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THE INEQUALITY
OF HUMAN RACES

THE RENAISSANCE

By ARTHUR, COUNT GOBINEAU.
With an Introductory Essay on Count
Gobineau's Life-Work by Dr. Oscar Levy.
One Vol., Demy 8vo, Illustrated 10s net

THE YOUNG NIETZSCHE

By FRAU FORSTER NIETZSCHE.
One Volume, Demy 8vo, Price 15s net

THE LONELY NIETZSCHE

By FRAU FORSTER NIETZSCHE.
One Volume, Royal 8vo. Price 15s net

NIETZSCHE

By GEORGE BRANDES
One Volume, Demy 8vo, 6s net

LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

THE INEQUALITY
OF HUMAN RACES

BY ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU

TRANSLATED BY ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.

INTRODUCTION BY DR. OSCAR LEVY, EDITOR OF THE
AUTHORISED ENGLISH VERSION OF NIETZSCHE'S WORKS

\<&>

WILLIAM HEINEMANN
LONDON MCMXV

London William Heinemann 1915

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGB

INTRODUCTION vii

FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION xi

AUTHOR'S PREFACE xvii

I. THE MORTAL DISEASE OF CIVILIZATIONS AND
SOCIETIES PROCEEDS FROM GENERAL CAUSES
COMMON TO THEM ALL i

II. FANATICISM, LUXURY, CORRUPTION OF MORALS,
AND IRRELIGION DO NOT NECESSARILY LEAD
TO THE FALL OF SOCIETIES 7

III. THE RELATIVE MERIT OF GOVERNMENTS HAS NO

INFLUENCE ON THE LENGTH OF A NATION'S LIFE 19

IV. THE MEANING OF THE WORD " DEGENERATION " ;

THE MIXTURE OF RACIAL ELEMENTS; HOW
SOCIETIES ARE FORMED AND BROKEN UP 23

V. RACIAL INEQUALITY IS NOT THE RESULT OF IN-
STITUTIONS 36

VI. NATIONS. WHETHER PROGRESSING OR STAGNATING
ARE INDEPENDENT OF THE REGIONS IN WHICH
THEY LIVE S4

VII. CHRISTIANITY NEITHER CREATES NOR CHANGES

THE CAPACITY FOR CIVILIZATION 63

VIII. DEFINITION OF THE WORD ** CIVILIZATION " ;

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT HAS A TWO-FOLD ORIGIN 77

IX. DEFINITION OF THE WORD " CIVILIZATION " (con-
tinued); DIFFERENT CHARACTERISTICS OF CIVI-
LIZED SOCIETIES; OUR CIVILIZATION IS NOT
SUPERIOR TO THOSE WHICH HAVE GONE BEFORE 89

X. SOME ANTHROPOLOGISTS REGARD MAN AS HAVING

A MULTIPLE ORIGIN 106

rr O O Q cv O

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

XI. RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT 117

XII. HOW THE RACES WERE PHYSIOLOGICALLY SEPA-
RATED, AND THE DIFFERENT VARIETIES FORMED
BY THEIR INTER-MIXTURE. THEY ARE UN-
EQUAL IN STRENGTH AND BEAUTY 141
XIII THE HUMAN RACES ARE INTELLECTUALLY UN-
EQUAL ; MANKIND IS NOT CAPABLE OF INFINITE
PROGRESS • 154

XIV. PROOF OF THE INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF
RACES {continued). DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS
ARE MUTUALLY REPULSIVE; HYBRID RACES
HAVE EQUALLY HYBRID CIVILIZATIONS 168

XV. THE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES ARE UNEQUAL, AND
CORRESPOND PERFECTLY IN RELATIVE MERIT
TO THE RACES THAT USE THEM 182

XVI. RECAPITULATION j THE RESPECTIVE CHARAC-
, TERISTICS OF THE THREE GREAT RACES ; THE

SUPERIORITY OF THE WHITE TYPE, AND, WITH-
IN THIS TYPE, OF THE ARYAN FAMILY 205

INTRODUCTION TO GOBINEAU'S
''INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES"

Though many people have accused this age of irreligion, there is
at least one point of similarity between modern Europe and that
pre-Christian Era to which our present religion is due. Just as
in ancient Palestine, there are living amongst us two kinds of
prophets — the prophets of evil and disaster, and those of bliss,
or, as Europe likes to call it, of " progress." As in Palestine of
old the public usually sides with the lighter, the optimistic, the
more comfortable sort of people, with the prophets of bliss, while
Time and Fate invariably decide in favour of the sterner and
gloomier individuals, the prophets of evil. In the world to-day
as well as in Palestine of old, the prophets of bliss are the false
prophets ; the prophets of evil, to-day as of yore, are the true
ones. Such a true prophet was Count Arthur de Gobineau.

Even his friends — those few friends whom he gained at the
end of his life — still thought him unduly pessimistic. Old
Wagner, who introduced him to the German public, thought of
brightening his gloom by a little Christian faith, hope, and
charity, in order to make the pill more palatable to that great
public, which he, the great Stage-manager, knew so well. Other
Germans — Chamberlain, Schemann, and the Gobineau school —
poured a great deal of water into his wine, sweetened it with
patriotic syrups, adulterated it with their own pleasant inventions,
which were all too readily swallowed by a gullible and credulous
generation. But stern old Gobineau knew the world better than
his young and cheerful offspring. He had seen through all that
boisterous gaiety of the age, all its breathless labour, all its
technical advancement, all its materialistic progress, and had
diagnosed, behind it that muddle of moral values which our
forefathers have bequeathed to us and which in our genera-
tion has only become a greater muddle still. The catastrophe
which Gobineau had prophesied to an Aristocracy which had

vii

INTRODUCTION

forgotten its tradition, to a Democracy which had no root in
reality, to a Christianity which he thought entirely inefficient,
is now upon us.

Under the stress of the present misfortunes, we frequently hear
that all our previous opinions need revision, that we have to
forget many things and to learn afresh still more, that we must
try to build up our civilization on a safer basis, that we must
reconsider and re-construct the values received from former ages.
It is therefore our duty, I think, to turn back to those prophets
who accused our forefathers of being on the road to destruction,
all the more so as these prophets were likewise true poets
who tried as such to point out the right road, endeavouring
to remedy, as far as their insight went, the evil of their time.
This is the best, and I trust a perfectly satisfactory, reason for
the translation of " The Inequality of Human Races."

This book, written as early as 1853, is no doubt a youthful and
somewhat bewildering performance, but it gives us the basis of
Gobineau's creed, his belief in Race and Aristocracy as the first
condition of civilization, his disbelief in the influence of environ-
ment, his distrust in the efficacy of religion and morality. The
latter kind of scepticism brings him into relationship with
Nietzsche, who has even accentuated Count Gobineau's sus-
picions and who has branded our morality as Slave-Morality, and
consequently as harmful to good government. What a Europe
without Masters, but with plenty of Half-masters and Slaves,
was driving at, Gobineau foresaw as well as Nietzsche.

I sincerely hope that no intelligent reader will overlook this
sceptical attitude of Gobineau towards religion, because that is
a point of great importance at the present time, when our faith
will certainly thrive again on a misfortune, which, by the pro-
pagation of slave-values, it indirectly has caused. It is this
scepticism against the Church and its Semitic values, which
separates a Gobineau from Disraeli, to whom otherwise — in his
rejection of Buckle, Darwin, and their science, in his praise of
Race and Aristocracy, and in his prophecy of evil — he is so nearly
related. Disraeli still believed in a Church based upon a revival

viii

INTRODUCTION

of the old principles, Gobineau, like Nietzsche, had no hope
whatever in this respect. It is the great merit of both Nietzsche
and Gobineau, that they were not, like Disraeli, trying to revive
a corpse, but that they frankly acknowledged, the one that
the corpse was dead, the other that it was positively poisoning
the air. The occasional bows which Gobineau makes to the
Church cannot, I repeat, mislead any serious critics of his work,
especially if they likewise consult his later books, about which,
by the way, I have spoken at greater length elsewhere.* Both
Spinoza and Montaigne had the same laudable habit, and they
did not mean it either. For the first business of a great free-
thinker is not to be mistaken for a little one ; his greatest misfor-
tune is to be "understood " by the wrong class of people, and thus
an occasional bow to the old and venerable Power — apart from
the safety which it procures — protects him from an offensive
handshake with enthusiastic and unbalanced disciples and
apostles.

OSCAR LEVY
Geneva, July 1915

* See my Introduction to Count Gobineau's " Renaissance "
(Heinemann).

FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION

(1854)*

TO HIS MAJESTY GEORGE V, KING OF HANOVER

The great events — the bloody wars, the revolutions, and the
breaking up of laws — which have been rife for so many years in
the States of Europe, are apt to turn men's minds to the study
of political problems. While the vulgar consider merely im-
mediate results, and heap all their praise and blame on the little
electric spark that marks the contact with their own interests,
the more serious thinker will seek to discover the hidden causes
of these terrible upheavals. He will descend, lamp in hand,
by the obscure paths of philosophy and history ; and in the
analysis of the human heart or the careful search among the
annals of the past he will try to gain the master-key to the
enigma which has so long baffled the imagination of man.

Like every one else, I have felt all the prickings of curiosity
to which our restless modern world gives rise. But when I tried
to study, as completely as I could, the forces underlying this
world, I found the horizon of my inquiry growing wider and
wider. I had to push further and further into the past, and,
forced by analogy almost in spite of myself, to lift my eyes
further and further into the future. It seemed that I should
aspire to know not merely the immediate causes of the plagues
that are supposed to chasten us, but also to trace the more
remote reasons for those social evils which the most meagre
knowledge of history will show to have prevailed, in exactly the
same form, among all the nations that ever lived, as well as those

* This dedication and the following preface apply to the whole work,
of which the present volume contains the first book. The remaining
books are occupied by a detailed examination of the civilizations men-
tioned at the end of this volume, and it is of these as well as the present
book that the author is thinking, in his preface, when speaking of his
imitators. A few passages in the dedication that relate exclusively to
these books have been omitted. — Tr.

FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION

which survive to-day — evils that in all likelihood will exist
among nations yet unborn.

Further, the present age, I thought, offered peculiar facilities
for such an inquiry. While its very restlessness urges us on to
a kind of historical chemistry, it also makes our labours easier.
The thick mists, the profound darkness that from time im-
memorial veiled the beginnings of civilizations different from
our own, now lift and dissolve under the sun of science. An
analytic method of marvellous delicacy has made a Rome, un-
known to Livy, rise before us under the hands of Niebuhr, and
has unravelled for us the truths that lay hid among the legendary
tales of early Greece. In another quarter of the world, the
Germanic peoples, so long misunderstood, appear to us now as
great and majestic as they were thought barbarous by the writers
of the Later Empire. Egypt opens its subterranean tombs, trans-
lates its hieroglyphs, and reveals the age of its pyramids. Assyria
lays bare its palaces with their endless inscriptions, which had till
yesterday been buried beneath their own ruins. The Iran of
Zoroaster has held no secrets from the searching eyes of Burnouf ,
and the Vedas of early India take us back to events not far from the
dawn of creation. From all these conquests together, so important
in themselves, we gain a larger and truer understanding of Homer,
Herodotus, and especially of the first chapters of the Bible, that
deep well of truth, whose riches we can only begin to appreciate
when we go down into it with a fully enlightened mind.

These sudden and unexpected discoveries are naturally not
always beyond the reach of criticism. They are far from giving
us complete lists of dynasties, or an unbroken sequence of reigns
and events. In spite, however, of the fragmentary nature of
their results, many of them are admirable for my present purpose,
and far more fruitful than the most accurate chronological tables
would be. I welcome, most of all, the revelation of manners and
customs, of the very portraits and costumes, of vanished peoples.
We know the condition of their art. Their whole life, public and
private, physical and moral, is unrolled before us, and it becomes
possible to reconstruct, with the aid of the most authentic

xii

FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION

materials, that which constitutes the personality of races and
mainly determines their value.

With such a treasury of knowledge, new or newly understood,
to draw upon, no one can claim any longer to explain the com-
plicated play of social forces, the causes of the rise and decay of
nations, in the light of the purely abstract and hypothetical
arguments supplied by a sceptical philosophy. Since we have
now an abundance of positive facts crowding upon us from all
sides, rising from every sepulchre, and lying ready to every
seeker's hand, we may no longer, like the theorists of the
Revolution, form a collection of imaginary beings out of clouds,
and amuse ourselves by moving these chimeras about like
marionettes, in a political environment manufactured to suit
them. The reality is now too pressing, too well known ; and it
forbids games like these, which are always unseasonable, and
sometimes impious. There is only one tribunal competent to
decide rationally upon the general characteristics of man, and
that is history — a severe judge, I confess, and one to whom we
may well fear to appeal in an age so wretched as our own.

Not that the past is itself without stain. It includes every-
thing, and so may well have many faults, and more than one
shameful dereliction of duty, to confess. The men of to-day
might even be justified in flourishing in its face some new merits
of their own. But suppose, as an answer to their charges, that
the past suddenly called up the gigantic shades of the heroic
ages, what would they say then ? If it reproached them with
having compromised the names of religious faith, political
honour, and moral duty, what would they answer ? If it told
them that they are no longer fit for anything but to work out
the knowledge of which the principles had already been recognized
and laid down by itself ; that the virtue of the ancients has be-
come a laughing-stock, that energy has passed from man to
steam, that the light of poetry is out, that its great prophets
are no more, and that what men call their interests are confined
to the most pitiful tasks of daily life ; — how could they defend
themselves ?

xiii

FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION

They could merely reply that not every beautiful thing is dead
which has been swallowed up in silence ; it may be only sleeping.
All ages, they might say, have beheld periods of transition, when
life grapples with suffering and in the end arises victorious and
splendid. Just as Chaldaa in its dotage was succeeded by the
young and vigorous Persia, tottering Greece by virile Rome, and
the degenerate rule of Augustulus by the kingdoms of the noble
Teutonic princes, so the races of modern times will regain their
lost youth.

This was a hope I myself cherished for a brief moment, and I
should like to have at once flung back in the teeth of History its
accusations and gloomy forebodings, had I not been suddenly
struck with the devastating thought, that in my hurry I was
putting forward something that was absolutely without proof.
I began to look about for proofs, and so, in my sympathy for
the living, was more and more driven to plumb to their depths
the secrets of the dead.

Then, passing from one induction to another, I was gradually
penetrated by the conviction that the racial question over-
shadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to
them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion
a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its
destiny. Every one must have had some inkling of this colossal
truth, for every one must have seen how certain agglomerations
of men have descended on some country, and utterly trans-
formed its way of life ; how they have shown themselves able to
strike out a new vein of activity where, before their coming, all
had been sunk in torpor. Thus, to take an example, a new era
of power was opened for Great Britain by the Anglo-Saxon
invasion, thanks to a decree of Providence, which by sending to
this island some of the peoples governed by the sword of your
Majesty's illustrious ancestors, was to bring two branches of the
same nation under the sceptre of a single house — a house that
can trace its glorious title to the dim sources of the heroic nation
itself.

Recognizing that both strong and weak races exist, Kpreferred

xiv

FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION

to examine the former, to analyse their qualities, and especially
to follow them back to their origins. By this method I convinced
myself at last that everything great, noble, and fruitful in the
works of man on this earth, in science, art, and civilization,
derives from a single starting-point, is the development of a single
germ and the result of a single thought ; it belongs to one family
alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the
civilized countries of the universeJ

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN
RACES

CHAPTER I

THE MORTAL DISEASE OF CIVILIZATIONS AND SOCIETIES
PROCEEDS FROM GENERAL CAUSES COMMON TO THEM
ALL

The fall of civilizations is the most striking, and, at the same time,
the most obscure, of all the phenomena of history. It is a
calamity that strikes fear into the soul, and yet has always some-
thing so mysterious and so vast in reserve, that the thinker is
never weary of looking at it, of studying it, of groping for its
secrets. No doubt the birth and growth of peoples offer a very
remarkable subject for the observer ; the successive development
of societies, their gains, their conquests, their triumphs, have
something that vividly takes the imagination and holds it captive.
But all these events, however great one may think them, seem
to be easy of explanation ; one accepts them as the mere outcome
of the intellectual gifts of man. Once we recognize these gifts,
we are not astonished at their results ; they explain, by the bare
fact of their existence, the great stream of being whose source
they are. So, on this score, there need be no difficulty or hesita-
tion. But when we see that after a time of strength and glory
all human societies come to their decline and fall — all, I say, not
this or that ; when we see in what awful silence the earth shows
us, scattered on its surface, the wrecks of the civilizations that
have preceded our own — not merely the famous civilizations,
but also many others, of which we know nothing but the names,
and some, that lie as skeletons of stone in deep world-old forests,
and have not left us even this shadow of a memory ; when the
mind returns to our modern States, reflects on their extreme
youth, and confesses that they are a growth of yesterday, and
that some of them are already toppling to their fall : then at last

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

we recognize, not without a certain philosophic shudder, that the
words of the prophets on the instability of mortal things apply
with the same rigour to civilizations as to peoples, to peoples as
to States, to States as to individuals ; and we are forced to affirm
that every assemblage of men, however ingenious the network
of social relations that protects it, acquires on the very day of
its birth, hidden among the elements of its life, the seed of an
inevitable death.

But what is this seed, this principle of death ? Is it uniform,
as its results are, and do all civilizations perish from the same
cause ?

At first sight we are tempted to answer in the negative ; for
we have seen the fall of many empires, Assyria, Egypt, Greece,
Rome, amid the clash of events that had no likeness one to the
other. Yet, if we pierce below the surface, we soon find that
this very necessity of coming to an end, that weighs imperiously
on all societies without exception, presupposes such a general
cause, which, though hidden, cannot be explained away. When
we start from this fixed principle of natural death — a principle
unaffected by all the cases of violent death, — we see that all
civilizations, after they have lasted some time, betray to the
observer some little symptoms of uneasiness, which are difficult to
define, but not less difficult to deny ; these are of a like nature in
all times and all places. We may admit one obvious point of
difference between the fall of States and that of civilizations,
when we see the same kind of culture sometimes persisting in a
country under foreign rule and weathering every storm of
calamity, at other times being destroyed or changed by the
slightest breath of a contrary wind ; but we are, in the
end, more and more driven to the idea that the principle
of death which can be seen at the base of all societies is
not only inherent in their life, but also uniform and the same
for all.

To the elucidation of this great fact I have devoted the studies
of which I here give the results.

We moderns are the first to have recognized that every assem-

THE DISEASE OF CIVILIZATIONS

blage of men, together with the kind of culture it produces, is
doomed to perish. Former ages did not believe this. Among
the early Asiatics, the religious consciousness, moved by the
spectacle of great political catastrophes, as if by some apparition
from another world, attributed them to the anger of heaven
smiting a nation for its sins ; they were, it was thought, a chastise-
ment meet to bring to repentance the criminals yet unpunished.
The Jews, misinterpreting the meaning of the Covenant, supposed
that their Empire would never come to an end. Rome, at the
very moment when she was nearing the precipice, did not doubt
that her own empire was eternal.*. But the knowledge of later
generations has increased with experience ; and just as no one
doubts of the mortal state of humanit}', because all the men who
preceded us are dead, so we firmly believe that the days of
peoples are numbered, however great the number may be ;
for all those who held dominion before us have now fallen out of
the race. The wisdom of the ancients yields little that throws
light on our subject, except one fundamental axiom, the recogni-
tion of the finger of God in the conduct of this world ; to this
firm and ultimate principle we must adhere, accepting it in the
full sense in which it is understood by the Catholic Church. It
is certain that no civilization falls to the ground unless God
wills it ; and when we apply to the mortal state of all societies
the sacred formula used by the ancient priesthoods to explain
some striking catastrophes, which they wrongly considered as
isolated facts, we are asserting a truth of the first importance,
which should govern the search for all the truths of this world.
Add, if you will, that all societies perish because they are sinful —
and I will agree with you ; this merely sets up a true parallel to
the case of individuals, finding in sin the germ of destruction.
In this regard, there is no objection to saying that human
societies share the fate of their members ; they contract the stain
from them, and come to a like end. This is to reason merely by
the light of nature. But when we have once admitted and

* Amedee Thierry, La Gaule sous I' administration romaine, vol. i,
p. 244.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

pondered these two truths, we shall find no further help, I repeat,
in the wisdom of the ancients.

That wisdom tells us nothing definite as to the ways in which
the Divine will moves in order to compass the death of peoples ;
it is, on the contrary, driven to consider these ways as essentially
mysterious. It is seized with a pious terror at the sight of ruins,
and admits too easily that the fallen peoples could not have been
thus shaken, struck down, and hurled into the gulf, except by the
aid of miracles. I can readily believe that certain events have
had a miraculous element, so far as this is stated by Scripture ;
but where, as is usually the case, the formal testimony of Scripture
is wanting, we may legitimately hold the ancient opinion to be
incomplete and unenlightened. We may, in fact, take the
opposite view, and recognize that the heavy hand of God is laid
without ceasing on our societies, as the effect of a decision pro-
nounced before the rise of the first people ; and that the blow
falls according to rule and foreknowledge, by virtue of fixed
edicts, inscribed in the code of the universe by the side of other
laws which, in their rigid severity, govern organic and inorganic
nature alike.

We may justly reproach the philosophy of the early sacred
writers with a lack of experience ; and so, we may say, they
explain a mystery merely by enunciating a theological truth
which, however certain, is itself another mystery. They have not
pushed their inquiries so far as to observe the facts of the natural
world. But at least one cannot accuse them of misunderstanding
the greatness of the problem and scratching for solutions at the
surface of the ground. In fact, they have been content to state
the question in lofty language ; and if they have not solved it,
or even thrown light upon it, at least they have not made it a
breeder of errors. This puts them far above the rationalistic
schools and all their works.

The great minds of Athens and Rome formulated the theory,
accepted by later ages, that States, civilizations, and peoples,
are destroyed only by luxury, effeminacy, misgovernment,
fanaticism, and the corruption of morals. These causes, taken

THE DISEASE OF CIVILIZATIONS

singly or together, were declared to be responsible for the fall of
human societies ; the natural corollary being that in the absence
of these causes there can be no solvent whatever. The final
conclusion is that societies, more fortunate than men, die only a
violent death ; and if a nation can be imagined as escaping the
destructive forces I have mentioned, there is no reason why
it should not last as long as the earth itself. When the ancients
invented this theory, they did not see where it was leading them ;
they regarded it merely as a buttress for their ethical notions,
to establish which was, as we know, the sole aim of their historical
method. In their narrative of events, they were so taken up
with the idea of bringing out the admirable influence of virtue,
and the deplorable effects of vice and crime, that anything which
marred the harmony of this excellent moral picture had little
interest for them, and so was generally forgotten or set aside.
This method was not only false and petty, but also had very often
a different result from that intended by its authors ; for it applied
the terms "virtue" and "vice" in an arbitrary way, as the needs
of the moment dictated. Yet, to a certain extent, the theory
is excused by the stern and noble sentiment that lay at the base
of it ; and if the genius of Plutarch and Tacitus has built mere
romances and libels on this foundation, at any rate the libels
are generous, and the romances sublime.

I wish I could show myself as indulgent to the use that the
authors of the eighteenth century have made of the theory.
But there is too great a difference between their masters and
themselves. The former had even a quixotic devotion to the
maintenance of the social order ; the latter were eager for
novelty and furiously bent on destruction. The ancients made
their false ideas bear a noble progeny ; the moderns have pro-
duced only monstrous abortions. Their theory has furnished them
with arms against all principles of government, which they have
reproached in turn with tyranny, fanaticism, and corruption.
The Voltairean way of " preventing the ruin of society" is to
destroy religion, law, industry, and commerce, under the pretext
that religion is another name for fanaticism, law for despotism,

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

industry and commerce for luxury and corruption. Where so
many errors reign, I certainly agree that we have " bad govern-
ment."

I have not the least desire to write a polemic ; my object is
merely to show how an idea common to Thucydides and the
Abbe Raynal can produce quite opposite results. It makes
for conservatism in the one, for an anarchic cynicism in the
other — and is an error in both. The causes usually given for
the fall of nations are not necessarily the real causes ; and
though I willingly admit that they may come to the surface in
the death-agony of a people, I deny that they have enough power,
enough destructive energy, to draw on, by themselves, the
irremediable catastrophe.

CHAPTER II

FANATICISM, LUXURY, CORRUPTION OF MORALS, AND IRRE-
LIGION DO NOT NECESSARILY LEAD TO THE FALL OF
SOCIETIES

I must first explain what I understand by a " society." I do not
mean the more or less extended sphere within which, in some
form or other, a distinct sovereignty is exercised. The Athenian
democracy is not a " society " in our sense, any more than
the Kingdom of Magadha, the empire of Pontus, or the Caliphate
of Egypt in the time of the Fatimites. They are fragments of
societies, which, no doubt, change, coalesce, or break up according
to the natural laws that I am investigating ; but their existence
or death does not imply the existence or death of a society.
Their formation is usually a mere transitory phenomenon, having
but a limited or indirect influence on the civilization in which
they arise. What I mean by a " society " is an assemblage of
men moved by similar ideas and the same instincts ; their
political unity may be more or less imperfect, but their social
unity must be complete. Thus Egypt, Assyria, Greece, India,
and China were, or still are, the theatre where distinct and
separate societies have played out their own destinies, save when
these have been brought for a time into conjunction by political
troubles. As I shall speak of the parts only when my argument
applies to the whole, I shall use the words " nation " or " people "
either in the wide or the narrow sense, without any room for
ambiguity. I return now to my main subject, which is to show
that fanaticism, luxury, -corruption of morals, and irreligion do
not necessarily bring about the ruin of nations.

