, even about the most degraded savages. I have already denied that even the lowest tribes are absolutely stupid. I actually go further than my opponents, as I have no doubt that a fair number of negro chiefs are superior, in the wealth of their ideas, the synthetic power of their minds, and the strength of their capacity for action, to the level usually reached by our peasants, or even by the average specimens of our half-educated middle class. But, I say again, I do not take my stand on the narrow ground of individual capacity. It seems to me unworthy of science to cling to such futile arguments. If Mungo Park or Lander have given a certificate of intelligence to some negro, what is to prevent another traveller, who meets the same phœnix, from coming to a diametrically opposite conclusion? Let us leave these puerilities, and compare together, not men, but groups. When, as may happen some day, we have carefully investigated what the different groups can and cannot do, what is the limit of their faculties and the utmost reach of their intelligence, by what nations they have been dominated since the dawn of history—then and then only shall we have the right to consider why the higher individuals of one race are inferior to the geniuses of another. We may then go on to compare the powers of the average men belonging to these types, and to find out where these powers are equal and where one surpasses the other. But this difficult and delicate task cannot be performed until the relative position of the different races has been accurately, and to some extent mathematically, gauged. I do not even know if we shall ever get clear and undisputed results, if we shall ever be free to go beyond a mere general conclusion and come to such close grips with the minor varieties as to be able to recognize, define, and classify the lower strata and the average minds of each nation. If we can do this, we shall easily be able to show that the activity, energy, and intelligence of the least gifted individuals in the dominant races, are greater than the same qualities in the corresponding specimens produced by the other groups.[111]
Mankind is thus divided into unlike and unequal parts, or rather into a series of categories, arranged, one above the other, according to differences of intellect.
In this vast hierarchy there are two great forces always acting on each member of the series. These forces are continually setting up movements that tend to fuse the races together; they are, as I have already indicated,[112] (i) resemblance in general bodily structure and (ii) the common power of expressing ideas and sensations by the modulation of the voice.
I have said enough about the first of these, and have shown the true limits within which it operates.
I will now discuss the second point, and inquire what is the relation between the power of a race and the merit of its language; in other words, whether the strongest races have the best idioms, and if not, how the anomaly may be explained.