All these phenomena have been found in a highly developed
state, either in isolation or together, among peoples which were
actually the better for them — or at any rate not the worse.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

The Aztec Empire in America seems to have existed mainly
" for the greater glory " of fanaticism. I cannot imagine any-
thing more fanatical than a society like that of the Aztecs, which
rested on a religious foundation, continually watered by the blood
of human sacrifice. It has been denied,* perhaps with some
truth, that the ancient peoples of Europe ever practised ritual
murder on victims who were regarded as innocent, with the
exception of shipwrecked sailors and prisoners of war. But for
the ancient Mexicans one victim was as good as another. With a
ferocity recognized by a modern physiologist f as characteristic
of the races of the New World, they massacred their fellow
citizens on their altars, without pity, without flinching, and
without discrimination. This did not prevent their being a
powerful, industrious, and wealthy people, which would cer-
tainly for many ages have gone on flourishing, reigning, and
throat-cutting, had not the genius of Hernando Cortes and the
courage of his companions stepped in to put an end to the
monstrous existence of such an Empire. Thus fanaticism does
not cause the fall of States.

Luxury and effeminacy have no better claims than fanaticism.
Their effects are to be seen only in the upper classes ; and though
they assumed different forms in the ancient world, among the
Greeks, the Persians, and the Romans, I doubt whether they were
ever brought to a greater pitch of refinement than at the present
day, in France, Germany, England, and Russia — especially in
the last two. And it is just these two, England and Russia, that,
of all the States of modern Europe, seem to be gifted with a
peculiar vitality. Again, in the Middle Ages, the Venetians, the
Genoese, and the Pisans crowded their shops with the treasures
of the whole world ; they displayed them in their palaces, and
carried them over every sea. But they were certainly none the
weaker for that. Thus luxury and effeminacy are in no way the
necessary causes of weakness and ruin.

Again, the corruption of morals, however terrible a scourge it

* By C. F.Weber, Lucani Pharsalia (Leipzig, 1828), vol. i, pp. 122-3, note.
t Prichard, "Natural History of Man." Dr. Martius is still more
explicit. Cf. Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien, vol. i, pp. 379-80.

FANATICISM, LUXURY, AND IRRELIGION

may be, is not always an agent of destruction. If it were, the
military power and commercial prosperity of a nation would have
to vary directly with the purity of its morals ; but this is by no
means the case. The curious idea that the early Romans had
all the virtues * has now been rightly given up by most people.
We no longer see anything very edifying in the patricians of the
early Republic, who treated their wives like slaves, their children
like cattle, and their creditors like wild beasts. If there were still
any advocates to plead their unrighteous cause by arguing from
,an assumed " variation in the moral standard of different ages,"
it would not be very hard to show how flimsy such an argument is.
In all ages the misuse of power has excited equal indignation.
If the rape of Lucrece did not bring about the expulsion of the
kings, if the tribunate f was not established owing to the attempt
of Appius Claudius, at any rate the real causes that lay behind
these two great revolutions, by cloaking themselves under such
pretexts, reveal the state of public morality at the time. No,
we cannot account for the greater vigour of all early peoples by
alleging their greater virtue. From the beginning of history,
there has been no human society, however small, that has not
contained the germ of every vice. And yet, however burdened
with this load of depravity, the nations seem to march on very
comfortably, and often, in fact, to owe their greatness to their
detestable customs. The Spartans enjoyed a long life and the
admiration of men merely owing to their laws, which were those
of a robber-state. Was the fall of the Phoenicians due to the
corruption that gnawed their vitals and was disseminated by
them over the whole world ? Not at all ; on the contrary, this
corruption was the main instrument of their power and glory.
From the day when they first touched the shores of the Greek
islands,! and went their way, cheating their customers, robbing

* Balzac, Lettre a madame la duchess e de Montausier.

t The power of the Tribunate was revived after Appius's decemvirate
in 450 B.C., but the office had been founded more than forty years before.
On the other hand, consular tribunes were first elected after 450 (in
445) ; but the consular tribunate could hardly be described as a " great
revolution." The author may be confusing the two tribunates. — Tr.

X Cp. Homer, "Odyssey," xv, 415 sqq.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

their hosts, abducting women for the slave-market, stealing in
one place to sell in another — from that day, it is true, their
reputation fell not unreasonably low ; but they did not prosper
any the less for that, and they hold a place in history which is
quite unaffected by all the stories of their greed and treachery.

Far from admitting the superior moral character of early
societies, I have no doubt that nations, as they grow older and
so draw nearer their fall, present a far more satisfactory appear-
ance from the censor's point of view. Customs become less
rigid, rough edges become softened, the path of life is made
easier, the rights existing between man and man have had time
to become better defined and understood, and so the theories of
social justice have reached, little by little, a higher degree of
delicacy. At the time when the Greeks overthrew the Empire
of Darius, or when the Goths entered Rome, there were probably
far more honest men in Athens, Babylon, and the imperial city
than in the glorious days of Harmodius, Cyrus the Great, and
Valerius Publicola.

We need not go back to those distant epochs, but may judge
them by ourselves. Paris is certainly one of the places on this
earth where civilization has touched its highest point, and where
the contrast with primitive ages is most marked ; and yet you
will find a large number of religious and learned people admitting
that in no place and time were there so many examples of practical
virtue, of sincere piety, of saintly lives governed by a fine sense
of duty, as are to be met to-day in the great modern city. The
ideals of goodness are as high now as they ever were in the loftiest
minds of the seventeenth century ; and they have laid aside the
bitterness, the strain of sternness and savagery— I was almost
saying, of pedantry — that sometimes coloured them in that age.
And so, as a set-off to the frightful perversities of the modern
spirit, we find, in the very temple where that spirit has set up
the high altar of its power, a striking contrast, which never
appeared to former centuries in the same consoling light as it
has to our own.

I do not even believe that there is a lack of great men in periods

FANATICISM, LUXURY, AND IRRELIGION

of corruption and decadence ; and by " great men " I mean those
most richly endowed with energy of character and the masculine
virtues. If I look at the list of the Roman Emperors (most of
them, by the way, as high above their subjects in merit as they
were in rank) I find names like Trajan, Antoninus Pius, Septimius
Severus, and Jovian ; and below the throne, even among the city
mob, I see with admiration all the great theologians, the great
martyrs, the apostles of the primitive Church, to say nothing of
the virtuous Pagans. Strong, brave, and active spirits filled the
camps and the Italian towns ; and one may doubt whether in
the time of Cincinnatus, Rome held, in proportion, so many men
of eminence in all the walks of practical life. The testimony of
the facts is conclusive.

Thus men of strong character, men of talent and energy, so
far from being unknown to human societies in the time of their
decadence and old age, are actually to be found in greater
abundance than in the days when an empire is young. Further,
the ordinary level of morality is higher in the later period than
in the earlier. It is not generally true to say that in States on
the point of death the corruption of morals is any more virulent
than in those just born. It is equally doubtful whether this
corruption brings about their fall ; for some States, far from
dying of their perversity, have lived and grown fat on it. One
may go further, and show that moral degradation is not neces-
sarily a mortal disease at all ; for, as against the other maladies
of society, it has the advantage of being curable ; and the cure
is sometimes very rapid.

In fact, the morals of any particular people are in continual
ebb and flow throughout its history. To go no further afield
than our own France, we may say that, in the fifth and sixth
centuries, the conquered race of the Gallo-Romans were certainly
better than their conquerors from a moral point of view. Taken
individually, they were not always their inferiors even in courage
and the military virtues.* In the following centuries, when the

* Augustin Thierry, Recits des temps mirovingiens ; see especially the
story of Mummolus.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

two races had begunjtp irrtermin^eJLlhey_.se£ra4o have deterio-
rated ; and we have no reason to be very proud of the picture
that was presented by our dear country about the eighth and
ninth centuries. But in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth,
a great change came over the scene. Society had succeeded in
harmonizing its most discordant elements, and the state of
morals was reasonably good. The ideas of the time were not
favourable to the little casuistries that keep a man from the right
path even when he wishes to walk in it. The fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries were times of terrible conflict and perversity.
Brigandage reigned supreme. It was a period of decadence in
the strictest sense of the word ; and the decadence was shown
in a thousand ways. In view of the debauchery, the tyranny,
and the massacres of that age, of the complete withering of all
the finer feelings in every section of the State — in the nobles who
plundered their villeins, in the citizens who sold their country to
England, in a clergy that was false to its professions — one might
have thought that the whole society was about to crash to the
ground and bury its shame deep under its own ruins. . . . The
crash never came. The society continued to live ; it devised
remedies, it beat back its foes, it emerged from the dark cloud.
The sixteenth century was far more reputable than its prede-
cessor, in spite of its orgies of blood, which were a pale reflection
of those of the preceding age. St. Bartholomew's day is not such
a shameful memory as the massacre of the Armagnacs. Finally,
the French people passed from this semi-barbarous twilight
into the pure splendour of day, the age of Fenelon, Bossuet, and
the Montausier. Thus, up to Louis XIV, our history shows a
series of rapid changes from good to evil, from evil to good ;
while the real vitality of the nation has little to do with its moral
condition. I have touched lightly on the larger curves of change ;
to trace the multitude of lesser changes within these would
require many pages. To speak even of what we have all but
seen with our own eyes, is it not clear that in every decade since
1787 the standard of morality has varied enormously ? I con-
clude that the corruption of morals is a fleeting and unstable

FANATICISM, LUXURY, AND IRRELIGION

phenomenon : it becomes sometimes worse and sometimes better,
lind so cannot be considered as necessarily causing the ruin of
societies.

I must examine here an argument, put forward in our time,
which never entered people's heads in the eighteenth century ;
but as it fits in admirably with the subject of the preceding
paragraph, I could not find a better place in which to speak of it.
Many people have come to think that the end of a society is at
hand when its religious ideas tend to weaken and disappear.
They see a kind of connexion between the open profession of the
doctrines of Zeno and Epicurus at Athens and Rome, with the
consequent abandonment (according to them) of the national
cults, and the fall of the two republics. They fail to notice that
these are virtually the only examples that can be given of such
a coincidence. The Persian Empire at the time of its fall was
wholly under the sway of the Magi. Tyre, Carthage, Judaea, the
Aztec andPeruvian monarchies were struck down while fanatically
clinging to their altars. Thus it cannot be maintained that all
the peoples whose existence as a nation is being destroyed are
at that moment expiating the sin they committed in deserting
the faith of their fathers. Further, even the two examples that
go to support the theory seem to prove much more than they
really do. I deny absolutely that the ancient cults were ever
given up in Rome or Athens, until the day when they were
supplanted in the hearts of all men by the victorious religion of
Christ. In other words, I believe that there has never been a
real breach of continuity in the religious beliefs of any nation on
this earth. The outward form or inner meaning of the creed
may have changed ; but we shall always find some Gallic Teutates
making way for the Roman Jupiter, Jupiter for the Christian
God, without any interval of unbelief, in exactly the same way
as the dead give up their inheritance to the living. Hence, as
there hats never been a nation of which one could say that it had
no faith at all, we have no right to assume that " the lack of faith
causes the destruction of States."

I quite see the grounds on which such a view is based. Its

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

defenders will tell us of " the notorious fact " that a little before
the time of Pericles at Athens, and about the age of the Scipios
at Rome the upper classes became more and more prone, first
to reason about their religion, then to doubt it, and finally
to give up all faith in it, and to take pride in being atheists.
Little by little, we shall be told, the habit of atheism spread,
until there was no one with any pretensions to intellect at
all who did not defy one augur to pass another without
smiling.

This opinion has a grain of truth, but is largely false. Say,
if you will, that Aspasia, at the end of her little suppers, and
Laelius, in the company of his friends, made a virtue of mocking
at the sacred beliefs of their country ; no one will contradict
you. But they would not have been allowed to vent their ideas
too publicly ; and yet they lived at the two most brilliant periods
of Greek and Roman history. The imprudent conduct of his
mistress all but cost Pericles himself very dear ; we remember
the tears he shed in open court, tears which would not of them-
selves have secured the acquittal of the fair infidel. Think, too,
of the official language held by contemporary poets, how Sophocles
and Aristophanes succeeded ^Eschylus as the stern champions of
outraged deity. The whole nation believed in its gods, regarded
Socrates as a revolutionary and a criminal, and wished to see
Anaxagoras brought to trial and condemned. . . . What of the
later ages ? Did the impious theories of the philosophers succeed
at any time in reaching the masses ? Not for a single day.
Scepticism remained a luxury of the fashionable world andof
that world alone. One may call it useless to speak of the thoughts
of the plain citizens, the country folk, and the slaves, who had no
influence in the government, and could not impose their ideas
on their rulers. They had, however, a very real influence ; and the
proof is that until paganism was at its last gasp, their temples
and shrines had to be kept going, and their acolytes to be paid.
The most eminent and enlightened men, the most fervent in their
unbelief, had not only to accept the public honour of wearing
the priestly robe, but to undertake the most disagreeable duties

FANATICISM, LUXURY, AND IRRELIGION

of the cult — they who were accustomed to turn over, day and
night, tnanu diurna, manu nocturna, the pages of Lucretius.
Not only did they go through these rites on ceremonial occasions,
but they used their scanty hours of leisure, hours snatched with
difficulty from the life-and-death game of politics, in composing
treatises on augury. I am referring to the great Julius.* Well,
all the emperors after him had to hold the office of high-priest,
even Constantine. He, certainly, had far stronger reason than
all his predecessors for shaking off a yoke so degrading to his
honour as a Christian prince ; yet he was forced by public opinion,
that blazed up for the last time before being extinguished for
ever, to come to terms with the old national religion. Thus it
was not the faith of the plain citizens, the country folk, and the
slaves that was of small account ; it was the theories of the men
of culture that mattered nothing. They protested in vain, in
the name of reason and good sense, against the absurdities of
paganism ; the mass of the people neither would nor could give
up one belief before they had been provided with another. They
proved once more the great truth that it is affirmation, not
negation, which is of service in the business of this world. So
strongly did men feel this truth in the third century that there
was a religious reaction among the higher classes. The reaction
was serious and general, and lasted till the world definitely passed
into the arms of the Church. In fact, the supremacy of philo-
sophy reached its highest point under the Antonines and began
to decline soon after their death. I need not here go deeply into
this question, however interesting it may be for the historian of
ideas ; it will be enough for me to show that the revolution

* Caesar, the democrat and sceptic, knew how to hold language con-
trary to his opinions when it was necessary. His funeral oration on his
aunt is very curious : " On the mother's side," he said, " Julia was
descended from kings ; on her father's, from the immortal gods : for
the Marcian Reges, whose name her mother bore, were sprung from
Ancus Marcius, while Venus is the ancestress of the Julii, the clan to which
belongs the family of the Caesars. Thus in our blood is mingled at the
same time the sanctity of kings, who are the mightiest of men, and the
awful majesty of the gods, who hold kings themselves in their power "
(Suetonius, " Julius," p. 6). Nothing could be more monarchical ; and
also, for an atheist, nothing could be more religious.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

gained ground as the years went on, and to bring out its
immediate cause.

The older the Roman world became, the greater was the part
played by the army. From the emperor, who invariably came
from the ranks, down to the pettiest officer in his Praetorian
guard and the prefect of the most unimportant district, every
official had begun his career on the parade-ground, under the
vine-staff of the centurion ; in other words they had all sprung
from the mass of the people, of whose unquenchable piety I have
already spoken. When they had scaled the heights of office,
they found confronting them, to their intense annoyance and
dismay, the ancient aristocracy of the municipalities, the local
senators, who took pleasure in regarding them as upstarts, and
would gladly have turned them to ridicule if they had dared.
Thus the real masters of the State and the once predominant
families were at daggers drawn. The commanders of the army
were believers and fanatics — Maximin, for example, and Galerius,
and a hundred others. The senators and decurions still found
their chief delight in the literature of the sceptics ; but as they
actually lived at court, that is to say among soldiers, they were
forced to adopt a way of speaking and an official set of opinions
which should not put them to any risk. Gradually an atmosphere
of devotion spread through the Empire ; and this led the philo-
sophers themselves, with Euhemerus at their head, to invent
systems of reconciling the theories of the rationalists with the
State religion — a movement in which the Emperor Julian was the
most powerful spirit. There is no reason to give much praise to
this renaissance of pagan piety, for it caused most of the persecu-
tions under which our martyrs have suffered. The masses,
whose religious feelings had been wounded by the atheistic sects,
had bided their time so long as they were ruled by the upper
classes. But as soon as the empire had become democratic, and
the pride of these classes had been brought low, then the populace
determined to have their revenge. They made a mistake,
however, in their victims, and cut the throats of the Christians,
whom they took for philosophers, and accused of impiety.

FANATICISM, LUXURY, AND IRRELIGION

What a difference there was between this and an earlier age !
The really sceptical pagan was King Agrippa, who wished to hear
St. Paul merely out of curiosity.* He listened to him, disputed
with him, took him for a madman, but did not dream of punishing
him for thinking differently from himself. Another example is
the historian Tacitus, who was full of contempt for the new
sectaries, but blamed Nero for his cruelty in persecuting them.
Agrippa and Tacitus were the real unbelievers. Diocletian was
a politician ruled by the clamours of his people ; Decius and
Aurelian were fanatics like their subjects.

Even when the Roman Government had definitely gone over
to Christianity, what a task it was to bring the different peoples
into the bosom of the Church ! In Greece there was a series
of terrible struggles, in the Universities as well as in the small
towns and villages. The bishops had everywhere such difficulty
in ousting the little local divinities that very often the victory
was due less to argument and conversion than to time, patience,
and diplomacy. The clergy were forced to make use of pious
frauds, and their ingenuity replaced the deities of wood, meadow,
and fountain, by saints, martyrs, and virgins. Thus the feelings
of reverence continued without a break ; for some time they
were directed to the wrong objects, but they at last found the
right road. . . . But what am I saying ? Can we be so certain
that even in France there are not to be found to this day a few
places where the tenacity of some odd superstition still gives
trouble to the parish priest ? In Catholic Brittany, in the
eighteenth century, a bishop had a long struggle with a village-
people that clung to the worship of a stone idol. In vain was the
gross image thrown into the water ; its fanatical admirers always
fished it out again, and the help of a company of infantry was
needed to break it to pieces. We see from this what a long life
paganism had — and still has. I conclude that there is no good
reason for holding that Rome and Athens were for a single day
without religion.

Since then, a nation has never, either in ancient or modern
* Acts xxvi, 24, 28, 31.

B 17

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

times, given up one faith before being duly provided with another,
it is impossible to claim that the ruin of nations follows from
their irreligion.

I have now shown that fanaticism, luxury, and the corruption
of morals have not necessarily any power of destruction, and that
irreligion has no political reality at all ; it remains to discuss the
influence of bad government, which is well worth a chapter to
itself.

CHAPTER III

THE RELATIVE MERIT OF GOVERNMENTS HAS NO INFLUENCE
ON THE LENGTH OF A NATION'S LIFE

I know the difficulty of my present task. That I should even

venture to touch on it will seem a kind of paradox to many of

my readers. People are convinced, and rightly convinced, that

the good administration of good laws has a direct and powerful

influence on the health of a people ; and this conviction is so

strong, that they attribute to such administration the mere fact

that a human society goes on living at all. Here they are

wrcng.

They would be right, of course, if it were true that nations

could exist only in a state of well being ; but we know that,

like individuals, they can often go on for a long time, carrying

within them the seeds of some fell disease, which may suddenly

break out in 3. virulent form. If nations invariably died of their

sufferings, not one would survive the first years of its growth ;

for it is precisely in those years that they show the worst

administration, the worst laws, and the greatest disorder. But

in this respect they are the exact opposite of the human organism.

The greatest enemy that the latter has to fear, especially in

infancy, is a continuous series of illnesses — we know beforehand

that there is no resisting these ; to a society, however, such a

series does no harm at all, and history gives us abundant proof

that the body politic is always being cured of the longest, the

most terrible and devastating attacks of disease, of which the

worst forms are ill-conceived laws and an oppressive or negligent

administration.*

* The reader will understand that I am not speaking of the political
existence of a centre of sovereignty, but of the life of a whole society,
or the span of a whole civilization. The distinction drawn at the beginning
of chap, ii must be applied here.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

We will first try to make clear in what a " bad government "
consists.

It is a malady that seems to take many forms. It would be
impossible even to enumerate them all, for they are multiplied
to infinity by the differences in the constitutions of peoples,
and in the place and time of their existence. But if we group
these forms under four main headings, there are very few varieties
that will not be included.

A government is bad when it is set up by a foreign Power.
Athens experienced this kind of government under the Thirty
Tyrants ; they were driven out, and the national spirit, far from
dying under their oppressive rule, was tempered by it to a greater
hardness.

A government is bad when it is based on conquest, pure and
simple. In the fourteenth century practically the whole of
France passed under the yoke of England. It emerged strongei
than before, and entered on a career of great brilliance. China
was overrun and conquered by hordes of Mongols ; it managed
to expel them beyond its borders, after sapping their vitality in
a most extraordinary way. Since that time China has fallen
into a new servitude ; but although the Manchus have already
enjoyed more than a century of sovereignty, they are on the eve
of suffering the same fate as the Mongols, and have passed
through a similar period of weakness.

A government is especially bad when the principle on which
it rests becomes vitiated, and ceases to operate in the healthy
and vigorous way it did at first. This was the condition
of the Spanish monarchy. It was based on the military spirit
and the idea of social freedom ; towards the end of Philip IPs
reign it forgot its origin and began to degenerate. There has
never been a country where all theories of conduct had become
more obsolete, where the executive was more feeble and dis-
credited, where the organization of the church itself was so open
to criticism. Agriculture and industry, like everything else,
were struck down and all but buried in the morass where the
nation was decaying. . . . But is Spain dead ? Not at all.

THE RELATIVE MERIT OF GOVERNMENTS

The country of which so many despaired has given Europe the
glorious example of a desperate resistance to the fortune of
our arms ; and at the present moment it is perhaps in Spain,
of all the modern States, that the feeling of nationality is most
intense.

Finally, a government is bad when, by the very nature of its
institutions, it gives colour to an antagonism between the supreme
power and the mass of the people, or between different classes
of society. Thus, in the Middle Ages, we see the kings of England
and France engaged in a struggle with their great vassals, and
the peasants flying at the throats of their overlords. In Germany,
too, the first effects of the new freedom of thought were the
civil wars of the Hussites, the Anabaptists, and all the other
sectaries. A little before that, Italy was in such distress through
the division of the supreme power, and the quarrel over the
fragments between the Emperor, the Pope, the nobles, and the
communes, that the masses, not knowing whom to obey, often
ended by obeying nobody. Did this cause the ruin of the whole
society ? Not at all. Its civilization was never more brilliant,
its industry more productive, its influence abroad more incon-
testable.

I can well believe that sometimes, in the midst of these storms,
a wise and potent law-giver came, like a sunbeam, to shed the
light of his beneficence on the peoples he ruled. The light
remained only for a short space ; and just as its absence had
not caused death, so its presence did not bring life. For this,
the times of prosperity would have had to be frequent and of
long duration. But upright princes were rare in that age, and
are rare in all ages. Even the best of them have their detractors,
and the happiest pictures are full of shadow. Do all historians
alike regard the time of King William III as an era of prosperity
for England ? Do they all admire Louis XIV, the Great, with-
out reserve ? On the contrary ; the critics are all at their posts,
and their arrows know where to find their mark. And yet these
are, on the whole, the best regulated and most fruitful periods
in the history of ourselves and our neighbours. Good govern-

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

ments are so thinly sown on the soil of the ages, and even when
they spring up, are so withered by criticism ; political science,
the highest and most intricate of all sciences, is so incommen-
surate with the weakness of man, that we cannot sincerely claim
that nations perish from being ill-governed. Thank heaven
they have the power of soon becoming accustomed to their
sufferings, which, in their worst forms, are infinitely preferable
to anarchy. The most superficial study of history will be enough
to show that however bad may be the government that is drain-
ing away the life-blood of a people, it is often better than many
of the administrations that have gone before.

CHAPTER IV

THE MEANING OF THE WORD "DEGENERATION"; THE
MIXTURE OF RACIAL ELEMENTS ; HOW SOCIETIES ARE
FORMED AND BROKEN UP

However little the spirit of the foregoing pages may have been
understood, no one will conclude from them that I attach no
importance to the maladies of the social organism, and that,
for me, bad government, fanaticism, and irreligion are mere
unmeaning accidents. On the contrary I quite agree with the
ordinary view, that it is a lamentable thing to see a society
being gradually undermined by these fell diseases, and that no
amount of care and trouble would be wasted if a remedy could
only be found. I merely add that if these poisonous blossoms
of disunion are not grafted on a stronger principle of destruction,
if they are not the consequences of a hidden plague more terrible
still, we may rest assured that their ravages will not be fatal
and that after a time of suffering more or less drawn out, the
society will emerge from their toils, perhaps with strength and
youth renewed.

The examples I have brought forward seem to me conclusive,
though their number might be indefinitely increased. Through
some such reasoning as this the ordinary opinions of men have
at last come to contain an instinctive perception of the truth.
It is being dimly seen that one ought not to have given such a
preponderant importance to evils which were after all merely
derivative, and that the true causes of the life and death of
peoples should have been sought elsewhere, and been drawn
from a deeper well. Men have begun to look at the inner con-
stitution of a society, by itself, quite apart from all circumstances
of health or disease. They have shown themselves ready to
admit that no external cause could lay the hand of death on any

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

society, so long as a certain destructive principle, inherent in it
from the first, born from its womb and nourished on its entrails,
had not reached its full maturity ; on the other hand, so soon
as this destructive principle had come into existence, the society
was doomed to certain death, even though it had the best of all
possible governments — in exactly the same way as a spent horse
will fall dead on a concrete road.

A great step in advance was made, I admit, when the question
was considered from this point of view, which was anyhow
much more philosophic than the one taken up before. Bichat,*
as we know, did not seek to discover the great mystery of exist-
ence by studying the human subject from the outside ; the key
to the riddle, he saw, lay within. Those who followed the same
method, in our own subject, were travelling on the only road
that really led to discoveries. Unfortunately, this excellent
idea of theirs was the result of mere instinct ; its logical impli-
cations were not carried very far, and it was shattered on the first
difficulty. " Yes," they cried, " the cause of destruction lies hidden
in the very vitals of the social organism ; but what is this cause ? "
"Degeneration," was the answer ; " nations die when they are com-
posed of elements that have degenerated." The answer was excel-
lent, etymologically and otherwise. It only remained to define
the meaning of " nation that has degenerated." This was the
rock on which they foundered ; a degenerate people meant, they
said, " A people which through bad government, misuse of wealth,
fanaticism, or irreligion, had lost the characteristic virtues of
its ancestors." What a fall is there ! Thus a people dies of
its endemic diseases because it is degenerate, and is degenerate
because it dies. This circular argument merely proves that the
science of social anatomy is in its infancy. I quite agree that
societies perish because they are degenerate, and for no other
reason. This is the evil condition that makes them wholly
unable to withstand the shock of the disasters that close in
upon them ; and when they can no longer endure the blows of

* The celebrated physiologist (1771-1802), and author of L'Anatomie
generate. — Tr.

THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION

adverse fortune, and have no power to raise their heads when
the scourge has passed, then we have the sublime spectacle of a
nation in agony. If it perish, it is because it has no longer the
same vigour as it had of old in battling with the dangers of life ;
in a word, because it is degenerate. I repeat, the term is excellent;
but we must explain it a little better, and give it a definite
meaning. How and why is a nation's vigour lost ? How does
it degenerate ? These are the questions which we must try to
answer. Up to the present, men have been content with finding
the word, without unveiling the reality that lies behind. This
further step I shall now attempt to take.

The word degenerate, when applied to a people, means (as it
ought to mean) that the people has no longer the same intrinsic
value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood
in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected
the quality of that blood. In other words, though the nation
bears the name given by its founders, the name no longer
connotes the same race ; in fact, the man of a decadent time, the
degenerate man properly so called, is a different being, from the
racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages. I agree that
he still keeps something of their essence ; but the more he degen-
erates the more attenuated does this "something" become.
The heterogeneous elements that henceforth prevail in him
give him quite a different nationality — a very original one, no
doubt, but such originality is not to be envied. He is only a
very distant kinsman of those he still calls his ancestors. He,
and his civilization with him, will certainly die on the day when
the primordial race-unit is so broken up and swamped by the
influx of foreign elements, that its effective qualities have no
longer a sufficient freedom of action. It will not, of course,
absolutely disappear, but it will in practice be so beaten down
and enfeebled, that its power will be felt less and less as time
goes on. It is at this point that all the results of degeneration
will appear, and the process may be considered complete.

If I manage to prove this proposition, I shall have given
a meaning to the word "degeneration." By showing how

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

the essential quality of a nation gradually alters, I shift the
responsibility for its decadence, which thus becomes, in a way,
less shameful, for it weighs no longer on the sons, but on the
nephews, then on the cousins, then on collaterals more or less
removed. And when I have shown by examples that great
peoples, at the moment of their death, have only a very small
and insignificant share in the blood of the founders, into whose
inheritance they come, I shall thereby have explained clearly
enough how it is possible for civilizations to fall — the reason
being that they are no longer in the same hands. At the same
time I shall be touching on a problem which is much more
dangerous than that which I have tried to solve in the preceding
chapters. This problem is : " Are there serious and ultimate
differences of value between human races ; and can these differ-
ences be estimated ? "

I will begin at once to develop the series of arguments that
touch the first point ; they will indirectly settle the second also.

To put my ideas into a clearer and more easily intelligible
form I may compare a nation to a human body, which, accord-
ing to the physiologists, is constantly renewing all its parts ;
the work of transformation that goes on is incessant, and after
a certain number of years the body retains hardly any of its
former elements. Thus, in the old man, there are no traces of
the man of middle age, in the adult no traces of the youth, nor in
the youth of the child ; the personal identity in all these stages
is kept purely by the succession of inner and outer forms, each
an imperfect copy of the last. Yet I will admit one difference
between a nation and a human body ; in the former there is no
question of the " forms " being preserved, for these are destroyed
and disappear with enormous rapidity. I will take a people,
or better, a tribe, at the moment when, yielding to a definite
vital instinct, it provides itself with laws and begins to play a
part in the world. By the mere fact of its wants and powers
increasing, it inevitably finds itself in contact with other similar
associations, and by war or peaceful measures succeeds in
incorporating them with itself.

THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION

Not all human families can reach this first step ; but it is a
step that every tribe must take if it is to rank one day as a
nation. Even if a certain number of races, themselves perhaps
not very far advanced on the ladder of civilization, have passed
through this stage, we cannot properly regard this as a general
rule.

Indeed, the human species seems to have a very great diffi-
culty in raising itself above a rudimentary type of organization ;
the transition to a more complex state is made only by those
groups of tribes, that are eminently gifted. I may cite, in
support of this, the actual condition of a large number of com-
munities spread throughout the world. These backward tribes,
especially the Polynesian negroes, the Samoyedes and others
in the far north, and the majority of the African races, have never
been able to shake themselves free from their impotence ; they
live side by side in complete independence of each other. The
stronger massacre the weaker, the weaker try to move as far
away as possible from the stronger. This sums up the political
ideas of these embryo societies, which have lived on in their
imperfect state, without possibility of improvement, as long as
the human race itself. It may be said that these miserable
savages are a very small part of the earth's population. Granted ;
but we must take account of all the similar peoples who have
lived and disappeared. Their number is incalculable, and
certainly includes the vast majority of the pure-blooded yellow
and black races.

If then we are driven to admit that for a very large number
of human beings it has been, and always will be, impossible to
take even the first step towards civilization ; if, again, we consider
that these peoples are scattered over the whole face of the earth
under the most varying conditions of climate and environment,
that they live indifferently in the tropics, in the temperate zones,
and in the Arctic circle, by sea, lake, and river, in the depths
of the forest, in the grassy plains, in the arid deserts, we must
conclude that a part of mankind, is in its own nature stricken
with a paralysis, which makes it for ever unable to take even

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

the first step towards civilization, since it cannot overcome
the natural repugnance, felt by men and animals alike, to a
crossing of blood.

Leaving these tribes, that are incapable of civilization, on
one side, we come, in our journey upwards, to those which
understand that if they wish to increase their power and pros-
perity, they are absolutely compelled, either by war or
peaceful measures, to draw their neighbours within their sphere
of influence. War is undoubtedly the simpler way of doing
this. Accordingly, they go to war. But when the campaign
is finished, and the craving for destruction is satisfied, some
prisoners are left over ; these prisoners become slaves, and as
slaves, work for their masters. We have class distinctions at
once, and an industrial system : the tribe has become a little
people. This is a higher rung on the ladder of civilization, and
is not necessarily passed by all the tribes which have been able
to reach it ; many remain at this stage in cheerful stagnation.

But there are others, more imaginative and energetic, whose
ideas soar beyond mere brigandage. They manage to conquer
a great territory, and assume rights of ownership not only over
the inhabitants, but also over their land. From this moment
a real nation has been formed. The two races often continue
for a time to live side by side without mingling ; and yet, as
they become indispensable to each other, as a community of
work and interest is gradually built up, as the pride and rancour
of conquest begin to ebb away, as those below naturally tend
to rise to the level of their masters, while the masters have a
thousand reasons for allowing, or even for promoting, such a
tendency, the mixture of blood finally takes place, the two races
cease to be associated with distinct tribes, and become more and
more fused into a single whole.

The spirit of isolation is, however, so innate in the human race,
that even those who have reached this advanced stage of crossing
refuse in many cases to take a step, further. There are some
peoples who are, as we know positively, of mixed origin, but who
keep their feeling for the clan to an extraordinary degree. The

THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION

Arabs, for example, do more than merely spring from different
branches of the Semitic stock ; they belong at one and the same
time to the so-called families of Shem and Ham, not to speak of
a vast number of local strains that are intermingled with these.
Nevertheless, their attachment to the tribe, as a separate unit,
is one of the most striking features of their national character
and their political history. In fact, it has been thought possible
to attribute their expulsion from Spain not only to the actual
breaking up of their power there, but also, to a large extent,
to their being continually divided into smaller and mutually
antagonistic groups, in the struggles for promotion among the
Arab families at the petty courts of Valentia, Toledo, Cordova,
and Grenada.*

We may say the same about the majority of such peoples.
Further, where the tribal separation has broken down, a national
feeling takes its place, and acts with a similar vigour, which a
community of religion is not enough to destroy. This is the
case among the Arabs and the Turks, the Persians and the Jews,
the Parsees and the Hindus, the Nestorians of Syria and the Kurds.
We find it also in European Turkey, and can trace its course in
Hungary, among the Magyars, the Saxons, the Wallachians,
and the Croats. I know, from what I have seen with my own
eyes, that in certain parts of France, the country where races are
mingled more than perhaps anywhere else, there are little com-
munities to be found to this day, who feel a repugnance to
marrying outside their own village.

I think I am right in concluding from these examples, which
cover all countries and ages, including our own, that the human
race in all its branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing
of blood, a repulsion which in many of the branches is in-
vincible, and in others is only conquered to a slight extent.

* This attachment of the Arab tribes to their racial unity shows itself
sometimes in a very curious manner. A traveller (M. Fulgence Fresnel,
I think) says that at Djiddah, where morals are very lax, the same Bedouin
girl who will sell her favours for the smallest piece of money would think
herself dishonoured if she contracted a legal marriage with the Turk or
European to whom she contemptuously lends herself.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Even those who most completely shake off the yoke of this idea
cannot get rid of the few last traces of it ; yet such peoples are
the only members of our species who can be civilized at all.

Thus mankind lives in obedience to two laws, one of repulsion,
the other of attraction ; these act with different force on different
peoples. The first is fully respected only by those races which
can never raise themselves above the elementary completeness
of the tribal life, while the power of the second, on the contrary,
is the more absolute, as the racial units on which it is exercised
are more capable of development.

Here especially I must be concrete. I have just taken the
example of a people in embryo, whose state is like that of a single
family. I have given them the qualities which will allow them
to pass into the state of a nation. Well, suppose they have
become a nation. History does not tell me what the elements
were that constituted the original group ; all I know is that
these elements fitted it for the transformation which I have
made it undergo. Now that it has grown, it has only two
possibilities. One or other of two destinies is inevitable. It
will either conquer or be conquered.

I will give it the better part, and assume that it will conquer.
It will at the same time rule, administer, and civilize. It will
not go through its provinces, sowing a useless harvest of fire and
massacre. Monuments, customs, and institutions will be alike
sacred. It will change what it can usefully modify, and replace
it by something better. Weakness in its hands will become
strength. It will behave in such a way that, in the words of
Scripture, it will be magnified in the sight of men.

I do not know if the same thought has already struck the
reader ; but in the picture which I am presenting — and which in
certain features is that of the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Persians
and the Macedonians — two facts appear to me to stand out.
The first is that a nation, which itself lacks vigour and power, is
suddenly called upon to share a new and a better destiny — that
of the strong masters into whose hands it has fallen ; this was the
case with the Anglo-Saxons, when they had been subdued by the

THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION

Normans. The second fact is that a picked race of men, a
sovereign people, with the usual strong propensities of such a
people to cross its blood with another's, finds itself henceforth
in close contact with a race whose inferiority is shown, not only
by defeat, but also by the lack of the attributes that may be
seen in the conquerors. From the very day when the conquest
is accomplished and the fusion begins, there appears a noticeable
change of quality in the blood of the masters. If there were no
other modifying influence at work, then — at the end of a number
of years, which would vary according to the number of peoples
that composed the original stock — we should be confronted with
a new race, less powerful certainly than the better of its two
ancestors, but still of considerable strength. It would have
developed special qualities resulting from the actual mixture,
and unknown to the communities from which it sprang. But
the case is not generally so simple as this, and the intermingling
of blood is not confined for long to the two constituent peoples;

The empire I have just been imagining is a powerful one .
and its power is used to control its neighbours. I assume that
there will be new conquests ; and, every time, a current of fresh
blood will be mingled with the main stream. Henceforth, as the
nation grows, whether by war or treaty, its racial character
changes more and more. It is rich, commercial, and civilized.
The needs and the pleasures of other peoples find ample satis-
faction in its capitals, its great towns, and its ports ; while its
myriad attractions cause many foreigners to make it their home.
After a short time, we might truly say that a distinction of castes
takes the place of the original distinction of races.

I am willing to grant that the people of whom I am speaking
is strengthened in its exclusive notions by the most formal
commands of religion, and that some dreadful penalty lurks in
the background, to awe the disobedient. But since the people
is civilized, its character is soft and tolerant, even to the con-
tempt of its faith. Its oracles will speak in vain ; there will be
births outside the caste-limits. Every day new distinctions will
have to be drawn, new classifications invented ; the number of

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

social grades will be increased, and it will be almost impossible
to know where one is, amid the infinite variety of the subdivisions,
that change from province to province, from canton to canton,
from village to village. In fact, the condition will be that of the
Hindu countries. It is only, however, the Brahman who has
shown himself so tenacious of his ideas of separation ; the foreign
peoples he civilized have never fastened these cramping fetters on
their shoulders, or any rate have long since shaken them off. In
all the States that have made any advance in intellectual culture,
the process has not been checked for a single moment by those
desperate shifts to which the law-givers of the Aryavarta were
put, in their desire to reconcile the prescriptions of the Code of
Manu with the irresistible march of events. In every other place
where there were really any castes at all, they ceased to exist at
the moment when the chance of making a fortune, and of be-
coming famous by useful discoveries or social talents, became
open to the whole world, without distinction of origin. But also,
from that same day, the nation that was originally the active,
conquering, and civilizing power began to disappear ; its blood
became merged in that of all the tributaries which it had attracted
to its own stream.

Generally the dominating peoples begin by being far fewer in
number than those they conquer ; while, on the other hand,
certain races that form the basis of the population in immense
districts are extremely prolific — the Celts, for example, and the
Slavs. This is yet another reason for the rapid disappearance
of the conquering races. Again, their greater activity and the
more personal part they take in the affairs of the State make them
the chief mark for attack after a disastrous battle, a proscription,
or a revolution. Thus, while by their very genius for civilization
they collect round them the different elements in which they are
to be absorbed, they are the victims, first of their original small-
ness of number, and then of a host of secondary causes which
combine together for their destruction.

It is fairly obvious that the time when the disappearance takes
place will vary considerably, according to circumstances. Yet

THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION

it does finally come to pass, and is everywhere quite complete,
long before the end of the civilization which the victorious race
is supposed to be animating. A people may often go on living
and working, and even growing in power, after the active,
generating force of its life and glory has ceased to exist. Does
this contradict what I have said above ? Not at all ; for while
the blood of the civilizing race is gradually drained away by
being parcelled out among the peoples that are conquered or
annexed, the impulse originally given to these peoples still
persists. The institutions which the dead master had invented,
the laws he had prescribed, the customs he had initiated — all
these live after him. No doubt the customs, laws, and institu-
tions have quite forgotten the spirit that informed their youth ;
they survive in dishonoured old age, every day more sapless and
rotten. But so long as even their shadows remain, the building
stands, the body seems to have a soul, the pale ghost walks.
When the original impulse has worked itself out, the last word
has been said. Nothing remains ; the civilization is dead.

I think I now have all the data necessary for grappling with
the problem of the life and death of nations ; and I can say
positively that a people will never die, if it remains eternally
composed of the same national elements. If the empire of Darius
had, at the battle of Arbela, been able to fill its ranks with
Persians, that is to say with real Aryans ; if the Romans of the
later Empire had had a Senate and an army of the same stock as
that which existed at the time of the Fabii, their dominion would
never have come to an end. So long as they kept the same purity
of blood, the Persians and Romans would have lived and reigned.
In the long run, it might be said, a conqueror, more irresistible
than they, would have appeared on the scene ; and they would
have fallen under a well-directed attack, or a long siege, or simply
by the fortune of a single battle. Yes, a State might be over-
thrown in this way, but not a civilization or a social organism.
Invasion and defeat are but the dark clouds that for a time blot
out the day, and then pass over. Many examples might be
brought forward in proof of this.

c 33

THE INEOUALITY OF HUMAN RACES,

In modern times the Chinese have been twice conquered.
They have always forced their conquerors to become assimilated
to them, and to respect their customs ; they gave much, and took
hardly anything in return. They drove out the first invaders,
and in time will do the same with the second.

The English are the masters of India, and yet their moral hold
over their subjects is almost non-existent. They are themselves
influenced in many ways by the local civilization, and cannot
succeed in stamping their ideas on a people that fears its con-
querors, but is only physically dominated by them. It keeps its
soul erect, and its thoughts apart from theirs. The Hindu race
has become a stranger to the race that governs it to-day, and its
civilization does not obey the law that gives the battle to the
strong. External forms, kingdoms, and empires have changed,
and will change again ; but the foundations on which they rest,
and from which they spring, do not necessarily change with them.
Though Hyderabad, Lahore, and Delhi are no longer capital
cities, Hindu society none the less persists. A moment will come,
in one way or another, when India will again live publicly, as
she already does privately, under her own laws ; and, by the
help either of the races actually existing or of a hybrid proceeding
from them, will assume again, in the full sense of the word, a
political personality.

The hazard of war cannot destroy the life of a people. At most,
it suspends its animation for a time, and in some ways shears it
of its outward pomp. So long as the blood and institutions of
a nation keep to a sufficient degree the impress of the original
race, that nation exists. Whether, as in the case of the Chinese,
its conqueror has, in a purely material sense, greater energy than
itself ; whether, like the Hindu, it is matched, in a long and
arduous trial of patience, against a nation, such as the English,
in all points its superior ; in either case the thought of its certain
destiny should bring consolation — one day it will be free. But
if, like the Greeks, and the Romans of the later Empire, the people
has been absolutely drained of its original blood, and the qualities
conferred by the blood, then the day of its defeat will be the day

THE MEANING OF DEGENERATION

of its death. It has used up the time that heaven granted at its
birth, for it has completely changed its race, and with its race
its nature. It is therefore degenerate.

In view of the preceding paragraph, we may regard as settled
the vexed question as to what would have happened if the
Carthaginians, instead of falling before the fortunes of Rome,
had become masters of Italy. Inasmuch as they belonged to the
Phoenician stock, a stock inferior in the citizen-virtues to the
races that produced the soldiers of Scipio, a different issue of the
battle of Zama could not have made any change in their destiny.
If they had been lucky on one day, the next would have seen
their luck recoil on their "heads ; or they might have been merged
in the Italian race by victory, as they were by defeat. In any
case the final result would have been exactly the same. The
destiny of civilizations is not a matter of chance ; it does not
depend on the toss of a coin. It is only men who are killed by
the sword ; and when the most redoubtable, warlike, and success-
ful nations have nothing but valour in their hearts, military
science in their heads, and the laurels of victory in their hands,
without any thought that rises above mere conquest, they
always end merely by learning, and learning badly, from those
they have conquered, how to live in time of peace. The annals
of the Celts and the Nomadic hordes of Asia tell no other tale
than this.

I have now given a meaning to the word degeneration ; and
so have been able to attack the problem of a nation's vitality.
I must next proceed to prove what for the sake of clearness
I have had to put forward as a mere hypothesis ; namely, that
there are real differences in the relative value of human races.
The consequences of proving this will be considerable, and cover
a wide field. But first I must lay a foundation of fact and
argument capable of holding up such a vast building ; and the
foundation cannot be too complete. The question with which
I have just been dealing was only the gateway of the temple,

CHAPTER V

RACIAL INEQUALITY IS NOT THE RESULT OF
INSTITUTIONS

The idea of an original, clear-cut, and permanent inequality
among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely
held opinions in the world. We need not be surprised at this,
when we consider the isolation of primitive tribes and com-
munities, and how in the early ages they all used to " retire
into their shell " ; a great number have never left this stage.
Except in quite modern times, this idea has been the basis of
nearly all theories of government. Every people, great or small,
has begun by making inequality its chief political motto. This
is the origin of all systems of caste, of nobility, and of aristocracy,
in so far as the last is founded on the right of birth. The law of
primogeniture, which assumes the pre-eminence of the first born
and his descendants, is merely a corollary of the same principle.
With it go the repulsion felt for the foreigner and the superiority
which every nation claims for itself with regard to its neighbours.
As soon as the isolated groups have begun to intermingle and to
become one people, they grow great and civilized, and look at
each other in a more favourable light, as one finds the other
useful. Then, and only then, do we see the absolute principle
of the inequality, and hence the mutual hostility, of races ques-
tioned and undermined. Finally, when the majority of the
citizens have mixed blood flowing in their veins, they erect into
a universal and absolute truth what is only true for themselves,
and feel it to be their duty to assert that all men are equal.
They are also moved by praiseworthy dislike jo oppression, a
legitimate hatred towards the abuse of power ; to all thinking
men these cast an ugly shadow on the memory of races which
have once been dominant, and which have never failed (for

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

such is the way of the world) to justify to some extent many
of the charges that have been brought against them. From
mere declamation against tyrann}', men go on to deny the
natural causes of the superiority against which they are de-
claiming. The tyrant's power is, to them, not only misused,
but usurped. They refuse, quite wrongly, to admit that certain
qualities are by a fatal necessity the exclusive inheritance
of such and such a stock. In fact, the more heterogeneous the
elements of which a people is composed, the more complacently
does it assert that the most different powers are, or can be,
possessed in the same measure by every fraction of the human
race, without exception. This theory is barely applicable to
these hybrid philosophers themselves ; but they extend it to
cover all the generations which were, are, and ever shall be on
the earth. They end one day by summing up their views in the
words which, like the bag of /Eolus, contain so many storms —
" All men are brothers." *

This is the political axiom. Would you like to hear it in its
scientific form ? " All men," say the defenders of human
equality, " are furnished with similar intellectual powers, of the
same nature, of the same value, of the same compass." These
are not perhaps their exact words, but they certainly give the
right meaning. So the brain of the Huron Indian contains in an
undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely the same as
that of the Englishman or the Frenchman ! Why then, in the
course of the ages, has he not invented printing or steam power ?
I should be quite justified in asking our Huron why, if he is equal
to our European peoples, his tribe has never produced a Caesar
or a Charlemagne among its warriors, and why his bards and
sorcerers have, in some inexplicable way, neglected to become

* The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys ;
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches ; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.

Shelley, " Queen Mab."

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Homers and Galens. The difficulty is usually met by the
blessed phrase, " the predominating influence of environment."
According to this doctrine, an island will not see the same
miracles of civilization as a continent, the same people will be
different in the north from what it is in the south, forests will not
allow of developments which are favoured by open country.
What else ? the humidity of a marsh, I suppose, will produce a
civilization which would inevitably have been stifled by the
dryness of the Sahara ! However ingenious these little hypo-
theses may be, the testimony of fact is against them. In spite of
wind and rain, cold and heat, sterility and fruitfulness, the world
has seen barbarism and civilization flourishing everywhere, one
after the other, on the same soil. The brutish fellah is tanned
by the same sun as scorched the powerful priest of Memphis ; the
learned professor of Berlin lectures under the same inclement sky
that once beheld the wretched existence of the Finnish savage.

The curious point is that the theory of equality, which is held
by the majority of men and so has permeated our customs and
institutions, has not been powerful enough to overthrow the
evidence against it ; and those who are most convinced of its
truth pay homage every day to its opposite. No one at any
time refuses to admit that there are great differences between
nations, and the ordinary speech of men, with a naive incon-
sistency, confesses the fact. In this it is merely imitating the
practice of other ages which were not less convinced than we are
— and for the same reason — of the absolute equality of races.

While clinging to the liberal dogma of human brotherhood,
every nation has always managed to add to the names of others
certain qualifications and epithets that suggest their unlikeness
from itself. The Roman of Italy called the Graeco-Roman a
GrcBCidus, or " little Greek," and gave him the monopoly of
cowardice and empty chatter. He ridiculed the Carthaginian
settler, and pretended to be able to pick him out among a thou-
sand for his litigious character and his want of faith. The
Alexandrians were held to be witty, insolent, and seditious.
In the Middle Ages, the Anglo-Norman kings accused their

3«

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

French subjects of lightness and inconstancy. To-day, every one
talks of the " national characteristics " of the German, the
Spaniard, the Englishman, and the Russian. I am not asking
whether the judgments are true or not. My sole point is that
they exist, and are adopted in ordinary speech. Thus, if on the
one hand human societies are called equal, and on the other
we find some of them frivolous, others serious ; some avaricious,
others thriftless ; some passionately fond of fighting, others
careful of their lives and energies ; — it stands to reason that
these differing nations must have destinies which are also abso-
lutely different, and, in a word, unequal. The stronger will play
the parts of kings and rulers in the tragedy of the world. The/
weaker will be content with a more humble position.

I do not think that the usual idea of a national character for
each people has yet been reconciled with the belief, which is just
as widely held, that all peoples are equal. Yet the contradiction
is striking and flagrant, and all the more serious because the most
ardent democrats are the first to claim superiority for the Anglo-
Saxons of North America over all the nations of the same conti-
nent. It is true that they ascribe the high position of their
favourites merely to their political constitution. But, so far as
I know, they do not deny that the countrymen of Penn and
Washington, are, as a nation, peculiarly prone to set up liberal
institutions in all their places of settlement, and, what is more,
to keep them going. Is not this very tenacity a wonderful
characteristic of this branch of the human race, and the more
precious because most of the societies which have existed, or still
exist, in the world seem to be without it ?

I do not flatter myself that I shall be able to enjoy this in-
consistency without opposition. The friends of equality will no
doubt talk very loudly, at this point, about " the power of
customs and institutions." They will tell me once more how
powerfully the health and growth of a nation are influenced by
" the essential quality of a government, taken by itself," or " the
fact of despotism or liberty." But it is just at this point that I
too shall oppose their arguments.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Political institutions have only two possible sources. They
either come directly from the nation which has to live under them,
or they are invented by a powerful people and imposed on all
the States that fall within its sphere of influence.

There is no difficulty in the first hypothesis. A people obviously
adapts its institutions to its wants and instincts ; and will
beware of laying down any rule which may thwart the one or the
other. If, by some lack of skill or care, such a rule is laid down,
the consequent feeling of discomfort leads the people to amend
its laws, and put them into more perfect harmony with their
express objects. In every autonomous State, the laws, we may
say, always emanate from the people ; not generally because it
has a direct power of making them, but because, in order to be
good laws, they must be based upon the people's point of view,
and be such as it might have thought out for itself, if it had been
better informed. If some wise lawgiver seems, at first sight,
the sole source of some piece of legislation, a nearer view will
show that his very wisdom has led him merely to give out the
oracles that have been dictated by his nation. If he is a judicious
man, like Lycurgus, he will prescribe nothing that the Dorian
of Sparta could not accept. If he is a mere doctrinaire, like
Draco, he will draw up a code that will soon be amended or
repealed by the Ionian of Athens, who, like all the children of
Adam, is incapable of living for long under laws that are foreign
to the natural tendencies of his real self. The entrance of a
man of genius into this great business of law-making is merely
a special manifestation of the enlightened will of the people ;
if the laws simply fulfilled the fantastic dreams of one individual,
they could not rule any people for long. We cannot admit that
the institutions thus invented and moulded by a race of men
make that race what it is. They are effects, not causes. Their
influence is, of course, very great ; they preserve the special
genius of the nation, they mark out the road on which it is to
travel, the end at which it must aim. To a certain extent, they
are the hothouse where its instincts develop, the armoury that
furnishes its best weapons for action. But they do not create

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

their creator ; and though they may be a powerful element in
his success by helping on the growth of his innate qualities,
they will fail miserably whenever they attempt to alter these,
or to extend them beyond their natural limits. In a word, they
cannot achieve the impossible.

Ill-fitting institutions, however, together with their conse-
quences, have played a great part in the world. When Charles I,
by the evil counsels of the Earl of Strafford, wished to force
absolute monarchy on the English, the King and his minister
were walking on the blood-stained morass of political theory.
When the Calvinists dreamed of bringing the French under a
government that was at once aristocratic and republican, they
were just as far away from the right road.

When the Regent * tried to join hands with the nobles who
were conquered in 1652, and to carry on the government by
intrigue, as the co-adjutor and his friends had desired.f her
efforts pleased nobody, and offended equally the nobility, the
clergy, the Parliament, and the Third Estate. Only a few tax-
farmers were pleased. But when Ferdinand the Catholic pro-
mulgated against the Moors of Spain his terrible, though necessary,
measures of destruction ; when Napoleon re-established religion
in France, flattered the military spirit, and organized his power
in such a way as to protect his subjects while coercing them,
both these sovereigns, having studied and understood the special
character of their people, were building their house upon a rock.
In fact, bad institutions are those which, however well they look
on paper, are not in harmony with the national qualities or
caprices, and so do not suit a particular State, though they
might be very successful in the neighbouring country. They would
bring only anarchy and disorder, even if they were taken from the

* Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV. — Tr.

f The Comte de Saint-Priest, in an excellent article in the Revue des
Deux Mondes, has rightly shown that the party crushed by Cardinal
Richelieu had nothing in common with feudalism or the great aristocratic
methods of government. Montmorency, Cinq-Mars, and Marillac tried
to overthrow the State merely in order to obtain favour and office for
themselves. The great Cardinal was quite innocent of the " murder of
the French nobility," with which he has been so often reproached.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

statute-book of the angels. On the contrary, other institutions
are good for the opposite reason, though they might be con-
demned, from a particular point of view or even absolutely, by
the political philosopher or the moralist. The Spartans were
small in number, of high courage, ambitious, and violent. Ill-
fitting laws might have turned them into a mere set of petti-
fogging knaves ; Lycurgus made them a nation of heroic
brigands.

There is no doubt about it. As the people is born before the
laws, the laws take after the people ; and receive from it the
stamp which they are afterwards to impress in their turn. The
changes made in institutions by the lapse of time are a great
proof of what I say.

I have already mentioned that as nations become greater,
more powerful, and more civilized, their blood loses its purity
and their instincts are gradually altered. As a result, it be-
comes impossible for them to live happily under the laws that
suited their ancestors. New generations have new customs and
tendencies, and profound changes in the institutions are not slow
to follow. These are more frequent and far-reaching in pro-
portion as the race itself is changed ; while they are rarer, and
more gradual, so long as the people is more nearly akin to the
first founders of the State. In England, where modifications of
the stock have been slower and, up to now, less varied than in
any other European country, we still see the institutions of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries forming the base of the social
structure. We find there, almost in its first vigour, the communal
organization of the Plantagenets and the Tudors, the same
method of giving the nobility a share in the government, the
same gradations of rank in this nobility, the same respect for
old families tempered with the same love of low-born merit.
Since James I, however, and especially since the Union under
Queen Anne, the English blood has been more and more prone to
mingle with that of the Scotch and Irish, while other nations
have also helped, by imperceptible degrees, to modify its purity.
The result is that innovations have been more frequent in our

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

time than ever before, though they have always remained fairly
faithful to the spirit of the original constitution.

In France, intermixture of race has been far more common
and varied. In some cases, by a sudden turn of the wheel, power
has even passed from one race to another. Further, on the social
side, there have been complete changes rather than modifications,
and these were more or less far-reaching, as the groups that
successively held the chief power were more or less different.
While the north of France was the preponderating element in
national politics, feudalism — or rather a degenerate parody of
feudalism — maintained itself with fair success ; and the municipal
spirit followed its fortunes. After the expulsion of the English,
in the fifteenth century, and the restoration of national inde-
pendence under Charles VII, the central provinces, which had
taken the chief part in this revolution and were far less Germanic
in race than the districts beyond the Loire, naturally saw their
Gallo-Roman blood predominant in the camp and the council-
chamber. They combined the taste for military life and foreign
conquest — the heritage of the Celtic race — with the love of
authority that was innate in their Roman blood ; and they
turned the current of national feeling in this direction. During
the sixteenth century they largely prepared the ground on which,
in 1599, the Aquitanian supporters of Henry IV, less Celtic
though still more Roman than themselves, laid the foundation
stone of another and greater edifice of absolute power. When
Paris, whose population is certainly a museum of the most
varied ethnological specimens, had finally gained dominion
over the rest of France owing to the centralizing policy
favoured by the Southern character, it had no longer any
reason to love, respect, or understand any particular tendency
or tradition. This great capital, this Tower of Babel, broke
with the past — the past of Flanders, Poitou, and Languedoc
— and dragged the whole of France into ceaseless experiments
with doctrines that were quite out of harmony with its ancient
customs.

We cannot therefore admit that institutions make peoples

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

what they are in cases where the peoples themselves have
invented the institutions. But may we say the same of the
second hypothesis, which deals with cases where a nation receives
its code from the hands of foreigners powerful enough to enforce
their will, whether the people like it or not ?

There are a few cases of such attempts ; but I confess I cannot
find any which have been carried out on a great scale by govern-
ments of real political genius in ancient or modern times. Their
wisdom has never been used to change the actual foundations
of any great national system. The Romans were too clever to
try such dangerous experiments. Alexander the Great had never
done so ; and the successors of Augustus, like the conqueror of
Darius, were content to rule over a vast mosaic of nations, all
of which clung to their own customs, habits, laws, and methods
of government. So long as they and their fellow-subjects re-
mained racially the same, they were controlled by their rulers
only in matters of taxation and military defence.

There is, however, one point that must not be passed over.
Many of the peoples subdued by the Romans had certain features
in their codes so outrageous that their existence could not be
tolerated by Roman sentiment ; for example, the human sacrifices
of the Druids, which were visited with the severest penalties.
Well, the Romans, for all their power, never succeeded in com-
pletely stamping out these barbarous rites. In Narbonese Gaul
the victory was easy, as the native population had been almost
entirely replaced by Roman colonists. But in the centre, where
the tribes were wilder, the resistance was more obstinate ; and
in the Breton Peninsula, where settlers from England in the
fourth century brought back the ancient customs with the
ancient blood, the people continued, from mere feelings of
patriotism and love of tradition, to cut men's throats on their
altars as often as they dared. The strictest supervision did
not succeed in taking the sacred knife and torch out of their
hands. Every revolt began by restoring this terrible feature
of the national cult ; and Christianity, still panting with rage
after its victory over an immoral polytheism, hurled itself with

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

shuddering horror against the still more hideous superstitions of
the Armorici. It destroyed them only after a long struggle ;
for as late as the seventeenth century shipwrecked sailors were
massacred and wrecks plundered in all the parishes on the sea-
board where the Cymric blood had kept its purity. These
barbarous customs were in accordance with the irresistible in-
stincts of a race which had not yet become sufficiently mixed,
and so had seen no reason to change its ways.

It is, however, in modern times especially that we find examples
of institutions imposed by a conqueror and not accepted by his
subjects. Intolerance is one of the chief notes of European
civilization. Conscious of its own power and greatness, it finds
itself confronted either by different civilizations or by peoples
in a state of barbarism. It treats both kinds with equal con-
tempt ; and as it sees obstacles to its own progress in everything
that is different from itself, it is apt to demand a complete change
in its subjects' point of view. The Spaniards, however, the
English, the Dutch, and even the French, did not venture to push
their innovating tendencies too far, when the conquered peoples
were at all considerable in number. In this they copied the
moderation that was forced on the conquerors of antiquity.
The East, and North and West Africa, show clear proof that the
most enlightened nations cannot set up institutions unsuited
to the character of their subjects. I have already mentioned
that British India lives its ancient life, under its own immemorial
laws. The Javanese have lost all political independence, but are
very far from accepting any institutions like those of the Nether-
lands. They continue to live bound as they lived free ; and
since the sixteenth century, when Europe first turned her face
towards the East, we cannot find the least trace of any moral
influence exerted by her, even in the case of the peoples she has
most completely conquered.

Not all these, however, have been so numerous as to force
self-control on their European masters. In some cases the
persuasive tongue has been backed by the stern argument of the
sword. The order has gone forth to abolish existing customs,

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

and put in their place others which the masters knew to be good
and useful. Has the attempt ever succeeded ?

America provides us with the richest field for gathering answers
to this question. In the South, the Spaniards reigned without
check, and to what end ? They uprooted the ancient empires,
but brought no light. They founded no race like themselves.

In the North the methods were different, but the results just
as negative. In fact, they have been still more unfruitful, still
more disastrous from the point of view of humanity. The
Spanish Indians, are, at any rate, extremely prolific,* and
have even transformed the blood of their conquerors, who have
now dropped to their level. But the Redskins of the United States
have withered at the touch of the Anglo-Saxon energy. The
few who remain are growing less every day ; and those few are as
uncivilized, and as incapable of civilization, as their forefathers.
In Oceania, the facts point to the same conclusions ; the
natives are dying out everywhere. We sometimes manage to
take away their arms, and prevent them from doing harm ;
but we do not change their nature. Wherever the European
rules, they drink brandy instead of eating each other. This is
the only new custom which our active minds have been quite
successful in imposing ; it does not mark a great step in advance.
There are in the world two Governments formed on European
models by peoples different from us in race ; one in the Sandwich
Islands, the other at San Domingo. A short sketch of these two
Governments will be enough to show the impotence of all at-
tempts to set up institutions which are not suggested by the
national character.

In the Sandwich Islands the representative system is to be
seen in all its majesty. There is a House of Lords, a House of
Commons, an executive Ministry, a reigning King ; nothing is
wanting. But all this is mere ornament. The real motive
power that keeps the machine going is a body of Protestant
missionaries. Without them, King, Lords, and Commons would

* A. von Humboldt, Ex amen critique de I'histoire de la gSographie du
nouveau continent, vol. ii, pp. 129-30.

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

not know which way to turn, and would soon cease to turn
at all. To the missionaries alone belongs the credit of furnish-
ing the ideas, of putting them into a palatable form, and
imposing them on the people ; they do this either by the
influence they exert on their neophytes, or, in the last resort, by
threats. Even so, I rather think that if the missionaries had
nothing but King and Parliament to work with, they might
struggle for a time with the stupidity of their scholars, but would
be forced in the end to take themselves a large and prominent
part in the management of affairs. This would show their hand
too obviously ; and so they avoid it by appointing a ministry
that consists simply of men of European race. The whole
business is thus a matter of agreement between the Protestant
mission and its nominees ; the rest is merely for show.

As to the King, Kamehameha III, he appears to be a prince
of considerable parts. He has given up tattooing his face,
and although he has not yet converted all the courtiers to his
views, he already experiences the well-earned satisfaction of
seeing nothing on their faces and cheeks but chaste designs,
traced in thin outline. The bulk of the nation, the landed
nobility and the townspeople, cling, in this and other respects,
to their old ideas. The European population of the Sandwich
Islands is, however, swollen every day by new arrivals. There
are many reasons for this. The short distance separating the
Hawaiian Kingdom from California makes it a very interesting
focus for the clear-sighted energy of the white race. Deserters
from the whaling vessels or mutinous sailors are not the only
colonists ; merchants, speculators, adventurers of all kinds,
flock to the islands, build houses, and settle down. The native
race is gradually tending to mix with the invaders and disappear.
I am not sure that the present representative and independent
system of administration will not soon give place to an ordinary
government of delegates, controlled by some great power. But
of this I am certain, that the institutions that are brought in will
end by establishing themselves firmly, and the first day of their
triumph will necessarily be the last for the natives,

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

At San Domingo the independence is complete. There are no
missionaries to exert a veiled and absolute power, no foreign
ministry to carry out European ideas ; everything is left to the
inspiration of the people itself. Its Spanish part consists of
mulattoes, of whom I need say nothing. They seem to imitate,
well or badly, all that is most easily grasped in our civilization.
They tend, like all hybrids, to identify themselves with the more
creditable of the races to which they belong. Thus they are
capable, to a certain extent, of reproducing our customs. It
is not among them that we must study the question in its essence.
Let us cross the mountains that separate the Republic of San
Domingo from the State of Hayti.

We find a society of which the institutions are not only parallel
to our own, but are derived from the latest pronouncements of
our political wisdom. All that the most enlightened liberalism
has proclaimed for the last sixty years in the deliberative as-
semblies of Europe, all that has been written by the most en-
thusiastic champions of man's dignity and independence, all the
declarations of rights and principles — these have all found their
echo on the banks of the Artibonite. Nothing African has
remained in the statute law. All memories of the land of Ham
have been officially expunged from men's minds. The State
language has never shown a trace of African influence. The
institutions, as I said before, are completely European. Let us
consider how they harmonize with the manners of the people.

We are in a different world at once. The manners are as de-
praved, brutal, and savage as in Dahomey or among the Fellatahs.*
There is the same barbaric love of finery coupled with the same
indifference to form. Beauty consists in colour, and so long as
a garment is of flaming red and edged with tinsel, the owner does
not trouble about its being largely in holes. The question
of cleanliness never enters anyone's head. If you wish to ap-
proach a high official in this country, you find yourself being
introduced to a gigantic negro lying on his back, on a wooden
bench. His head is enveloped in a torn and dirty handkerchief,

* See the articles of Gustave d'Alaux in the Revue des deux Mondes.

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

surmounted by a cocked hat, all over gold lace. An immense
sword hangs from his shapeless body. His embroidered coat
lacks the final perfection of a waistcoat. Our general's feet are
cased in carpet slippers. Do you wish to question him, to
penetrate his mind, and learn the nature of the ideas he is re-
volving there ? You will find him as uncultured as a savage,
and his bestial self-satisfaction is only equalled by his profound
and incurable laziness. If he deigns to open his mouth, he will
roll you out all the commonplaces which the newspapers have
been inflicting on us for the last half-century. The barbarian
knows them all by heart. He has other interests, of course, and
very different interests ; but no other ideas. He speaks like
Baron Holbach, argues like Monsieur de Grimm, and has ulti-
mately no serious preoccupation except chewing tobacco, drinking
alcohol, disembowelling his enemies, and conciliating his sorcerers.
The rest of the time he sleeps.

The State is divided among two factions. These are separated
from each other by a certain incompatibility, not of political
theory, but of skin. The mulattoes are on one side, the negroes
on the other. The former have certainly more intelligence and
are more open to ideas. As I have already remarked in the case
of San Domingo, the European blood has modified the African
character. If these men were set in the midst of a large white
population, and so had good models constantly before their eyes,
they might become quite useful citizens. Unfortunately the
negroes are for the time being superior in strength and numbers.
Although their racial memory of Africa has its origin, in many
cases, as far back as their grandfathers, they are still completely
under the sway of African ideals. Their greatest pleasure is
idleness ; their most cogent argument is murder. The most
intense hatred has always existed between the two parties in the
island. The history of Hayti, of democratic Hayti, is merely a
long series of massacres ; massacres of mulattoes by negroes, or
of negroes by mulattoes, according as the one or the other held
the reins of power. The constitution, however enlightened it
may pretend to be, has no influence whatever. It sleeps harm-

D 49

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

lessly upon the paper on which it is written. The power that
reigns unchecked is the true spirit of these peoples. According
to the natural law already mentioned, the black race, belonging
as it does to a branch of the human family that is incapable of
civilization, cherishes the deepest feelings of repulsion towards
all the others. Thus we see the negroes of Hayti violently driving
out the whites and forbidding them to enter their territory.
They would like to exclude even the mulattoes ; and they aim at
their extermination. Hatred of the foreigner is the mainspring
of local politics. Owing, further, to the innate laziness of the
race, agriculture is abolished, industry is not even mentioned,
commerce becomes less every day. The hideous increase of
misery prevents the growth of population, which is actually being
diminished by the continual wars, revolts, and military execu-
tions. The inevitable result is not far off. A country of which the
fertility and natural resources used to enrich generation after
generation of planters will become a desert ; and the wild
goat will roam alone over the fruitful plains, the magnificent
valleys, the sublime mountains, of the Queen of the Antilles.*

Let us suppose for a moment that the peoples of this unhappy
island could manage to live in accordance with the spirit of
their several races. In such a case they would not be influenced,
and so (of course) overshadowed,1 by foreign theories, but would
found their society in free obedience to their own instincts.
A separation between the two colours would take place, more or
less spontaneously, though certainly not without some acts of
violence.

The mulattoes would settle on the seaboard, in order to keep
continually in touch with Europeans. This is their chief wish.
Under European direction they would become merchants (and
especially money-brokers), lawyers, and physicians. They would
tighten the links with the higher elements of their race by a

* The colony of San Domingo, before its emancipation, was one of the
places where the luxury and refinement of wealth had reached its highest
point. It was, to a superior degree, what Havana has become through
its commercial activity. The slaves are now free and have set their
own house in order. This is the result !

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

continual crossing of blood ; they would be gradually improved
and lose their African character in the same proportion as their
African blood.

The negroes would withdraw to the interior and form small
societies like those of the runaway slaves in San Domingo itself,
in Martinique, Jamaica, and especially in Cuba, where the size
of the country and the depth of the forests baffle all pursuit.
Amid the varied and tropical vegetation of the Antilles, the
American negro would find the necessities of life yielded him in
abundance and without labour by the fruitful earth. He would
return quite freely to the despotic, patriarchal system that is
naturally suited to those of his brethren on whom the conquering
Mussulmans of Africa have not yet laid their yoke. The love
of isolation would be at once the cause and the result of his
institutions. Tribes would be formed, and become, at the end
of a short time, foreign and hostile to each other. Local wars
would constitute the sole political history of the different cantons ;
and the island, though it would be wild, thinly peopled, and ill-
cultivated, would yet maintain a double population. This is
now condemned to disappear, owing to the fatal influence wielded
by laws and institutions that have no relation to the mind
of the negro, his interests, and his wants

The examples of San Domingo and the Sandwich Islands are
conclusive. But I cannot leave this part of my subject without
touching on a similar instance, of a peculiar character, which
strongly supports my view. I cited first a State where the
institutions, imposed by Protestant preachers, are a mere childish
copy of the British system. I then spoke of a government,
materially free, but spiritually bound by European theories ;
which it tries to carry out, with fatal consequences for the un-
happy population. I will now bring forward an instance of quite
a different kind ; I mean the attempt of the Jesuits to civilize
the natives of Paraguay.*

These missionaries have been universally praised for their fine
courage and lofty intelligence. The bitterest enemies of the

* Consult, on this subject, Prichard, d'Orbigny, A. von Humboldt, &c.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Order have not been able to withhold a warm tribute of ad-
miration for them. If any institutions imposed on a nation from
without ever had a chance of success, it was certainly those of the
Jesuits, based as they were on a powerful religious sentiment,
and supported by all the links of association that could be devised
by an exact and subtle knowledge of human nature. The
Fathers were persuaded, as so many others have been, that
barbarism occupies the same place in the life of peoples as infancy
does in the life of a man ; and that the more rudeness and
savagery a nation shows, the younger it really is.

In order, then, to bring their neophytes to the adult stage,
they treated them like children, and gave them a despotic
government, which was as unyielding in its real aims, as it was
mild and gracious in its outward appearance. The savage tribes
of America have, as a rule, democratic tendencies ; monarchy
and aristocracy are rarely seen among them, and then only in a
very limited form. The natural character of the Guaranis,
among whom the Jesuits came, did not differ in this respect from
that of the other tribes. Happily, however, their intelligence
was relatively higher, and their ferocity perhaps a little less, than
was the case with most of their neighbours ; they had, too, in
some degree, the power of conceiving new needs. About a
hundred and twenty thousand souls were collected together in
the mission villages, under the control of the Fathers. All that
experience, unremitting study, and the living spirit of charity
had taught the Jesuits, was now drawn upon ; they made un-
tiring efforts to secure a quick, though lasting, success. In spite
of all their care, they found that their absolute power was not
sufficient to keep their scholars on the right road, and they had
frequent proofs of the want of solidity in the whole structure.

The proof was complete, when in an evil hour the edict of the
Count of Aranda ended the reign of piety and intelligence in
Paraguay. The Guaranis, deprived of their spiritual guides,
refused to trust the laymen set over them by the Crown of Spain.
They showed no attachment to their new institutions. They
felt once more the call of the savage life, and to-day, with the

THE INFLUENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

exception of thirty-seven straggling little villages on the banks
of the Parana, the Paraguay, and the Uruguay — villages in which
the population is, no doubt, partly hybrid — the rest of the tribes
have returned to the woods, and live there in just as wild a state
as the western tribes of the same stock, Guaranis and Cirionos.
I do not say that they keep all the old customs in their original
form, but at any rate their present ones show an attempt to
revive the ancient practices, and are directly descended from
them ; for no human race can be unfaithful to its instincts, and
leave the path that has been marked out for it by God. We may
believe that if the Jesuits had continued to direct their missions
in Paraguay, their efforts would, in the course of time, have had
better results. I admit it ; but, in accordance with our universal
law, this could only have happened on one condition — that
a series of European settlements should have been gradually
made in the country under the protection of the Jesuits. These
settlers would have mingled with the natives, have first modified
and then completely changed their blood. A State would have
arisen, bearing perhaps a native name and boasting that it had
sprung from the soil ; but it would actually have been as European
as its own institutions.

This is the end of my argument as to the relation between
institutions and races.

CHAPTER VI

NATIONS, WHETHER PROGRESSING OR STAGNATING, ARE
INDEPENDENT OF THE REGIONS IN WHICH THEY LIVE

I must now consider whether the development of peoples is
affected (as many writers have asserted) by climate, soil, or
geographical situation. And although I have briefly touched
on this point in speaking of environment,* I should be leaving
a real gap in my theory if I did not discuss it more thoroughly.

Suppose that a nation lives in a temperate climate, which is
not hot enough to sap its energies, or cold enough to make the
soil unproductive ; that its territory contains large rivers, wide
roads suitable for traffic, plains and valleys capable of varied
cultivation, and mountains filled with rich veins of ore — we are
usually led to believe that a nation so favoured by nature will
be quick to leave the stage of barbarism, and will pass, with no
difficulty, to that of civilization. f We are just as ready to admit,
as a corollary, that the tribes which are burnt by the sun or
numbed by the eternal ice will be much more liable to remain
in a savage state, living as they do on nothing but barren rocks.
It goes without saying, that on this hypothesis, mankind is
capable of perfection only by the help of material nature, and
that its value and greatness exist potentially outside itself.
This view may seem attractive at first sight, but it has no support
whatever from the facts of observation.

Nowhere is the soil more fertile, the climate milder, than in
certain parts of America. There is an abundance of great rivers.
The gulfs, the bays, the harbours, are large, deep, magnificent,
and innumerable. Precious metals can be dug out almost

* See above, p. 38.

+ Compare Cams, Uber ungleiche Befdhigung der verschiedenen Mensch-
keitstdmme fur hohere geistige Entwickelung (Leipzig, 1849), P- 9^ et
passim.

THE INFLUENCE OF LOCALITY

at the surface of the ground. The vegetable world yields in
abundance, and almost of its own accord, the necessaries of
life in the most varied forms ; while the animals, most of which
are good for food, are a still more valuable source of wealth.
And yet the greater part of this happy land has been occupied,
for centuries, by peoples who have not succeeded, to the slightest
extent, in exploiting their treasures.

Some have started on the road to improvement. In more
than one place we come upon an attenuated kind of culture,
a rudimentary attempt to extract the minerals. The traveller
may still, to his surprise, find a few useful arts being practised
with a certain ingenuity. But all these efforts are very humble
and uncoordinated ; they are certainly not the beginnings of
any definite civilization. In the vast territory between Lake
Erie and the Gulf of Mexico, the River Missouri and the Rocky
Mountains,* there certainly existed, in remote ages, a nation
which has left remarkable traces of its presence. The remains
of buildings, the inscriptions engraved on rocks, the tumuli,")"
the mummies, show that it had reached an advanced state of
mental culture. But there is nothing to prove a very close
kinship between this mysterious people and the tribes that now

* Prichard, " Natural History of Man," sec. 37. See also Squier, " Ob-
servations on the Aboriginal Monuments of the Mississippi Valley."

f The special construction of these tumuli and the numerous instruments
and utensils they contain are occupying the attention of many eminent
American antiquaries. It is impossible to doubt the great age of these
monuments. Squier is perfectly right in finding a proof of this in the
mere fact that the skeletons discovered in the tumuli fall to pieces when
brought into the slightest contact with the air, although the conditions
for their preservation are excellent, so far as the quality of the soil is
concerned. On the other hand, the bodies which lay buried under the
cromlechs of Brittany, and which are at least 1 800 years old, are perfectly
firm. Hence we may easily imagine that there is no relation between
these ancient inhabitants of the land and the tribes of the present day —
the Lenni-Lenapes and others. I must not end this note without praising
the industry and resource shown by American scholars in the study of
the antiquities of their continent. Finding their labours greatly hindered
by the extreme brittleness of the skulls they had exhumed, they discovered,
after many abortive attempts, a way of pouring a preparation of bitumen
into the bodies, which solidifies at once and keeps the bones from crumbling.
This delicate process, which requires infinite care and quickness, seems, as
a rule, to be entirely successful.

5.5

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

wander over its tombs. Suppose, if you will, that there was
some relation between them, whether by way of blood or of
slavery, and that thus the natives of to-day did learn from the
ancient lords of the country, the first rudiments of the arts they
practise so imperfectly ; this only makes us wonder the more
that they should have found it impossible to carry any further
what they had been taught. In fact, this would supply one
more reason for my belief that not every people would be capable
of civilization, even if it chose the most favoured spot on earth
as its settlement.

Indeed, civilization is quite independent of climate and soil,
and their adaptability to man's wants. India and Egypt are
both countries which have had to be artificially fertilized ; *
yet they are famous centres of human culture and development.
In China, certain regions are naturally fertile ; but others have
needed great labour to fit them for cultivation. Chinese history
begins with the conquest of the rivers. The first benefits con-
ferred by the ancient Emperors were the opening of canals and
the draining of marshes. In the country between the Euphrates
and the Tigris, that beheld the splendour of the first Assyrian
empire, and is the majestic scene of our most sacred recollections
— in this region, where wheat is said to grow of its own accord,!
the soil is naturally so unproductive that vast works of irrigation,
carried out in the teeth of every difficulty, have been needed to
make it a fit abode for man. Now that the canals are destroyed
or filled up, sterility has resumed its ancient reign. I am there-
fore inclined to believe that nature did not favour these regions
as much as we are apt to think. But I will not discuss the point.
I will grant, if you like, that China, Egypt, India, and Assyria,
contained all the conditions of prosperity, and were eminently
suited for the founding of powerful empires and the development

* Ancient India required a vast amount of clearing on the part of the
first white settlers. See Lassen, Indische Altertumskunde, vol. i. As
to Egypt, compare Bunsen, Agyptens Stelle in der W eltgesohichte , as to
the fertilization of the Fayoum, a vast work executed by the early kings.

f They say that it spontaneously produces wheat, barley, beans, and
sesame, and all the edible plants that grow in the plains" (Syncellus).

THE INFLUENCE OF LOCALITY

of great civilizations. But, we must also admit, these conditions
were of such a kind that, in order to receive any 'benefit from
them the inhabitants must have reached beforehand, by other
means, a high stage of social culture. Thus, for the commerce
to be able to make use of the great waterways, manufactures,
or at any rate agriculture, must have already existed ; again,
neighbouring peoples would not have been attracted to these
great centres before towns and markets had grown up and
prospered. Thus the great natural advantages of China, India,
and Assyria, imply not only a considerable mental power on the
part of the nations that profited by them, but even a civilization
going back beyond the day when these advantages began to be
exploited. We will now leave these specially favoured regions,
and consider others.

When the Phoenicians, in the course of their migration, left
Tylos, or some other island in the south-east, and settled in a
portion of Syria, what did they find in their new home ? A
desert and rocky coast, forming a narrow strip of land between
the sea and a range of cliffs that seemed to be cursed with ever-
lasting barrenness. There was no room for expansion in such
a place, for the girdle of mountains was unbroken on all sides.
And yet this wretched country, which should have been a prison,
became, thanks to the industry of its inhabitants, a crown
studded with temples and palaces. The Phoenicians, who
seemed for ever condemned to be a set of fish-eating barbarians,
or at most a miserable crew of pirates, were, as a fact, pirates on
a grand scale ; they were also clever and enterprising merchants,
bold and lucky speculators. " Yes," it may be objected,
" necessity is the mother of invention ; if the founders of
Tyre and Sidon had settled in the plains of Damascus, they
would have been content to live by agriculture, and would
probably have never become a famous nation. Misery sharpened
their wits, and awakened their genius."

Then why does it not awaken the genius of all the tribes of
Africa, America, and Oceania, who find themselves in a similar
condition ? The Kabyles of Morocco are an ancient race ; they

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

have certainly had a long time for reflection, and, what is more
striking still, have had every reason to imitate the customs of their
betters ; why then have they never thought of a more fruitful
way of alleviating their wretchedness than mere brigandage on
the high seas ? Why, in the Indian archipelago, which seems
created for trade, and in the Pacific islands, where intercom-
munication is so easy, are nearly all the commercial advantages
in the hands of foreigners — Chinese, Malays, and Arabs ? And
where half-caste natives or other mixed races have been able to
share in these advantages, why has the trade at once fallen off ?
Why is the internal exchange of commodities carried on more
and more by elementary methods of barter ? The fact is, that
for a commercial state to be established on any coast or island,
something more is necessary than an open sea, and the pressure
exerted by the barrenness of the land — something more, even,
than the lessons learned from the experience of others ; the
native of the coast or the island must be gifted with the
special talent that alone can lead him to profit by the tools
that lie to his hand, and alone can point him the road to
success.

It is not enough to show that a nation's value in the scale of
civilization does not come from the fertility — or, to be more
precise, the infertility — of the country where it happens to live.
I must also prove that this value is quite independent of all the
material conditions of environment. For example, the Armenians,
shut up in their mountains — the same mountains where, for
generations, so many other peoples have lived and died in
barbarism — had already reached a high stage of civilization in
a very remote age. Yet their country was almost entirely cut
off from others ; it had no communication with the sea, and
could boast of no great fertility.

The Jews were in a similar position. They were surrounded
by tribes speaking the dialects of a language cognate with their
own, and for the most part closely connected with them in race ;
yet they outdistanced all these tribes. They became warriors,
farmers, and traders. Their method of government was extremely

THE INFLUENCE OF LOCALITY

complicated ; it was a mixture of monarchy and theocracy, of
patriarchal and democratic rule (this last being represented by
the assemblies and the prophets), all in a curious equilibrium.
Under this government they lived through long ages of prosperity
and glory, and by a scientific system of emigration they con-
quered the difficulties that were put in the way of their expansion
by the narrow limits of their territory. And what kind of
territory was it ? Modern travellers know what an amount of
organized effort was required from the Israelite farmers, in
order to keep up its artificial fertility. Since the chosen race
ceased to dwell in the mountains and the plains of Palestine,
the well where Jacob's flocks came down to drink has been
filled up with sand, Naboth's vineyard has been invaded by the
desert, and the bramble flourishes in the place where stood the
palace of Ahab. And what did the Jews become, in this miser-
able corner of the earth ? They became a people that succeeded
in everything it undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people,
and one which, before it lost, sword in hand, the name of an
independent nation, had given as many learned men to the
world as it had merchants.*

The Greeks themselves could not wholly congratulate them-
selves on their geographical position. Their country was a
wretched one, for the most part. Arcadia was beloved of shep-
herds, Bceotia claimed to be dear to Demeter and Tripto-
lemus ; but Arcadia and Bceotia play a very minor part in Greek
history. The rich and brilliant Corinth itself, favoured by
Plutus and Aphrodite, is in this respect only in the second rank.
To which city belongs the chief glory ? To Athens, where the
fields and olive-groves were perpetually covered with grey dust,
and where statues and books were the main articles of com-
merce; to Sparta also, a city buried in a narrow valley, at
the foot of a mass of rocks which Victory had to cross to find her
out.

And what of the miserable quarter of Latium that was chosen
for the foundation of Rome ? The little river Tiber, on whose
* Salvador, Histoire des Juifs.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

banks it lay, flowed down to an almost unknown coast, that
no Greek or Phoenician ship had ever touched, save by chance ;
was it through her situation that Rome became the mistress of
the world ? No sooner did the whole world lie at the feet of the
Roman eagles, than the central government found that its
capital was ill-placed ; and the long series of insults to the
eternal city began. The early emperors had their eyes turned
towards Greece, and nearly always lived there. When Tiberius
was in Italy he stayed at Capri, a point facing the two halves
of the empire. His successors went to Antioch. Some of
them, in view of the importance of Gaul, went as far north as
Treves. Finally, an edict took away even the title of chief
city from Rome and conferred it on Milan. If the Romans
made some stir in the world, it was certainly in spite of
the position of the district from which their first armies issued
forth.

Coming down to modern history I am overwhelmed by the
multitude of facts that support my theory. I see prosperity
suddenly leaving the Mediterranean coasts, a clear proof that
it was not inseparably attached to them. The great commercial
cities of the Middle Ages grew up in places where no political
philosopher of an earlier time would have thought of founding
them. Novgorod rose in the midst of an ice-bound land ;
Bremen on a coast almost as cold. The Hanseatic towns in the
centre of Germany were built in regions plunged, as it seemed,
in immemorial slumber. Venice emerged from a deep gulf in
the Adriatic. The balance of political power was shifted to
places scarcely heard of before, but now gleaming with a new
splendour. In France the whole strength was concentrated to
the north of the Loire, almost beyond the Seine. Lyons, Toulouse,
Narbonne, Marseilles, and Bordeaux fell from the high dignity to
which they had been called by the Romans. It was Paris that
became the important city, Paris, which was too far from the
sea for purposes of trade, and which would soon prove too near
to escape the invasions of the Norman pirates. In Italy, towns
formerly of the lowest rank became greater than the city of the

THE INFLUENCE OF LOCALITY

Popes. Ravenna rose from its marshes, Amalfi began its long
career of power. Chance, I may remark, had no part in these
changes, which can all be explained by the presence, at the given
point, of a victorious or powerful race. In other words, a nation
does not derive its value from its position ; it never has and
never will. On the contrary, it is the people which has always
given — and always will give — to the land its moral, economic,
and political value.

I add, for the sake of clearness, that I have no wish to deny
the importance of geographical position for certain towns,
whether they are trade-centres, ports, or capitals. The arguments
that have been brought forward,* in the case of Constantinople
and especially of Alexandria, are indisputable. There certainly
exist different points which we may call " the keys of the earth."
Thus we may imagine that when the isthmus of Panama is
pierced, the power holding the town that is yet to be built on the
hypothetical canal, might play a great part in the history of the
world. But this part will be played well, badly, or even not at
all, according to the intrinsic excellence of the people in question.
Make Chagres into a large city, let the two seas meet under its
walls, and assume that you are free to fill it with what settlers
you will. Your choice will finally determine the future of the
new town. Suppose that Chagres is not exactly in the best
position to develop all the advantages coming from the junction
of the two oceans ; then, if the race is really worthy of its high
calling, it will remove to some other place where it may in perfect
freedom work out its splendid destiny.f

* M. Saint -Marc Girardin, in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

f We may cite, on the subject treated in this chapter, the opinion of a
learned historian, though it is rather truculent in tone :

" A large number of writers are convinced that the country makes the
people ; that the Bavarians or the Saxons were predestined by the nature
of the soil to become what they are to-day ; that Protestantism does not
suit the South, nor Catholicism the North, and so on. Some of the people
who interpret history in the light of their meagre knowledge, narrow
sympathies, and limited intelligence would like to show that the nation
of which we are speaking (the Jews) possessed such and such qualities —
whether these gentlemen understand the nature of the qualities or not —
merely from having lived in Palestine instead of India or Greece. But

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

if these great scholars, who are so clever in proving everything, would
condescend to reflect that the soil of the Holy Land has contained in
its limited area very different peoples, with different ideas and religions,
and that between these various peoples and their successors at the present
day there have been infinite degrees of diversity, although the actual
country has remained the same — they would then see how little influence
is exerted by material conditions on a nation's character and civilization."
Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. i, p. 259.

CHAPTER VII

CHRISTIANITY NEITHER CREATES NOR CHANGES THE
CAPACITY FOR CIVILIZATION

After my arguments on the subject of institutions and climates,
I come to another, which I should really have put before all the
rest ; not that I think it stronger than they are, but because
the facts on which it is based naturally command our reverence.
If my conclusions in the preceding chapters are admitted, two
points become increasingly evident : first, that most human
races are for ever incapable of civilization, so long as they
remain unmixed ; secondly, that such races are not only without
the inner impulse necessary to start them on the path of im-
provement, but also that no external force, however energetic
in other respects, is powerful enough to turn their congenital
barrenness into fertility. Here we shall be asked, no doubt,
whether the light of Christianity is to shine in vain on entire
nations, and whether some peoples are doomed never to behold
it at all.

Some writers have answered in the affirmative. They have
not scrupled to contradict the promise of the Gospel, by denying
the most characteristic feature of the new law, which is precisely
that of being accessible to all men. Their view merely restates
the old formula of the Hebrews, to which it returns by a little
larger gate than that of the Old Covenant ; but it returns all
the same. I have no desire to follow the champions of this idea,
which is condemned by the Church, nor have I the least difficulty
in admitting that all human races are gifted with an equal capacity
for being received into the bosom of the Christian Communion.
Here there is no impediment arising from any original difference
between races ; for this purpose their inequalities are of no
account. Religions and their followers are not, as has been

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

assumed, distributed in zones over the surface of the earth. It
is not true that Christianity must rule from this meridian to
that, while from such and such a point Islam takes up the sceptre,
holding it only as far as a certain impassable frontier, and then
having to deliver it into the hands of Buddhism or Brahmanism,
while the fetichists of the tribe of Ham divide among themselves
the rest of the world.

Christians are found in all latitudes and all climates. Statistics,
inaccurate perhaps, but still approximately true, show us a vast
number of them, Mongols wandering in the plains of Upper
Asia, savages hunting on the tableland of the Cordilleras, Eskimos
fishing in the ice of the Arctic circle, even Chinese and Japanese
dying under the scourge of the persecutor. The least observation
will show this, and will also prevent us from falling into the
very common error of confusing the universal power of recog-
nizing the truths of Christianity and following its precepts, with
the very different facuLy that leads one human race, and not
another, to understand the earthly conditions of social improve-
ment, and to be able to pass from one rung of the ladder to
another, so as to reach finally the state which we call civilization.
The rungs of this ladder are the measure of the inequality of
human races.

It was held, quite wrongly, in the last century, that the doctrine
of renunciation, a corner-stone of Christianity, was essentially
opposed to social development ; and that people to whom the
highest virtue consists in despising the things here below, and
in turning their eyes and hearts, without ceasing, towards the
heavenly Jerusalem, will not do much to help the progress of
this world. The very imperfection of man may serve to rebut
such an argument. There has never been any serious reason
to fear that he will renounce the joys of earth ; and though the
counsels of religion were expressly directed to this point, we
may say that they were pulling against a current that they knew
to be irresistible, and were merely demanding a great deal in
order to obtain a very little. Further, the Christian precepts
are a great aid to society ; they plane away all roughness, they

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

pour the oil of charity on all social relations, they condemn
violence, force men to appeal to the sole authority of reason,
and so gain for the spirit a plenitude of power which works in
a thousand ways for the good of the flesh. Again, religion
elevates the mind by the metaphysical and intellectual character
of its dogmas, while through the purity of its moral ideal it tends
to free the spirit from a host of corrosive vices and weaknesses,
which are dangerous to material progress. Thus, as against
the philosophers of the eighteenth century, we are right in calling
Christianity a civilizing power — but only within certain limits ;
if we take the words in too wide a sense, we shall find ourselves
drawn into a maze of error.

Christianity is a civilizing force in so far as it makes a man
better minded and better mannered ; yet it is only indirectly so,
for it has no idea of applying this improvement in morals and
intelligence to the perishable things of this world, and it is always
content with the social conditions in which it finds its neophytes,
however imperfect the conditions may be. So long as it can
pull out the noxious weeds that stifle the well-being of the soul,
it is indifferent to everything else. It leaves all men as it finds
them — the Chinese in his robes, the Eskimo in his furs, the first
eating rice, and the second eating whale-blubber. It does not
require them to change their way of life. If their state can be
improved as a direct consequence of their conversion, then
Christianity will certainly do its best to bring such an improve-
ment about ; but it will not try to alter a single custom, and
certainly will not force any advance from one civilization to
another, for it has not yet adopted one itself. It uses all civiliza-
tions and is above all. There are proofs in abundance, and I
will speak of them in a moment ; but I must first make the
confession that I have never understood the ultra-modern
doctrine which identifies the law of Christ and the interests of
this world in such a way that it creates from their union a fictitious
social order which it calls " Christian civilization."

There is certainly such a thing as a pagan civilization, just as
there is a Brahman, Buddhist, or Jewish civilization. Societies

E 65

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

have existed, and still exist, which are absolutely based on
religion. Religion has given them their constitution, drawn up
their laws, settled their civic duties, marked out their frontiers,
and prescribed their foreign policy. Such societies have only
been able to persist by placing themselves under a more or less
strict theocracy. We can no more imagine their living without
their rites and creeds than we can imagine the rites and creeds
existing by themselves, without the people. The whole of
antiquity was more or less in this condition. Roman states-
manship certainly invented the legal tolerance of creeds, and a
decadent theology produced a vast system of fusion and assimila-
tion of cults ; but these belonged to the latest age of paganism,
when the fruit was already rotten on the tree. While it was
young and flourishing, there were as many Jupiters, Mercuries,
and Venuses, as there were towns. The god was a jealous god,
in a sense quite different from the jealousy of the Jewish God ;
he was still more exclusive, and recognized no one but his fellow-
citizens in this world and the next. Every ancient civilization
rose to greatness under the aegis of some divinity, of some par-
ticular cult. Religion and the State were united so closely and
inseparably that the responsibility for all that happened was
shared between them. We may speak, if we will, of " finding
traces of the cult of the Tyrian Heracles in the public policy
of Carthage " ; but I think that we can really identify the effects
of the doctrines taught by the priests with the policy of the
suffetes and the trend of social development. Again, I have
no doubt that the dog-headed Anubis, Isis Neith, and the Ibises
taught the men of the Nile valley all that they knew and
practised. Christianity, however, acted in this respect quite
differently from all preceding religions ; this was its greatest
innovation. Unlike them, it had no chosen people. It was
addressed to the whole world, not only to the rich or the
poor. From the first it received from the Holy Ghost the gift
of tongues,* that it might speak to each man in the language
of his country, and proclaim the Gospel by means of the

* Acts ii, 4, 8, 9-1 1.

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

ideas and images that each nation could best understand. It
did not come to change the outward part of man, the material
world ; it taught him to despise this outward part, and was
only concerned with his inner self. We read in a very ancient
apocryphal book, " Let not the strong man boast of his strength,
nor the rich man of his riches ; but let him who will be glorified
glorify himself in the Lord." * Strength, riches, worldly power,
and the way of ambition — all these have no meaning for our
law. No civilization whatever has excited its envy or contempt ;
and because of this rare impartiality, and the consequences that
were to flow from it, the law could rightly call itself " Catholic,"
or universal. It does not belong exclusively to any civilization.
It did not come to bless any one form of earthly existence ; it
rejects none, and would purify all.

The canonical books, the writings of the Fathers, the stories
of the missionaries of all ages, are filled with proofs of this in-
difference to the outward forms of social life, and to social life
itself. Provided that a man believes, and that none of his daily
actions tend to transgress the ordinances of religion, nothing
else matters. Of what importance is the shape of a Christian's
house, the cut and material of his clothes, his system of govern-
ment, the measure of tyranny or liberty in his public institutions ?
He may be a fisherman, a hunter, a ploughman, a sailor, a soldier
— whatever you like. In all these different employments is
there anything to prevent a man — to whatever nation he belong,
English, Turkish, Siberian, American, Hottentot — from receiving
the light of the Christian faith ? Absolutely nothing ; and
when this result is attained, the rest counts for very little. The
savage Galla can remain a Galla, and yet become as staunch
a believer, as pure a " vessel of election," as the holiest pre-
late in Europe. It is here that Christianity shows its striking
superiority to other religions, in its peculiar quality of grace. We
must not take this away, in deference to a favourite idea of
modern Europe, that something of material utility must be
found everywhere, even in the holiest things.

* Apocryphal Gospels : " The Story of Joseph the Carpenter," chap. i.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

During the eighteen centuries that the Church has existed,
it has converted many nations. In all these it has allowed the
political conditions to reign unchecked, just as it found them at
first. It began by protesting to the world of antiquity that it
did not wish to alter in the slightest degree the outward forms of
society. It has been even reproached, on occasion, with an
excess of tolerance in this respect ; compare, for example, the
attitude of the Jesuits towards the Chinese ceremonies. We do
not, however, find that Christianity has ever given the world a
unique type of civilization to which all believers had to belong.
The Church adapts itself to everything, even to the mud-hut ;
and wherever there is a savage too stupid even to understand
the use of shelter, you are sure to find a devoted missionary sitting
beside him on the hard rock, and thinking of nothing but how
to impress his soul with the ideas essential to salvation. Chris-
tianity is thus not a civilizing power in the ordinary sense of the
word ; it can be embraced by the most different races without
stunting their growth, or making demands on them that they
cannot fulfil.

I said above that Christianity elevates the soul by the sublimity
of its dogmas, and enlarges the intellect by their subtlety. This
is only true in so far as the soul and intellect to which it appeals
are capable of being enlarged and elevated. Its mission is not
'to bestow the gift of genius, or to provide ideas for those who
are without them. Neither genius nor ideas are necessary for
salvation. Indeed the Church has expressly declared that it
prefers the weak and lowly to the strong. It gives only what it
wishes to receive. It fertilizes but does not create. It supports
but does not lift on high. It takes the man as he is, and merely
helps him to walk. If he is lame, it does not ask him to run.

If I open the " Lives of the Saints," shall I find many wise men
among them ? Certainly not. The company of the blessed
ones whose name and memory are honoured by the Church
consists mainly of those who were eminent for their virtue and
devotion ; but, though full of genius in all that concerned heaven,
they had none for the things of earth. When I see St. Rosa of

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

Lima honoured equally with St. Bernard, the intercession of St.
Zita valued no less than that of St. Teresa ; when I see all the
Anglo-Saxon saints, most of the Irish monks, the unsavoury
hermits of the Egyptian Thebaid, the legions of martyrs who
sprang from the dregs of the people and whom a sudden flash
of courage and devotion raised to shine eternally in glory — when
I see all these venerated to the same extent as the cleverest
apologists of dogma, as the wisest champions of the faith, then I
find myself justified in my conclusion that Christianity is not a
civilizing power, in the narrow and worldly sense of the phrase.
Just as it merely asks of every man what he has himself received,
so it asks nothing of any race but what it is capable of giving,
and does not set it in a higher place among the civilized races of
the earth than its natural powers give it a right to expect. Hence
I absolutely deny the egalitarian argument which identifies the
possibility of adopting the Christian faith with that of an un-
limited intellectual growth. Most of the tribes of South America
were received centuries ago into the bosom of the Church ; but
they have always remained savages, with no understanding of
the European civilization unfolding itself before their eyes. I
am not surprised that the Cherokees of North America have been
largely converted by Methodist missionaries ; but it would
greatly astonish me if this tribe, while it remained pure in blood,
ever managed to form one of the States of the American Union,
or exert any influence in Congress. I find it quite natural also
that the Danish Lutherans and the Moravians should have
opened the eyes of the Eskimos to the light of faith ; but I think
it equally natural that their disciples should have remained in
the social condition in which they had been stagnating for ages.
Again, the Swedish Lapps are, as we might have expected, in the
same state of barbarism as their ancestors, even though centuries
have passed since the gospel first brought them the message of
salvation. All these peoples may produce — perhaps have pro-
duced already — men conspicuous for their piety and the purity of
their lives ; but I do not expect to see learned theologians among
them, or skilful soldiers, or clever mathematicians, or great

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

artists. In other words they will for ever exclude the select
company of the fine spirits who clasp hands across the ages and
continually renew the strength of the dominant races. Still less
will those rare and mighty geniuses appear who are followed by
their nations, in the paths they mark out for themselves, only
if those nations are themselves able to understand them and go
forward under their direction. Even as a matter of justice we
must leave Christianity absolutely out of the present ques-
tion. If all races are equally capable of receiving its benefits,
it cannot have been sent to bring equality among men. Its
kingdom, we may say, is in the most literal sense " not of this
world."

Many people are accustomed to judge the merits of Christianity
in the light of the prejudices natural to our age ; and I fear that,
in spite of what I have said above, they may have some difficulty
in getting rid of their inaccurate ideas. Even if they agree on
the whole with my conclusions, they may still believe that
the scale is turned by the indirect action of religion on conduct,
of conduct on institutions, of institutions on the whole social
order. I cannot admit any such action. My opponents will
assert that the personal influence of the missionaries, nay, their
mere presence, will be enough to change appreciably the political
condition of the converts and their ideas of material well-being.
They will say, for example, that these apostles nearly always
(though not invariably) come from a nation more advanced than
that to which they are preaching ; thus they will of their own
accord, almost by instinct, change the merely human customs of
their disciples, while they are reforming their morals. Suppose
the missionaries have to do with savages, plunged in an abyss of
wretchedness through their own ignorance. They will instruct
them in useful arts and show them how men escape from famine
by work on the land. After providing the necessary tools for
this, they will go further, and teach them how to build better
huts, to rear cattle, to control the water-supply — both in order
to irrigate their fields, and to prevent inundations. Little by
little they will manage to give them enough taste for matters of

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

the intellect to make them use an alphabet, and perhaps, as the
Cherokees have done,* invent one for themselves. Finally, if
they are exceptionally successful, they will bring their cultivated
disciples to imitate so exactly the customs of which the mis-
sionaries have told them, that they will possess, like the Cherokees
and the Creeks on the south bank of the Arkansas, flocks of
valuable sheep, and even a collection of black slaves to work on
their plantations. They will be completely equipped for living
on the land.

I have expressly chosen as examples the two races which are
considered to be the most advanced of all. Yet, far from agree-
ing with the advocates of equality, I cannot imagine any more
striking instances than these of the general incapacity of any
race to adopt a way of life which it could not have found for
itself.

These two peoples are the isolated remnant of many nations
which have been driven out or annihilated by the whites. They
are naturally on a different plane from the rest, since they are
supposed to be descended from the ancient Alleghany race to
which the great ruins found to the north of the Mississippi are
attributed.! Here is already a great inconsistency in the argu-
ments of those who assert that the Cherokees are the equals of
the European races ; for the first step in their proof is that
these Alleghany tribes are near the Anglo-Saxons precisely be-
cause they are themselves superior to the other races of North
America ! Well, what has happened to these chosen peoples ?
The American Government took their ancient territories from
both the tribes, and, by means of a special treaty, made them
emigrate to a definite region, where separate places of settlement
were marked out for them. Here, under the general superin-
tendence of the Ministry of War and the direct guidance of
Protestant missionaries, they were forced to take up their present
mode of life, whether they liked it or not. The writer from whom
I borrow these details — and who has himself taken them from the

* Prichard, " Natural History of Man," sec. 41.
t Ibid.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

great work of Gallatin ♦—says the number of the Cherokees is
continually increasing. His argument is that at the time when
Adair visited them, their warriors were estimated at 2300, while
to-day the sum-total of their population is calculated to be
15,000 ; this figure includes, it is true, the 1200 negro slaves
who have become their property. He also adds, however, that
their schools are, like their churches, in the hands of the mis-
sionaries, and that these missionaries, being Protestants, are
for the most part married men with white children or servants,
and probably also a sort of general staff of Europeans, acting as
clerks, and the like. It thus becomes very difficult to establish
the fact of any real increase in the number of the natives,
while on the other hand it is very easy to appreciate the strong
pressure that must be exerted by the European race over its
pupils, t

The possibility of making war is clearly taken away from them ;
they are exiled, surrounded on all sides by the American power,
which is too vast for them to comprehend, and are, I believe,
sincerely converted to the religion of their masters. They are
kindly treated by their spiritual guides and convinced of the
necessity for working, in the sense in which work is understood
by their masters, if they are not to die of hunger. Under these
conditions I can quite imagine that they will become successful
agriculturists, and will learn to carry out the ideas that have
been dinned into them, day in, day out, without ceasing.

* " Synopsis of the Indian Tribes of North America."
-■f I have discussed Prichard's facta without questioning their value.
I might, however, have simply denied them, and should have bad on my
side the weighty authority of A. de Tocqueville, who in his great work on
" Democracy in America " refers to the Cherokees in these words : " The
presence of half-breeds has favoured the very rapid development of Euro-
pean habits among the Indians. The half-breed shares the enlightenment
of his father without entirely giving up the savage customs of his mother's
race. He is thus a natural link between civilization and barbarism.
Wherever half-breeds exist and multiply we see the savages gradually
changing their customs and social conditions " (" Democracy in America,"
vol. iii). Do Tocqueville ends by prophesying that although the Cherokees
and the Creeks are half-breeds and not natives, as Prichard says, they
will nevertheless disappear in a short time through the encroachment of
the white race.

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

By the exercise of a little patience and by the judicious use of
hunger as a spur to greed, we can teach animals what they would
never learn by instinct. But to cry out at our success would be
to rate much lower than it is the intelligence even of the humblest
member of the human family. When the village fairs are full of
learned animals going through the most complicated tricks, can
we be surprised that men, who have been submitted to a rigorous
training and cut off from all means of escape or relaxation, should
manage to perform those functions of civilized life which, even in
a savage state, they might be able to understand, without having
the desire to practise them ? The result is a matter of course ;
and anyone who is surprised at it is putting man far below the
card-playing dog or the horse who orders his dinner ! By
arbitrarily gathering one's premises from the " intelligent
actions " of a few human groups, one ends in being too easily
satisfied, and in coming to feel enthusiasms which are not very
flattering even to those who are their objects.

I know that some learned men have given colour to these
rather obvious comparisons by asserting that between some
human races and the larger apes there is only a slight difference
of degree, and none of kind. As I absolutely reject such an insult
to humanity, I may be also allowed to take no notice of the
exaggerations by which it is usually answered. I believe, of
course, that human races are unequal ; but I do not think that
any of them are like the brute, or to be classed with it. The
lowest tribe, the most backward and miserable variety of the
human species, is at least capable of imitation ; and I have no
doubt that if we take one of the most hideous bushmen, we could
develop — I do not say in him, if he is already grown up, but in
his son or at any rate his grandson — sufficient intelligence to
make his acts correspond to a certain degree of civilization,
even if this required some conscious effort of study on his part.
Are we to infer that the people to which he belongs could be
civilized on our model ? This would be a hasty and superficial
conclusion. From the practice of the arts and professions
invented under an advanced civilization, it is a far cry to that

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

civilization itself. Further, though the Protestant missionaries
are an indispensable link between the savage tribe and the central
civilizing power, is it certain that these missionaries are equal
to the task imposed on them ? Are they the masters of a com-
plete system of social science ? I doubt it. If communications
were suddenly cut off between the American Government and
its spiritual legates among the Cherokees, the traveller would find
in the native farms, at the end of a few years, some new practices
that he had not expected. These would result from the mixture
of white and Indian blood ; and our traveller would look in vain
for anything more than a very pale copy of what is taught at
New York.

We often hear of negroes who have learnt music, who are
clerks in banking-houses, and who know how to read, write,
count, dance, and speak, like white men. People are astonished
at this, and conclude that the negro is capable of everything !
And then, in the same breath, they will express surprise at the
contrast between the Slav civilization and our own. The
Russians, Poles, and Serbians (they will say), even though they
are far nearer to us than the negroes, are only civilized on the
surface ; the higher classes alone participate in our ideas, owing
to the continual admixture of English, French, and German
blood. The masses, on the other hand, are. invincibly ignorant
of the Western world and its movements, although they have
been Christian for so many centuries — in many cases before we
were converted ourselves ! The solution is simple. There is
a great difference between imitation and conviction. Imitation
does not necessarily imply a serious breach with hereditary
instincts ; but no one has a real part in any civilization until he is
able to make progress by himself, without direction from others.*

* In discussing the list of remarkable negroes which is given in the
first instance by Blumenbach and could easily be supplemented, Carus
well says that among the black races there has never been any politics
or literature or any developed ideas of art, and that when any individual
negroes have distinguished themselves it has always been the result of
white influence. There is not a single man among them to be compared,
I will not say to one of our men of genius, but to the heroes of the yellow
races — for example, Confucius. (Carus, op. cit.)

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

What is the use of telling me how clever some particular savages
are in guiding the plough, in spelling, or reading, when they are
only repeating the lessons they have learnt ? Show me rather,
among the many regions in which negroes have lived for ages in
contact with Europeans, one single place where, in addition to
the religious doctrines, the ideas, customs, and institutions of even
one European people have been so completely assimilated that
progress in them is made as naturally and spontaneously as among
ourselves. Show me a place where the introduction of printing
has had results, similar to those in Europe, where our sciences are
brought to perfection, where new applications are made of our
discoveries, where our philosophies are the parents of other
philosophies, of political systems, of literature and art, of books,
statues, and pictures !

But I am not really so exacting and narrow-minded as I seem.
I am not seriously asking that a people should adopt our whole
individuality at the same time as our faith. I am willing to admit
that it should reject our way of thinking and strike out quite
a different one. Well then ! let me see our negro, at the moment
when he opens his eyes to the light of the Gospel, suddenly
realizing that his earthly path is as dark and perplexed as his
spiritual life was before. Let me see him creating for himself
a new social order in his own image, putting ideas into practice
that have hitherto rusted unused, taking foreign notions and
moulding them to his purpose. I will wait long for the work
to be finished ; I merely ask that it may be begun. But it has
never been begun ; it has never even been attempted. You may
search through all the pages of history, and you will not find
a single people that has attained to European civilization
by adopting Christianity, or has been brought by the great
fact of its conversion to civilize itself when it was not civilized
already.

On the other hand, I shall find, In the vast tracts of Southern
Asia and in certain parts of Europe, States fused together out of
men of very different religions. The unalterable hostility of
races, however, will be found side by side with that of cults ;

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

we can distinguish the Pathan who has become a Christian from
the converted Hindu, just as easily as we separate to-day the
Russian of Orenburg from the nomad Christian tribes among
which he lives.

Once more, Christianity is not a civilizing power, and has
excellent reasons for not being so.

CHAPTER VIII

DEFINITION OF THE WORD •» CIVILIZATION " ; SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT HAS A TWOFOLD ORIGIN

Here I must enter on a digression vital to my argument. At
every turn I am using a word involving a circle of ideas which
it is very necessary to define. I am continually speaking of
" civilization," and cannot help doing so ; for it is only by the
existence in some measure, or the complete absence, of this
attribute that I can gauge the relative merits of the different
races. I refer both to European civilization and to others which
may be distinguished from it. I must not leave the slightest
vagueness on this point, especially as I differ from the celebrated
writer who alone in France has made it his special business to fix
the meaning and province of this particular word.

Guizot, if I may be allowed to dispute his great authority,
begins his book on " Civilization in Europe " by a confusion of
terms which leads him into serious error. He calls civilization
an event.

The word event must be used by Guizot in a less positive and
accurate way than it usually is — in a wide, uncertain, elastic sense
that it never bears ; otherwise, it does not properly define the
meaning of the word civilization at all. Civilization is not an
event, it is a series, a chain of events linked more or less logically
together and brought about by the inter-action of ideas which are
often themselves very complex. There is a continual bringing to
birth of further ideas and events. The result is sometimes
incessant movement, sometimes stagnation. In either case,
civilization is not an event, but an assemblage of events and ideas,
a state in which a human society subsists, an environment with
which it has managed to surround itself, which is created by it,
emanates from it, and in turn reacts on it.

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

This state is universal in a sense in which an event never is.
It admits of many variations which it could not survive if it
were merely an event. Further, it is quite independent of all
forms of government ; it makes as much progress under a
despotism as under the freest democracy, and it does not cease to
exist when the conditions of political life are modified or even
absolutely changed by civil war.

This does not mean that we may more or less neglect the forms
of government. They are intimately bound up with the health
of the social organism ; its prosperity is impaired or destroyed
if the choice of government is bad, favoured and developed if
the choice is good. But we are not concerned here with mere
questions of prosperity. Our subject is more serious. It deals
with the very existence of peoples and of civilization ; and
civilization has to do with certain elemental conditions which are
independent of politics, and have to look far deeper for the
motive-forces that bring them into being, direct, and expand
them, make them fruitful or barren and, in a word, mould their
whole life. In face of such root-questions as these, considerations
of government, prosperity, and misery naturally take a second
place. The first place is always and everywhere held by the
question "to be or not to be," which is as supreme for a people
as for an individual. As Guizot does not seem to have realized
this, civilization is to him not a state or an environment, but an
event; and he finds its generating principle in another event,
of a purely political character.

If we open his eloquent and famous book, we shall come upon
a mass of hypotheses calculated to set his leading idea into relief.
After mentioning a certain number of situations to which human
societies might come, the author asks " whether common instinct
would recognize in these the conditions under which a people
civilizes itself, in the natural sense of the word."

The first hypothesis is as follows : " Consider a people whose
external life is easy and luxurious. It pays few taxes, and is in
no distress. Justice is fairly administered between man and man.
In fact, its material and moral life is carefully kept in a state of

DEFINITION OF CIVILIZATION

inertia, of torpor, I will not say of oppression, because there is no
feeling of this, but at any rate of repression. The case is not
unexampled. There have been a large number of little aristo-
cratic republics, where the subjects have been treated in this way,
like sheep, well looked after and, in a material sense, happy, but
without any intellectual or moral activity. Is this civilization ?
And is such a people civilizing itself ? "

I do not know whether it is actually civilizing itself ; but
certainly the people of whom he speaks might be very " civilized."
Otherwise, we should have to rank among savage tribes or
barbarians all the aristocratic republics, of ancient and modern
times, which Guizot confessedly includes as instances of his
hypothesis. The general instinct would certainly be offended
by a method that forbids not only the Phoenicians, the Cartha-
ginians, and the Spartans to enter the temple of civilization, but
also the Venetians, the Genoese, the Pisans, and all the free
Imperial cities of Germany, in a word all the powerful munici-
palities of the last few centuries. This conclusion seems in
itself too violently paradoxical to be admitted by the common
sense to which it appeals ; but besides this, it has, I think, to
face a still greater difficulty. These little aristocratic States
which, owing to their form of government, Guizot refuses to
accept as capable of civilization, have never, in most cases,
possessed a special and unique culture. However powerful
many of them may have been, they were in this respect assimilated
to peoples who were differently governed, but very near them in
race ; they merely shared in a common civilization. Thus,
though the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians were at a great
distance from each other, they were nevertheless united by a
similar form of culture, which had its prototype in Assyria.
The Italian republics took part in the movement of ideas and
opinions which were dominant in the neighbouring monarchies.
The Imperial towns of Swabia and Thuringia were quite inde-
pendent politically, but were otherwise wholly within the sweep
of the general progress or decadence of the German race. Hence
while Guizot is distributing his orders of merit among the nations

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

according to their degree of political liberty and their forms of
government, he is really making cleavages, within races, that he
cannot justify, and assuming differences that do not exist. A
more detailed discussion of the point would hardly be in place
here, and I pass on. If I did open such an argument, I should
begin (and rightly I think) by refusing to admit that Pisa, Genoa,
Venice, and the rest were in any way inferior to towns such as
Milan, Naples, and Rome.

Guizot himself anticipates such an objection. He does not
allow that a people is civilized, " which is governed mildly, but
kept in a state of repression " ; yet he also refuses civilization
to another people " whose material life is less easy and luxurious,
though still tolerable, yet whose moral and intellectual needs
have not been neglected. ... In the people I am supposing," he
says, " pure and noble sentiments are fostered. Their religious
and ethical beliefs are developed to a certain degree, but the idea
of freedom is extinct. Every one has his share of truth doled out
to him ; no one is allowed to seek it for himself. This is the
condition into which most of the Asiatic nations, the Hindus,
for example, have fallen ; their manly qualities are sapped by
the domination of the priests."

Thus into the same limbo as the aristocratic peoples must now
be thrust the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Peruvians,
the Tibetans, the Japanese, and even the districts subject to
modern Rome.

I will not touch on Guizot's last two hypotheses, for the first
two have so restricted the meaning of civilization that scarcely
any nation of the earth can rightly lay claim to it any more.
In order to do so a people would have to live under institutions in
which power and freedom were equally mingled, and material de-
velopment and moral progress co-ordinated in one particular way.
Government and religion would have strict limits drawn round
them, beyond which they would not be allowed to advance.
Finally, the subjects would necessarily possess rights of a very
definite kind. On such an assumption, the only civilized peoples
would be those whose government is both constitutional and

DEFINITION OF CIVILIZATION

representative. Thus, I should not be able to save any of the
European nations from the indignity of being thrust into
barbarism ; and, as I should be always measuring the degree
of civilization with reference to one single and unique political
standard, I should gradually come to reject even those con-
stitutional states that made a bad use of their Parliaments, and
keep the prize exclusively for those which used them well. In
the end I should be driven to consider only one nation, of all
that have ever lived, as truly civilized — namely, the English.

I am, of course, full of respect and admiration for the great
people whose power and prodigious deeds are witnessed in every
corner of the world by their victories, their industry, and their
commerce. I do not, however, feel that I am bound to respect
and admire no other. It seems to me a confession altogether
too cruel and humiliating to mankind, to say that, since the
beginning of the ages, it has only succeeded in producing the
full flower of civilization on a little island in the western ocean,
and that even there the true principle was not discovered before
the reign of William and Mary. Such a conception seems, you
must allow, a little narrow. And then consider its danger. If
civilization depends on a particular form of government, then
reason, observation, and science will soon have no voice in the
question at all ; party-feeling alone will decide. Some bold
spirits will be found to follow their own preferences, and refuse
to the British institutions the honour of being the ideal of human
perfection ; all their enthusiasm will be given to the system
established at Petrograd or Vienna. Many people, perhaps the
majority of those living between the Rhine and the Pyrenees,
will hold that, in spite of some defects, France is still the most
civilized country in the world. The moment that a decision as to
culture becomes a matter of personal feeling, agreement is im-
possible. The most highly developed man will be he who holds
the same views as oneself as to the respective duties of ruler and
subjects ; while the unfortunate people who happen to think
differently will be barbarians and savages. No one, I suppose,
will question the logic of this, or dispute that a system that can

F 8i

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

lead to such a conclusion is, to say the least of it, very incom-
plete.

For my own part, Guizot's definition seems to me inferior even
to that given by William von Humboldt : " Civilization is the
humanizing of peoples both in their outward customs and institu-
tions, and in the inward feelings that correspond to these."*

The defect here is the exact opposite of that which I have
ventured to find in Guizot's formula. The cord is too loose, the
field of application too wide. If civilization is acquired merely
by softness of temper, more than one very primitive tribe will have
the right to claim it in preference to some European nation that
may be rather rough in its character. There are some tribes, in
the islands of the South Pacific Ocean and elsewhere, which are
very mild and inoffensive, very easy of approach ; and yet no
one, even while praising them, has ever dreamed of setting them
above the surly Norwegians, or even at the side of the ferocious
Malays, who are clad in flaming robes made by themselves, who
sail the seas in ships they have cleverly built with their own
hands, and are the terror, and at the same time the most in-
telligent agents, of the carrying trade to the Eastern ports of the
Indian Ocean. So eminent a thinker as von Humboldt could not
fail to see this ; by the side, therefore, of civilization, and just one
grade above it, he places culture. " By culture," he says, "a
people which is already humanized in its social relations attains
to art and science."

According to this hierarchy, we find the second age of the
world f filled with affectionate and sympathetic beings, poets,
artists, and scholars. These, however, in their own nature,
stand outside the grosser forms of work ; they are as aloof from
the hardships of war as they are from tilling the soil or practising
the ordinary trades.

The leisure-time allowed for the exercise of the pure intellect
is very small, even in times of the greatest happiness and stability ;

* W. von Humboldt, Uber die Kawi-sprache auf der Insel Java, Intro-
duction, vol. i, p. 37.

I I.e. the world in its second stage of improvement.

DEFINITION OF CIVILIZATION

and there is an incessant struggle going on with Nature and the
laws of the universe to gain even the bare means of subsistence.
This being so, we can easily see that our Berlin philosopher is less
concerned with describing realities than with taking certain
abstractions which seem to him great and beautiful (as indeed
they are) , endowing them with life, and making them act and
move in a sphere as ideal as they are themselves. Any doubts
that might remain on this point are soon dispelled when we come
to the culminating-point of the system, which consists of a third
grade, higher than the others. Here stands the " completely
formed man," in whose nature is " something at once higher and
more personal, a way of looking at the universe by which all the
impressions gathered from the intellectual and moral forces
at work around him are welded harmoniously together and taken
up into his character and sensibility."

In this rather elaborate series the first stage is thus the
" civilized man," that is, the softened or humanized man ;
the next is the " cultured man," the poet, artist, and scholar,
and the last is the highest point of development of which our
species is capable, the " completely formed man," — of whom
(if I understand the doctrine aright) we can gain an exact idea
from what we are told of Goethe and his " Olympian calm."
The principle at the base of this theory is merely the vast difference
which von Humboldt sees between the general level of a people's
civilization and the stage of perfection reached by a few great
individuals. This difference is so great that civilizations quite
foreign to our own — that of the Brahmans, for instance — have
been able, so far as we know, to produce men far superior in some
ways to those that are most admired among ourselves.

I quite agree with von Humboldt on this point. It is quite
true that our European society gives us neither the most sublime
thinkers, nor the greatest poets, nor even the cleverest artists.
I venture to think, however, in spite of the great scholar's opinion,
that, in order to define and criticize civilization generally, we must,
if only for a moment, be careful to shake off our prejudices with
regard to the details of some particular type. We must not cast

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

our net so widely as to include the man in von Humboldt's first
stage, whom I refuse to call civilized merely because he happens
to be mild in character. On the other hand we must not be so
narrow as to reject every one but the philosopher of the third
stage. This would limit too strictly the scope of all human
endeavour after progress, and present its results as merely
isolated and individual.

Von Humboldt's system does honour to the width and subtlety
of a noble mind, and may be compared, in its essentially abstract
nature, with the frail worlds, imagined by the Hindu philosophers,
which are born from the brain of a sleeping god, rise into the
aether like the rainbow-coloured bubbles blown by a child, and
then break and give place to others according to the dreams
that lightly hover round the Divine slumber.

The nature of my investigations keeps me on a lower and
more prosaic level ; I wish to arrive at results that are a little
more within the range of practical experience. The restricted
angle of my vision forbids me to consider, as Guizot does, the
measure of prosperity enjoyed by human societies, or to contem-
plate, with von Humboldt, the high peaks on which a few great
minds sit in solitary splendour ; my inquiries concern merely the
amount of power, material as well as moral, that has been
developed among the mass of a people. It has made me uneasy,
I confess, to see two of the most famous men of the century
losing themselves in by-ways ; and if I am to trust myself to
follow a different road from theirs, I must survey my ground,
and go back as far as possible for my premises, in order to reach
my goal without stumbling. I must ask the reader to follow me
with patience and attention through the winding paths in which
I have to walk, and I will try to illuminate, as far as I can, the
inherent obscurity of my subject.

There is no tribe so degraded that we cannot discover in it
the instinct to satisfy both its material and its moral needs.
The first and most obvious difference between races lies in the
various ways in which the two sides of this instinct are balanced.
Among the most primitive peoples they are never of equal

DEFINITION OF CIVILIZATION

intensity. In some, the sense of the physical need is uppermost,
in others, the tendency to contemplation. Thus the brutish
hordes of the yellow race seem to be dominated by the needs
of the body, though they are not quite without gleams of a
spiritual world. On the other hand to most of the negro tribes
that have reached the same stage of development, action is less
than thought, and the imagination gives a higher value to the
things unseen than those that can be handled. From the point
of view of civilization, I do not regard this as a reason for placing
the negroes on a higher level ; for the experience of centuries
shows that they are no more capable of being civilized than the
others. Ages have passed without their doing anything to
improve their condition ; they are all equally powerless to mingle
act and idea in sufficient strength to burst their prison walls
and emerge from their degradation. But even in the lowest
stages of human progress I always find this twofold stream of
instinct, in which now one, now the other current predominates ;
and I will try to trace its path as I go up the scale of civilization.
Above the Samoyedes, as above some of the Polynesian negroes,
come the tribes that are not quite content with a hut made of
branches or with force as the only social relation, but desire
something better. These tribes are raised one step above
absolute barbarism. If they belong to those races to whom
action is more than thought, we shall see them improving their
tools, their arms, and their ornaments, setting up a government
in which the warriors are more important than the priests,
developing ideas of exchange, and already showing a fair aptitude
for commerce. Their wars will still be cruel, but will tend more
and more to become mere pillaging expeditions ; in fact, material
comfort and physical enjoyment will be the main aim of the people.
I find this picture realized in many of the Mongolian tribes ;
also, in a higher form, among the Quichuas and Aymaras of Peru.
The opposite condition, involving a greater detachment from
mere bodily needs, will be found among the Dahomeys of West
Africa, and the Kaffirs.

I now continue the journey upwards, and leave the groups in

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

which the social system is not strong enough to impose itself
over a large population, even after a fusion of blood. I pass to
those in which the racial elements are so strong that they grip
fast everything that comes within their reach, and draw it into
themselves ; they found over immense tracts of territory a
supreme dominion resting on a basis of ideas and actions that
are more or less perfectly co-ordinated. For the first time we
have reached what can be called a civilization. The same
internal differences that I brought out in the first two stages
appear in the third ; they are in fact far more marked than before,
as it is only in this third stage that their effects are of any real
importance. From the moment when an assemblage of men,
which began as a mere tribe, has so widened the horizon of its
social relations as to merit the name of a people, we see one of
the two currents of instinct, the material and the intellectual,
flowing with greater force than before, according as the separate
groups, now fused together, were originally borne along by one
or the other. Thus, different results will follow, and different
qualities of a nation will come to the surface, according as the
power of thought or that of action is dominant. We may use
here the Hindu symbolism, and represent what I call the " in-
tellectual current " by Prakriti, the female principle, and the
" material current " by Purusha, the male principle. There is,
of course, no blame or praise attaching to either of these phrases ;
they merely imply that the one principle is fertilized by the
others-
Further, we can see, at some periods of a people's existence,
a strong oscillation between the two principles, one of which
alternately prevails over the other. These changes depend on
the mingling of blood that inevitably takes place at various times.
Their consequences are very important, and sensibly alter the
character of the civilization by impairing its stability.

I can thus divide peoples into two classes, as they come pre-

* Klemm (Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit) divides the races
of men into " active " and " passive." I do not know his book, and so
cannot tell if his idea agrees with my own. But it is natural that if we
follow the same path we should light upon the same truth.

DEFINITION OF CIVILIZATION

dominantly under the action of one or other of these currents ;
though the division is, of course, in no way absolute. At the
head of the " male " category I put the Chinese ; the Hindus
being the prototype of the opposite class.

After the Chinese come most of the peoples of ancient Italy,
the Romans of the Early Republic, and the Germanic tribes.
In the opposite camp are ranged the nations of Egypt and
Assyria. They take their place behind the men of Hindustan.

When we follow the nations down the ages, we find that the
civilization of nearly all of them has been modified by their
oscillation between the two principles. The peoples of Northern
China were at first almost entirely materialistic. By a gradual
fusion with tribes of different blood, especially those in the
Yunnan, their outlook became less purely utilitarian. The
reason why this development has been arrested, or at least has
been very slow, for centuries past, is because the " male " con-
stituents of the population are far greater in quantity than the
slight " female " element in its blood.

In Northern Europe the materialistic strain, contributed by the
best of the Germanic tribes, has been continually strengthened
by the influx of Celts and Slavs. But as the white peoples
drifted more and more towards the south, the male influences
gradually lost their force and were absorbed by an excess of
female elements, which finally triumphed. We must allow some
exceptions to this, for example in Piedmont and Northern Spain.

Passing now to the other division, we see that the Hindus have
in a high degree the feeling of the supernatural, that they are
more given to meditation than to action. As their earliest
conquests brought them mainly into contact with races organized
along the same lines as themselves, the male principle could not
be sufficiently developed among them. In such an environment
their civilization was not able to advance on the material side
as it had on the intellectual. We may contrast the ancient
Romans, who were naturally materialistic, and only ceased to be
so after a complete fusion with Greeks, Africans, and Orientals
had changed their original nature and given them a totally new

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

temperament. The internal development of the Greeks resembled
that of the Hindus.

I conclude from such facts as these that every human activity,
moral or intellectual, has its original source in one or other
of these two currents, " male " or " female " ; and only the
races which have one of these elements in abundance (without,
of course, being quite destitute of the other) can reach, in
their social life, a satisfactory stage of culture, and so attain to
civilization.

CHAPTER IX

DEFINITION OF THE WORD "CIVILIZATION" {continued);
DIFFERENT CHARACTERISTICS OF CIVILIZED SOCIETIES ;
OUR CIVILIZATION IS NOT SUPERIOR TO THOSE WHICH
HAVE GONE BEFORE

When a nation, belonging to either the male or female series,
has the civilizing instinct so strongly that it can impose its laws
on vast multitudes of men ; when it is so fortunate as to be able
to satisfy their inner needs, and appeal to their hearts as well as
their heads ; from this moment a culture is brought into being.
This general appeal is the essential note of the civilizing instinct,
and its greatest glory. This alone makes it a living and active
force. The interests of individuals only flourish in isolation ; and
social life always tends, to some extent, to mutilate them. For
a system of ideas to be really fruitful and convincing, it must
suit the particular ways of thought and feeling current among
the people to whom it is offered.

When some special point of view is accepted by the mass of
a people as the basis of their legislation, it is really because it
fulfils, in the main, their most cherished desires. The male
nations look principally for material well-being, the female
nations are more taken up with the needs of the imagination ;
but, I repeat, as soon as the multitudes enrol them selvesunder
a banner, or — to speak more exactly — as soon as a particular
form of administration is accepted, a civilization is born.

Another invariable mark of civilization is the need that is
felt for stability. This follows immediately from what I have
said above ; for the moment that men have admitted, as a
community, that some special principle is to govern and unite
them, and have consented to make individual sacrifices to bring
this about, their first impulse is to respect the governing principle

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

— as much for what it brings as for what it demands — and to
declare it unshakable. The purer a race keeps its blood, the
less will its social foundations be liable to attack ; for the general
wa3^ of thought will remain the same. Yet the desire for stability
cannot be entirely satisfied for long. The admixture of blood
will be followed by some modifications in the fundamental ideas
of the people, and these again by an itch for change in the building
itself. Such change will sometimes mean real progress, especially
in the dawn of a civilization, when the governing principle is
usually rigid and absolute, owing to the exclusive predominance
of some single race. Later, the tinkering will become incessant,
as the mass is more heterogeneous and loses its singleness of aim ;
and the community will not always be able to congratulate itself
on the result. So long, however, as it remains under the guidance
of the original impulse, it will not cease, while holding fast to the
idea of bettering its condition, to follow a chimera of stability.
Fickle, unstable, changing every hour, it yet thinks itself eternal,
and marches on, as towards some goal in Paradise. It clings to
the doctrine (even while continually denying it in practice) that
one of the chief marks of civilization is to borrow a part of God's
immutability for the profit of man. When the likeness obviously
does not exist, it takes courage, and consoles itself by the con-
viction that soon, at any rate, it will attain to the Divine attribute.
By the side of stability, and the co-operation of individual
interests, which touch each other without being destroyed, we

fmust put a third and a fourth characteristic of civilization,
sociability, and the hatred of violence — in other words the demand
that the head, and not the fists, shall be used for self-defence.

These last two features are the source of all mental improvement,
and so of all material progress ; it is to these especially that we
look for the evidence as to whether a society is advanced or not.*

* It is also in connexion with these that we find the main cause of the
false judgments passed on foreign peoples. Because the externals of
their civilization are unlike the corresponding parts of our own, we are
often apt to infer hastily that they are either barbarians or of less worth
than ourselves. Nothing could be more superficial, and so more doubtful,
than a conclusion drawn from such premises.

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

I think I may now sum up my view of civilization by denning
it as a state of relative stability, where the mass of men try to satisfy
their wants by peaceful means, and are refined in their conduct and
intelligence.

In this formula are comprised all the peoples whom I have
mentioned up to now as being civilized, whether they belong to
one or the other class. Assuming that the conditions are fulfilled,
we must now inquire whether all civilizations are equal. I think
not. The social needs of the chief peoples are not felt with the
same intensity or directed towards the same objects ; thus their
conduct and intelligence will show great differences in kind, as
well as in degree. What are the material needs of the Hindu ?
Rice and butter for his food, and a linen cloth for his raiment.
We may certainly be tempted to ascribe this simplicity to con-
ditions of climate. But the Tibetans live in a very severe climate,
and are yet most remarkable for their abstinence. The main
interest of both these peoples is in their religious and philosophical
development, in providing for the very insistent demands of the
mind and the spirit. Thus there is no balance kept between the
male and female principles. The scale is too heavily weighted
on the intellectual side, the consequence being that almost all the
work done under this civilization is exclusively devoted to the one
end, to the detriment of the other. Huge monuments, mountains
of stone, are chiselled and set up, at a cost of toil and effort that
staggers the imagination. Colossal buildings cover the ground —
and with what object ? to honour the gods. Nothing is made
for man — except perhaps the tombs. By the side of the marvels
produced by the sculptor, literature, with no less vigour, creates
her masterpieces. The theology, the metaphysics, are as varied
as they are subtle and ingenious, and man's thought goes down,
without flinching, into the immeasurable abyss. In lyric poetry
feminine civilization is the pride of humanity.

But when I pass from the kingdom of ideals and visions to that
of the useful inventions, and the theoretical sciences on which
they rest, I fall at once from the heights into the depths, and the
brilliant day gives place to night. Useful discoveries are rare ;

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

the few that appear are petty and sterile ; the power of observa-
tion practically does not exist. While the Chinese were con-
tinually inventing, the Hindus conceived a few ideas, which they
did not take the trouble to work out. Again the Greeks had,
as we know from their literature, many scientific notions that
were unworthy of them ; while the Romans, after passing the
culminating-point in their history, could not advance very far,
although they did more than the Greeks ; for the mixture of
Asiatic blood, that absorbed them with startling rapidity, denied
them the qualities which are indispensable for a patient in-
vestigation of nature. Yet their administrative genius, their
legislation, and the useful buildings that were set up throughout
the Empire are a sufficient witness to the positive nature of their
social ideas at a certain period ; they prove that if Southern
Europe had not been so quickly covered by the continual stream
of colonists from Asia and Africa, positive science would have
won the day, and the Germanic pioneers would, in consequence,
have lost a few of their laurels.

The conquerors of the fifth century brought into Europe a
spirit of the same order as that of the Chinese, but with very
different powers. It was equipped, to a far greater extent,
with the feminine qualities, and united the two motive-forces far
more harmoniously. Wherever this branch of the human family
was dominant, the utilitarian tendencies, though in a nobler form,
are unmistakable. In England, North America, Holland, and
Hanover, they override the other instincts of the people. It is
the same in Belgium, and also in the north of France, where there
is always a wonderfully quick comprehension of anything with
a practical bearing. As we go further south these tendencies
become weaker. This is not due to the fiercer action of the sun,
for the Catalans and the Piedmontese certainly live in a hotter
climate than the men of Provence or Bas-Languedoc ; the sole
cause is the influence of blood.

The female or feminized races occupy the greater part of the
globe, and, in particular, the greater part of Europe. With the
exception of the Teutonic group and some of the Slavs, all the

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

races in our part of the world have the material instincts only in
a slight degree ; they have already played their parts in former
ages and cannot begin again. The masses, in their infinite
gradations from Gaul to Celtiberian, from Celtiberian to the
nameless mixture of Italians and other Latin races, form a
descending scale, so far as the chief powers (though not all the
powers) of the male principle are concerned.

Our civilization has been created by the mingling of the
Germanic tribes with the races of the ancient world, the union,
that is to say, of pre-eminently male groups with races and
fragments of races clinging to the decayed remnants of the
ancient ideas. The richness, variety, and fertility of invention
for which we honour our modern societies, are the natural, and
more or less successful, result of the maimed and disparate
elements which our Germanic ancestors instinctively knew how
to use, temper, and disguise.

Our own kind of culture has two general marks, wherever it is
found ; it has been touched, however superficially, by the
Germanic element, and it is Christian. This second characteristic
(to repeat what I have said already) is more marked than the
other, and leaps first to the eye, because it is an outward feature
of our modern State, a sort of varnish on its surface ; but it is
not absolutely essential, as many nations are Christian — and
still more might become Christian — without forming a part of
our circle of civilization. The first characteristic is, on the
contrary, positive and decisive. Where the Germanic element
has never penetrated, our special kind of civilization does not
exist.

This naturally brings me to the question whether we can call
our European societies entirely civilized ; whether the ideas and
actions that appear on the surface have the roots of their being
deep down in the mass of the people, and therefore whether their
effects correspond with the instincts of the greatest number.
This leads to a further question : do the lower strata of our
populations think and act in accordance with what we call
European civilization ?

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Many have admired, and with good reason, the extraordinary
unity of ideas and views that guided the whole body of citizens
in the Greek states of the best period. The conclusions on every
essential point were often hostile to each other ; but they all
derived from the same source. In politics, some wanted more or
less democracy, some more or less oligarchy. In religion, some
chose to worship the Eleusinian Demeter, others Athene Parthe-
nos. As a matter of literary taste, ^Eschylus might be preferred
to Sophocles, Alcaeus to Pindar. But, at bottom, the ideas dis-
cussed were all such as we might call national ; the disputes
turned merely on points of proportion. The same was the case
at Rome, before the Punic Wars ; the civilization of the country
was uniform and unquestioned. It reached the slave through the
master ; all shared in it to a different extent, but none shared
in any other.

From the time of the Punic Wars among the Romans, and
from that of Pericles, and especially of Philip, among the Greeks,
this uniformity tended more and more to break down. The
mixture of nations brought with it a mixture of civilizations.
The result was a very complex and learned society, with a culture
far more refined than before. But it had one striking dis-
advantage ; both in Italy and in Hellas, it existed merely for
the upper classes, the lower strata being left quite ignorant of
its nature, its merits, and its aims. Roman civilization after
the great Asiatic wars was, no doubt, a powerful manifestation
of human genius ; but it really embraced none but the Greek
rhetoricians who supplied its philosophical basis, the Syrian
lawyers who built up for it an atheistic legal system, the rich
men who were engaged in public administration or money-making,
and finally the leisured voluptuaries who did nothing at all.
By the masses it was, at all times, merely tolerated. The peoples
of Europe understood nothing of its Asiatic and African elements,
those of Egypt had no better idea of what it brought them from
Gaul and Spain, those of Numidia had no appreciation of what
came to them from the rest of the world. Thus, below what
| we might call the social classes, lived innumerable multitudes

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

who had a different civilization from that of the official world, or
were not civilized at all. Only the minority of the Roman people
held the secret, and attached any importance to it. We have
here the example of a civilization that is accepted and dominant,
no longer through the convictions of the peoples who live under
it, but by their exhaustion, their weakness, and their indifference.

In China we find the exact contrary. The territory is of course
immense, but from one end to the other there is the same spirit
among the native Chinese — I leave the rest out of account—-
and the same grasp of their civilization. Whatever its principles
may be, whether we approve of its aims or not, we must admit
that the part played by the masses in their civilization shows
how well they understand it. The reason is not that the country
is free in our sense, that a democratic feeling of rivalry impels all
to do their best in order to secure a position guaranteed them by
law. Not at all ; I am not trying to paint an ideal picture.
Peasants and middle classes alike have little hope, in the Middle
Kingdom at any rate, of rising by sheer force of merit. In this
part of the Empire, in spite of the official promises with regard to
the system of examinations by which the public services are filled,
no one doubts that the places are all reserved for members of the
official families, and that the decision of the professors is often
affected more by money than by scholarship ; * but though ship-
wrecked ambitions may bewail the evils of the system, they do
not imagine that there could be a better one, and the existing
state of things is the object of unshakable admiration to the
whole people.

Education in China is remarkably general and widespread ;
it extends to classes considerably below those which, in France,

* " It is still only in China that a poor student can offer himself for
the Imperial examination and come out a great man. This is a splendid
feature of the social organization of the Chinese, and their theory is cer-
tainly better than any other. Unfortunately, its application is far from
perfect. I am not here referring to the errors of judgment and corruption
on the part of the examiners, or even to the sale of literary degrees, an
expedient to which the Government is sometimes driven in times of
financial stress ..." (F. J. Mohl, <' Annual Report of the Societe Asiatique,"
1846).

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

might conceivably feel the want of it. The cheapness of books,*
the number and the low fees of the schools, bring a certain
measure of education within the reach of everybody. The aims
and spirit of the laws are generally well understood, and the
government is proud of having made legal knowledge accessible
to all. There is a strong instinct of repulsion against radical
changes in the Government. A very trustworthy critic on this
point, Mr. John F. Davis, the British Commissioner in China,
who has not only lived in Canton but has studied its affairs
with the closest application, says that the Chinese are a people
whose history does not show a single attempt at a social revolu-
tion, or any alteration in the outward forms of power. In
his opinion, they are best described as " a nation of steady
conservatives."

The contrast is very striking, when we turn to the civilization
of the Roman world, where changes of government followed each
other with startling rapidity right up to the coming of the
northern peoples. Everywhere in this great society, and at every
time, we can find populations so detached from the existing
order as to be ready for the wildest experiments. Nothing was
left untried in this long period, no principle respected. Property,
religion, the family were all called in question, and many, both
in the North and South, were inclined to put the novel theories
into practice. Absolutely nothing in the Grasco-Roman world
rested on a solid foundation, not even the unity of the Empire,
so necessary one would think for the general safety. Further,
it was not only the armies, with their hosts of improvised Caesars,
who were continually battering at this Palladium of society ;
the emperors themselves, beginning with Diocletian, had so little
belief in the monarchy, that they established of their own accord
a division of power. At last there were four rulers at once.

* John F. Davis, "The Chinese" (London, 1840): "Three or four
volumes of any ordinary work of the octavo size and shape may be had
for a sum equivalent to two shillings. A Canton bookseller's manuscript
catalogue marked the price of the four books of Confucius, including the
commentary, at a price rather under half-a-crown. The cheapness of
their common literature is occasioned partly by the mode of printing, but
partly also by the low price of paper."

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

Not a single institution, not a single principle, was fixed, in this
unhappy society, which had no better reason for continuing to
exist than the physical impossibility of deciding on which rock
it should founder ; until the moment came when it was crushed
in the vigorous arms of the North, and forced at last to become
something definite.

Thus we find a complete opposition between these two great
societies, the Celestial and the Roman Empires. To the civiliza-
tion of Eastern Asia I will add that of the Brahmans, which is
also of extraordinary strength and universality. If in China
every one, or nearly every one, has reached a certain level of
knowledge, the same is the case among the Hindus. Each man,
according to his caste, shares in a spirit that has lasted for ages,
and knows exactly what he ought to learn, think, and believe.
Among the Buddhists of Tibet and other parts of Upper Asia,
nothing is rarer than a peasant who cannot read. Every one has
similar convictions on the important matters of life.

Do we find the same uniformity among Europeans ? The
question is not worth asking. The Grseco-Roman civilization
has no definitely marked colour, either throughout the nations
as a whole, or even within the same people. I need not speak
of Russia or most of the Austrian States ; the proof would be
too easy. But consider Germany or Italy (especially South
Italy) ; Spain shows a similar picture, though in fainter lines ;
France is in the same position as Spain.

Take the case of France. I will not confine myself to the
fact, which always strikes the most superficial observer, that
between Paris and the rest of France there is an impassable
gulf, and that at the very gates of the capital a new nation begins,
which is quite different from that living within the walls. On
this point there is no room for doubt, and those who base their
conclusions, as to the unity of ideas and the fusion of blood, on
the formal unity of our Government, are under a great illusion.

Not a single social law or root-principle of civilization is
understood in the same way in all our departments. I do not
refer merely to the peoples of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou,

G 97

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Limousin, Gascony, and Provence ; every one knows how little
one is like the other, and how they vary in their opinions. The
important point is that, while in China, Tibet, and India the ideas
essential to the maintenance of civilization are familiar to all
classes, this is not at all the case among ourselves. The most
elementary and accessible facts are sealed mysteries to most of
our rural populations, who are absolutely indifferent to them ;
ior usually they can neither read nor write, and have no wish
to learn. They cannot see the use of such knowledge, nor the
possibility of applying it. In such a matter, I put no trust in
the promises of the law, or the fine show made by institutions,
but rather in what I have seen for myself, and in the reports of
careful observers. Different governments have made the most
praiseworthy attempts to raise the peasants from their ignorance ;
not only are the children given every opportunity for being
educated in their villages, but even adults, who are made con-
scripts at twenty, find in the regimental schools an excellent
system of instruction in the most necessary subjects. Yet,
in spite of these provisions, and the fatherly anxiety of the
Government, in spite of the compelle intrare * which it is con-
tinually dinning into the ears of its agents, the agricultural
classes learn nothing whatever. Like all those who have lived
in the provinces, I have seen how parents never send their
children to school without obvious reluctance, how they regard
the hours spent there as a mere waste of time, how they with-
draw them at once on the slightest pretext and never allow the
compulsory number of years to be extended. Once he leaves
school, the young man's first duty is to forget what he has learnt.
This is, to a certain extent, a point of honour with him ; and
his example is followed by the discharged soldiers, who, in many
parts of France, are not only ashamed of having learnt to read
and write, but even affect to forget their own language, and often
succeed in doing so. Hence I could more easily approve all the
generous efforts that have been so fruitlessly made to educate our
rural populations, if I were not convinced that the knowledge
* " Force them to enter."

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

put before them is quite unsuitable, and that at the root of their
apparent indifference there is a feeling of invincible hostility
to our civilization. One proof lies in their attitude of passive
resistance ; but the spectre of another and more convincing
argument appears before me, as soon as I see any instance of
this obstinacy being overcome, under apparently favourable
circumstances. In some respects the attempts at education are
succeeding better than before. In our eastern departments and
the great manufacturing towns there are many workmen who
learn of their own accord to read and write. They live in a
circle where such knowledge is obviously useful. But as soon as
they have a sufficient grasp of the rudiments, how do they use
them ? Generally as a means of acquiring ideas and feelings
which are now no longer instinctively, but actively, opposed to
the social order. The only exception is to be found in the
agricultural and even the industrial population of the North-west,
where knowledge up to an elementary point is far more wide-
spread than in any other part, and where it is not only retained
after the school time is over, but is usually made to serve a good
end. As these populations have much more affinity than the
others to the Germanic race, I am not surprised at the result.
We see the same phenomenon in Belgium and the Netherlands.
If we go on to consider the fundamental beliefs and opinions
of the people, the difference becomes still more marked. With
regard to the beliefs we have to congratulate the Christian
religion on not being exclusive or making its dogmas too narrow.
If it had, it would have struck some very dangerous shoals.
The bishops and the clergy have to struggle, as they have done for
these five, ten, fifteen centuries, against the stream of hereditary
tendencies and prejudices, which are the more formidable as they
are hardly even admitted, and so can neither be fought nor con-
quered. There is no enlightened priest who does not know, after
his mission-work in the villages, the deep cunning with which
even the religious peasant will continue to cherish, in his inmost
heart, some traditional idea that comes to the surface only at
rare moments, in spite of himself. His complete confidence

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

in his parish priest just stops short of what we might call his
secret religion. Does he mention it to him ? he denies it,
will admit no discussion, and will not budge an inch from his
convictions. This is the reason of the taciturnity that, in every
province, is the main attitude of the peasant in face of the middle
classes ; it raises too an insuperable barrier between him and
even the most popular landowners in his canton. With this
view of civilization on the part of the majority of the people
who are supposed to be most deeply attached to it, I can well
believe that an approximate estimate of ten millions within our
circle of culture, and twenty-six millions outside it, would be,
if anything, an under-statement.

If our rural populations were merely brutal and ignorant,
we might not take much notice of this cleavage, but console
ourselves with the delusive hope of gradually winning them over,
and absorbing them in the multitudes that are already civilized.
But these peasants are like certain savage tribes : at first sight
they seem brutish and unthinking, for they are outwardly self-
effacing and humble. But if one digs even a little beneath the
surface, into their real life, one finds that their isolation is
voluntary, and comes from no feeling of weakness. Their likes
and dislikes are not a matter of chance ; everything obeys a
logical sequence of definite ideas. When I spoke just now of
religion, I might also have pointed out how very far removed
our moral doctrines are from those of the peasants,* what a
different sense they give to the word delicacy, how obstinately
they cling to their custom of regarding every one who is not of
peasant stock in the same way as the men of remote antiquity
viewed the foreigner. It is true they do not murder him,
thanks to the strange and mysterious terror inspired by laws
they have not themselves made ; but they do not conceal their

* A nurse of Touraine put a bird into the hands of the three-year-old
boy of whom she was in charge, and encouraged him to pull out its wings
and feathers. When the parents blamed her for teaching such wickedness,
she replied, "It is to make him proud." This answer, given in 1847,
goes back directly to the educational maxims in vogue at the time of
Vercingetorix.

IOO

(

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

hatred and distrust of him, and they take great pleasure in
annoying him, if they can do it without risk. Does this mean
that they are ill-natured ? No, not among themselves — we
may continually see them doing each .other little kindnesses.
They simply look on themselves as a race apart, a race (if we
may believe them) which is weak and oppressed, and obliged to
deal crookedly, but which also keeps its stiff-necked and con-
temptuous pride. In some of our provinces the workman thinks
himself of far better blood and older stock than his former master.
Family pride, in some of the peasants, is at least equal to that
of the nobility of the Middle Ages.*

We cannot doubt it ; the lower strata of the French people
have very little in common with the surface. They form an
abyss over which civilization is suspended, and the deep stagnant
waters, sleeping at the bottom of the gulf, will one day show
their power of dissolving all that comes in their way. The most
tragic crises of her history have deluged the country with blood,
without the agricultural population playing any part except
that which was forced on it. Where its immediate interests
were not engaged, it let the storms pass by without troubling
itself in the least. Those who are astonished and scandalized
by such callousness say that the peasant is essentially immoral —
which is both unjust and untrue. The peasants look on us
almost in the light of enemies. They understand nothing of
our civilization, they share in it unwillingly, and think themselves

* A very few years ago there was a question of electing a churchwarden
in a little obscure parish of French Brittany, that part of the old province
which the true Bretons call the "Welsh," or "foreign," country. The
church council, composed of peasants, deliberated for two days without
being able to make up their minds ; for the candidate before them, though
rich and well esteemed as a good man and a good Christian, was a
"foreigner." The council would not move from its opinion, although
the " foreigner's " father, as well as himself, had been born in the district ;
it was still remembered that his grandfather, who had been dead for
many years and had never known any member of the council, was an
immigrant from another part of the country. The daughter of a peasant-
proprietor makes a mesdlliance if she marries a tailor or a miller or even
a farmer, if he works for wages. It does not matter whether the husband
is richer than she is ; her crime is often punished, just the same, by a
father's curse. Is not this case exactly like that of the churchwarden ?

IOI

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

justified in profiting, as far as they can, by its misfortunes. If
we put aside this antagonism, which is sometimes active but
generally inert, we need not hesitate to allow them some high
moral qualities, however strangely these may, at times, be
manifested.

I may apply to the whole of Europe what I have just said of
France, and conclude that modern civilization includes far more
than it absorbs ; in this it resembles the Roman Empire. Hence
one cannot be confident that our state of society will last ; and
I see a clear proof of this in the smallness of its hold even over the
classes raised a little above the country population. Our civiliza-
tion may be compared to the temporary islands thrown up in the
sea by submarine volcanoes. Exposed as they are to the destruc-
tive action of the currents, and robbed of the forces that first
kept them in position, they will one day break up, and their
fragments will be hurled into the gulf of the all-conquering
waves. It is a sad end, and one which many noble races before
ourselves have had to meet. The blow cannot be turned aside ;
it is inevitable. The wise man may see it coming, but can do
nothing more. The most consummate statesmanship is not able
for one moment to counteract the immutable laws of the world.

But though thus unknown, despised, or hated by the majority
of those who live under its shadow, our civilization is yet one of
the most glorious monuments ever erected by the genius of man.
It is certainly not distinguished by its power of invention ; but
putting this aside, we may say that it has greatly developed
the capacity for understanding, and so for conquest. To mistake
nothing is to take everything. If it has not founded the " exact
sciences," it has at least made them exact, and freed them from
errors to which, curiously enough, they were more liable than any
other branch of knowledge. Thanks to its discoveries, it knows
the material world better than all the societies which have gone
before. It has guessed some of its chief laws, it can describe
and explain them, and borrow from them a marvellous strength
that passes a hundredfold the strength of a man. Little by little,
by a skilful use of induction, it has reconstructed large periods

102

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

of history of which the ancients never suspected the existence.
The further we are from primitive times, the more clearly can we
see them, and penetrate their mysteries. This is a great point of
superiority, and one which we must, in fairness, allow to our
civilization.

But when we have admitted this, should we be right in con-
cluding, as is usually done, without reflexion, that it is superior
to all the civilizations that have ever existed, and to all those
that exist at the present day ? Yes and no. Yes, because the
extreme diversity of its elements allows it to rest on a powerful
basis of comparison and analysis, and so to assimilate at once
almost anything ; yes, because this power of choice is favourable
to its development in many different directions ; yes again,
because, thanks to the impulse of the Germanic element (which is
too materialistic to be a destructive force) it has made itself a
morality, the wise prescriptions of which were generally unknown
before. If, however, we carry this idea of its greatness so far
as to regard it as having an absolute and unqualified superiority,
then I say no, the simple fact being that it excels in practically
nothing whatever.

In politics, we see it in bondage to the continual change brought
about by the different requirements of the races which it includes.
In England, Holland, Naples, and Russia, its principles are still
fairly stable, because the populations are more homogeneous,
or at any rate form groups of the same kind, with similar instincts.
But everywhere else, especially in France, Central Italy, and
Germany — where variations of race are infinite — theories of
government can never rise to the rank of accepted truths, and
political science is a matter of continual experiment. As our
civilization is unable to have any sure confidence in itself, it is
without the stability that is one of the most important qualities
mentioned in my definition. This weakness is to be found
neither in the Buddhist and Brahman societies, nor in the
Celestial Empire ; and these civilizations have in this respect an
advantage over ours. The whole people is at one in its political
beliefs. When there is a wise government, and the ancient

103

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

institutions are bearing good fruit, every one is glad. When they
are in clumsy hands, and injure the commonwealth, they are
pitied by the citizens as a man pities himself ; but they never
cease to be respected. There is sometimes a desire to purify
them, but never to sweep them away or replace them by others.
It does not need very keen eyes to see here a guarantee of long
life which our civilization is very far from possessing.

In art, our inferiority to India, as well as to Egypt, Greece,
and America, is very marked. Neither in sublimity nor beauty
have we anything to compare with the masterpieces of antiquity.
When our day has drawn to its close, and the ruins of our towns
and monuments cover the face of the land, the traveller will
discover nothing, in the forests and marshes that will skirt the
Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine, to rival the gorgeous ruins of
Philse, Nineveh, Athens, Salsette, and the valley of Tenochtitlan.
If future ages have something to learn from us in the way of
positive science, this is not the case with poetry, as is clearly
proved by the despairing admiration that we so justly feel for
the intellectual wonders of foreign civilizations.

So far as the refinement of manners is concerned, we have
obviously changed for the worse. This is shown by our own
past history ; there were periods when luxury, elegance, and
sumptuousness were understood far better and practised on
a far more lavish scale than to-day. Pleasure was certainly
confined to a smaller number. Comparatively few were in what
we should call a state of well-being. On the other hand, if we
admit (as we must) that refinement of manners elevates the
minds of the multitudes who look on, as well as ennobling the
life of a few favoured individuals, that it spreads a varnish of
beauty and grandeur over the whole country, and that these
become the common inheritance of all — then our civilization,
which is essentially petty on its external side, cannot be compared
to its rivals.

I may add, finally, that the active element distinguishing
any civilization is identical with the most striking quality, what-
ever it may be, of the dominant race. The civilization is modified

104

COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS

and transformed according to the changes undergone by this race,
and when the race itself has disappeared, carries on for some time
the impulse originally received from it. Thus the kind of order
kept in any society is the best index to the special capacities
of the people and to the stage of progress to which they have
attained : it is the clearest mirror in which their individuality
can be reflected.

I see that the long digression, into which I have strayed, has
carried me further than I expected. I do not regret it, for it has
enabled me to vent certain ideas that the reader might well keep
in mind. But it is now time to return to the main course of my
argument, the chain of which is still far from being complete.

I established first that the life or death of societies was the
result of internal causes. I have said what these causes are,
and described their essential nature, in order that they may be
more easily recognized. I have shown that they are generally
referred to a wrong source ; and in looking for some sign that
could always distinguish them, and indicate their presence, I
found it in the capacity to create a civilization. As it seemed
impossible to discover a clear conception of this term, it was
necessary to define it, as I have done. My next step must be to
study the natural and unvarying phenomenon which I have
identified as the latent cause of the life and death of societies.
This, as I have said, consists in the relative worth of the different
races. Logic requires me to make clear at once what I under-
stand by the word race. This will be the subject of the following
chapter.

105

CHAPTER X

SOME ANTHROPOLOGISTS REGARD MAN AS HAVING A
MULTIPLE ORIGIN *

We must first discuss the word race in its physiological sense.

A good many observers, who judge by first impressions and
so take extreme views, assert that there are such radical and
essential differences between human families that one must refuse
them any identity of origin. t The writers who adhere to such a
notion assume many other genealogies by the side of that from
Adam. To them there is no original unity in the species, or
rather there is no single species ; there are three or four, or even
more, which produce perfectly distinct types, and these again
have united to form hybrids.

The supporters of this theory easily win belief by citing the
clear and striking differences between certain human groups.
When we see before us a man with a yellowish skin, scanty hair
and beard, a large face, a pyramidal skull, small stature, thick-set
limbs, and slanting eyes with the skin of the eyelids turned so
much outwards that the eye will hardly open J — we recognize
a very well-marked type, the main features of which it is easy to
bear in mind.

From him we turn to another — a negro from the West Coast
of Africa, tall, strong-looking, with thick-set limbs and a tendency
to fat. His colour is no longer yellowish, but entirely black ;
his hair no longer thin and wiry, but thick, coarse, woolly, and
luxuriant ; his lower jaw juts out, the shape of the skull is what

* This chapter was, of course, written before the appearance of the
"Origin of Species" or the "Descent of Man"; see author's preface. —
Tr.

| These views are quoted by Flourens (Eloge de Blumenbach, Mhnoire
de I'Academie des Sciences), who himself dissents from them.

I This and the other illustrations in this chapter are taken from
Prichard, " Natural History of Man."

106

THEORIES OF ORIGIN

is known as prognathous. " The long bones stand out, the front
of the tibia and the fibula are more convex than in a European,
the calves are very high and reach above the knee ; the feet are
quite flat, and the heel-bone, instead of being arched, is almost
in a straight line with the other bones of the foot, which is very
large. The hand is similarly formed."

When we look for a moment at an individual of this type,
we are involuntarily reminded of the structure of the monkey,
and are inclined to admit that the negro races of West Africa
come from a stock that has nothing in common, except the human
form, with the Mongolian.

We come next to tribes whose appearance is still less flattering
to the self-love of mankind than that of the Congo negro. Oceania
has the special privilege of providing the most ugly, degraded,
and repulsive specimens of the race, which seem to have been
created with the express purpose of forming a link between man
and the brute pure and simple. By the side of many Australian
tribes, the African negro himself assumes a value and dignity,
and seems to derive from a nobler source. In many of the
wretched inhabitants of this New World, the size of the head,
the extreme thinness of the limbs, the famished look of the body,
are absolutely hideous. The hair is flat or wavy, and generally
woolly, the flesh is black on a foundation of grey.

When, after examining these types, taken from all the quarters
of the globe, we finally come back to the inhabitants of Europe,
and of South and West Asia, we find them so superior in beauty,
in just proportion of limb and regularity of feature, that we are
at once tempted to accept the conclusions of those who assert the
multiplicity of races. Not only are these peoples more beautiful
than the rest of mankind, which is, I confess, a pestilent con-
gregation of ugliness ; * not only have they had the glory of

* Meiners was so struck with the repulsive appearance of the greater
part of humanity that he imagined a very simple system of classification,
containing only two categories — the beautiful, namely the white race,
and the ugly, which includes all the others (Grundriss der Geschichte der
Menschheit). The reader will see that I have not thought it necessary
to go through all the ethnological theories. I only mention the most
important.

I07

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

giving the world such admirable types as a Venus, an Apollo, a
Farnese Hercules ; but also there is a visible hierarchy of beauty
established from ancient times even among themselves, and in
this natural aristocracy the Europeans are the most eminent,
by their grace of outline and strength of muscular developement.
The most reasonable view appears to be that the families into
which man is divided are as distinct as are animals of different
species. Such was the conclusion drawn from simple observa-
tion, and so long as only general facts were in question, it seemed
irrefutable.

Camper was one of the first to reduce these observations to
some kind of system. He was no longer satisfied with merely
superficial evidence, but wished to give his proofs a mathematical
foundation ; he tried to define anatomically the differences
between races. He succeeded in establishing a strict method
that left no room for doubt, and his views gained the numerical
accuracy without which there can be no science. His method
was to take the front part of the skull and measure the inclination
of the profile by means of two lines which he called the facial
lines. Their intersection formed an angle, the size of which gave
the degree of elevation attained by the race to which the skull
belonged. One of these lines connected the base of the nose with
the orifice of the ear ; the other was tangential to the most
prominent part of the forehead and the jut of the upper jaw.
On the basis of the angle thus formed, he constructed a scale
including not only man but all kinds of animals. At the top
stood the European ; and the more acute the angle, the further
was the distance from the type which, according to Camper, was
the most perfect. Thus birds and fishes showed smaller angles
than the various mammals. A certain kind of ape reached
420, and even 500. Then came the heads of the African negro and
the Kalmuck, which touched 700. The European stood at 8o°,
and, to quote the inventor's own words, which are very flattering
to our own type, " On this difference of io° the superior beauty
of the European, what one might call his ' comparative beauty,'
depends ; the ' absolute beauty ' that is so striking in some of the

108

THEORIES OF ORIGIN

works of ancient sculpture, as in the head of Apollo and the
Medusa of Sosicles, is the result of a still greater angle, amounting
in this instance to ioo°."*

This method was attractive by its simplicity. Unhappily, the
facts are against it, as against so many systems. By a series
of accurate observations, Owen showed that, in the case of
monkeys, Camper had studied the skulls only of the young
animals ; but since, in the adults, the growth of the teeth and
jaws, and the development of the zygomatic arch, were not
accompanied by a corresponding enlargement of the brain, the
numerical difference between these and human skulls was much
greater than Camper had supposed, since the facial angle of the
black orang-outang or the highest type of chimpanzee was at most
300 or 35°. From this to the 700 of the negro and the Kalmuck
the gap was too great for Camper's scale to have any significance.

Camper's theory made considerable use of phrenology. He
attempted to discover a corresponding development of instinct
as he mounted his scale from the animals to man. But here too
the facts were against him. The elephant, for example, whose
intelligence is certainly greater than the orang-outang's, has a
far more acute facial angle ; and even the most docile and in
telligent monkeys do not belong to the species which are 'the
" highest" in Camper's series.

Beside these two great defects, the method is very open to
attack in that it does not apply to all the varieties of the human
race. It leaves out of account the tribes with pyramidally
shaped heads, who form, however, a striking division by them-
selves.

Blumenbach, who held the field against his predecessor,
elaborated a system in his turn ; this was to study a man's head
from the top. He called his discovery norma verticalis, the
" vertical method." He was confident that the comparison of
heads according to their width brought out the chief differences
in the general configuration of the skull. According to him,
the study of this part of the body is so pregnant with results,
* Prichard, op. cit. (2nd edition, 1845), p. 112.

ioq

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

especially in its bearing on national character, that it is im-
possible to measure all the differences merely by lines and angles ;
to reach a satisfying basis of classification,';we must consider the
heads from the point of view in which we can take in at one
glance the greatest number of varieties. His idea was, in outline,
as follows : " Arrange the skulls that you wish to compare in
such a way that the jaw-bones are on the same horizontal line ;
in other words, let each rest on its lower jaw. Then stand be-
hind the skulls and fix the eye on the vertex of each. In this
way you will best see the varieties of shape that have most to
do with national character ; these consist either (i) in the direc-
tion of the jaw-bone and maxillary, or (2) in the breadth or
narrowness of the oval outline presented by the top half of
the skull, or (3) in the flattened or vaulted form of the frontal
bone."*

Blumenbach's system resulted in the division of mankind into
five main categories, which were in their turn subdivided into a
certain number of types and classes.

This classification was of very doubtful value. Like that of
Camper, it overlooked many important characteristics. It was
partly to escape such objections that Owen proposed to examine
skulls, not from the top, but from the bottom. One of the chief
results of this new method was to show such a strong and definite
line of difference between a man and an orang-outang that it
became for ever impossible to find the link that Camper imagined
to exist between the two species. In fact, one glance at the two
skulls, from Owen's point of view, is enough to bring out their
radical difference. The diameter from front to back is longer in
the orang-outang than in man ; the zygomatic arch, instead
of being wholly in the front part of the base, is in the middle,
and occupies just a third of its diameter. Finally the position
of the occipital orifice, which has such a marked influence on
general structure and habits, is quite different. In the skull of a
man, it is almost at the centre of the base ; in that of an orang-
outang, it is a sixth of the way from the hinder end.f
* Prichard, p. 116. f Ibid- PP- "7-i&

THEORIES OF ORIGIN

Owen's observations have, no doubt, considerable value ; I
would prefer, however, the most recent of the craniological
systems, which is at the same time, in many ways, the most
ingenious, I mean that of the American scholar Morton, adopted
by Carus.* In outline this is as follows :

To show the difference of races, Morton and Carus started
from the idea, that the greater the size of the skull, the higher the
type to which the individual belonged, and they set out to in-
vestigate whether the development of the skull is equal in all the
human races.

To solve this question, Morton took a certain number of heads
belonging to whites, Mongols, negroes, and Redskins of North
America. He stopped all the openings with cotton, except the
foramen magnum, and completely filled the inside with carefully
dried grains of pepper. He then compared the number of grains
in each. This gave him the following table :

Number of

Average

Maximum

Minimum

skulls

number

measured.

of grains.

White races

IO9

Yellow races

/ Mongols .
\ Malays

IO
18

93
89

69
64

Redskins

147

100

Negroes

The results set down in the first two columns are certainly very
curious. On the other hand, I attach little importance to those
in the last two ; for if the extraordinary variations from the
average in the second column are to have any real significance,
Morton should have taken a far greater number of skulls, and
further, have given details as to the social position of those to
whom the skulls belonged. He was probably able to procure,
in the case of the whites and the Redskins, heads which had
belonged to men at any rate above the lowest level of society,
while it is not likely that he had access to the skulls of negro
* Carus, op. cit., from which the following details are taken.

Ill

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

chiefs, or of Chinese mandarins. This explains how he has been
able to assign the number ioo to an American Indian, while the
most intelligent Mongol whom he has examined does not rise
above 93, and is thus inferior even to the negro, who reaches 94.
Such results are a mere matter of chance. They are quite in-
complete and unscientific ; in such questions, however, one
cannot be too careful to avoid judgments founded merely on
individual cases. I am inclined therefore to reject altogether
the second half of Morton's calculations.

I must also question one detail in the other half. In the second
column, there is a clear gradation from the number 87, indicating
the capacity of the white man's skull, to the numbers 83 and 78
for the yellow and black man respectively. But the figures 83,
81, 82, for the Mongols, Malays, and Redskins, give average
results which evidently shade into one another ; all the more so,
because Carus does not hesitate to count the Mongols and Malays
as the same race, and consequently to put the numbers 83 and 81
together. But, in that case, why allow the number 82 to mark
a distinct race, and thus create arbitrarily a fourth great division
of mankind ?

This anomaly, however, actually buttresses the weak point in
Carus' system. He likes to think that, just as we see our planet
pass through the four stages of day and night, evening and
morning twilight, so there must be in the human species four sub-
divisions corresponding to these. He sees here a symbol, which
is always a temptation for a subtle mind. Carus yields to it, as
many of his learned fellow-countrymen would have done in
his place. The white races are the nations of the day ; the black
those of the night ; the yellow those of the Eastern, and the red
those of the Western twilight. We may easily guess the in-
genious comparisons suggested by such a picture. Thus, the
European nations, owing to the brilliance of their scientific
knowledge and the clear outlines of their civilization, are obviously
in the full glare of day, while the negroes sleep in the darkness
of ignorance, and the Chinese live in a half-light that gives them
an incomplete, though powerful, social development. As for

112

THEORIES OF ORIGIN

the Redskins, who are gradually disappearing from the earth,
where can we find a more beautiful image of their fate than the
setting sun ?

Unhappily, comparison is not proof, and by yielding too easily
to this poetic impulse, Carus has a little damaged his fine theory.
The same charge also may be levelled at this as at the other
ethnological doctrines ; Carus does not manage to include in a
systematic whole the various physiological differences between
one race and another.*

The supporters of the theory of racial unity have not failed
to seize on this weak point, and to claim that, where we cannot
arrange the observations on the shape of the skull in such a way
as to constitute a proof of the original separation of types, we
must no longer consider the variations as pointing to any radical
difference, but merely regard them as the result of secondary and
isolated causes, with no specific relevance.

The cry of victory may be raised a little too soon. It may
be hard to find the correct method, without being necessarily
impossible. The " unitarians," however, do not admit this
reservation. They support their view by observing that certain
tribes that belong to the same race show a very different physical
type. They cite, for instance, the various branches of the hybrid
Malayo-Polynesian family, without taking account of the pro-
portion in which the elements are mingled in each case. If
groups (they say) with a common origin can show quite a different
conformation of features and skull, the unity of the human race
cannot be disproved along these lines at all. However foreign
the negro or Mongol type may appear to European eyes, this
is no evidence of their different origin ; the reasons why the
human families have diverged will be found nearer to hand, and

* There are some apparently trivial differences which are, however,
very characteristic. A certain fullness at the side of the lower lip, that
we see among Germans and English, is an example. This mark of Ger-
manic origin may also be found in some faces of the Flemish School, in
the Rubens Madonna at Dresden, in the Satyrs and Nymphs in the same
collection, in a Lute-player of Mieris, &c. No craniological method can
take account of such details, though they have a certain importance,
in view of the mixed character of our races.

H 113

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

we may regard these physiological deviations merely as the
result of certain local causes acting for a definite period of
time.*

In face of so many objections, good and bad, the champions of
multiplicity tried to extend the sphere of their arguments.
Relying no longer on the mere study of skulls, they passed to that
of the individual man as a whole. In order to prove (as is quite
true) that the differences do not merely lie in the facial appearance
and the bony conformation of the head, they brought forward
other important differences with regard to the shape of the pelvis,
the proportions of the limbs, the colour of the skin, and the nature
of the capillary system.

Camper and other anthropologists had already recognized that

the pelvis of the negro showed certain peculiarities. Dr. Vrolik

pushed these inquiries further, and observed that the difference

between the male and female pelvis was far less marked in the

European, while in the negro race he saw in the pelvis of both

sexes a considerable approximation to the brute. Assuming

* Job Ludolf, whose data on this subject were necessarily very incom-
plete and inferior to those we have now, is none the less opposed to the
opinion accepted by Prichard. His remarks on the black race are striking
and unanswerable, and I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting them :
-' It is not my purpose to speak here about the blackness of the Ethiop ;
most people may, if they will, attribute it to the heat of the sun and the
torrid zone. Yet even within the sun's equatorial path there are peoples
who, if not white, are at least not quite black. Many who live outside
either tropic are further from the Equator than the Persians or Syrians
— for instance, the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, who, however,
are absolutely black. If you say that blackness belongs solely to Africa
and the sons of Ham, you must still allow that the Malabars and the
Cingalese and other even more remote peoples of Asia are equally black.
If you regard the climate and soil as the reason, then why do not white
men become black when they settle down in these regions ? If you take
refuge in ' hidden qualities,' you would do better to confess your ignorance
at once " (Jobus Ludolf us, Commentarium ad Historiam JEthiopicam). I
will add a short and conclusive passage of Mr. Pickering. He speaks of
the regions inhabited by the black race in these words : "Excluding the
northern and southern extremes, with the tableland of Abyssinia, it holds
all the more temperate and fertile parts of the Continent." Thus it is
just where we find most of the pure negroes that it is least hot . . .
(Pickering, ''The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution."
The essay is to be found in the " Records of the United States' Exploring
Expedition during the Years 1838-42," vol. ix).

THEORIES OF ORIGIN

that the configuration of the pelvis necessarily affected that of
the embryo, he inferred a difference of origin.*

Weber attacked this theory, with little result. He had to
recognize that some formations of the pelvis were found in one
race more frequently than in another ; and all he could do was
to show that there were some exceptions to Vrolik's rule, and
that certain American, African, and Mongolian specimens showed
formations that were usually confined to Europeans. This does
not prove very much, especially as, in speaking of these excep-
tions, Weber does not seem to have inquired whether the peculiar
configuration in question might not result from a mixture of
blood.

With regard to the size of the limbs, the opponents of a common
origin assert that the European is better proportioned. The
answer — which is a good one — is that we have no reason to be
surprised at the thinness of the extremities in peoples who live
mainly on vegetables or have not generally enough to eat. But
as against the argument from the extraordinary development of
the bust among the Quichuas, the critics who refuse to recognize
this as a specific difference are on less firm ground. Their con-
tention that the development among the mountaineers of Peru
is explained by the height of the Andes, is hardly serious. There
are many mountain-peoples in the world who are quite differently
constituted from the Quichuas.f

The next point is the colour of the skin. The unitarians deny
this any specific influence, first because the colour depends on
facts of climate, and is not permanent — a very bold assertion ;
secondly because the colour is capable of infinite gradation, pass-
ing insensibly from white to yellow, from yellow to black, without
showing a really definite line of cleavage. This proves nothing
but the existence of a vast number of hybrids, a fact which the
unitarians are continually neglecting, to the great prejudice of
their theory.

* Prichard, p. 124.

t Neither the Swiss nor the Tyrolese, nor the Highlanders of Scotland,
nor the Balkan Slavs, nor the Himalaya tribes have the same hideous
appearance as the Quichuas.

115

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

As to the specific character of the hair, Flourens is of opinion
that this is no argument against an original unity of race.

After this rapid review of the divergent theories I come
to the great scientific stronghold of the unitarians, an argu-
ment of great weight, which I have kept to the end — I mean the
ease with which the different branches of the human family
create hybrids, and the fertility of these hybrids.
• The observations of naturalists seem to prove that, in the
animal or vegetable world, hybrids can be produced only from
allied species, and that, even so, they are condemned to barren-
ness. It has also been observed that between related species
intercourse, although possibly fertile, is repugnant, and usually
has to be effected by trickery or force. This would tend to
show that in the free state the number of hybrids is even more
limited than when controlled by man. We may conclude that
the power of producing fertile offspring is among the marks of
a distinct species.

As nothing leads us to believe that the human race is outside
this rule, there is no answer to this argument, which more than
any other has served to hold in check the forces opposed to
unity. We hear, it is true, that in certain parts of Oceania the
native women who have become mothers by Europeans are no
longer fitted for impregnation by their own kind. Assuming this
to be true, we might make it the basis of a more profound inquiry ;
but, so far as the present discussion goes, we could not use
it to weaken the general principle of the fertility of human
hybrids and the infertility of all others ; it has no bearing on any
conclusions that may be drawn from this principle.

116

CHAPTER XI

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

The unitarians say that the separation of the races is merely
apparent, and due to local influences, such as are still at work, or
to accidental variations of shape in the ancestor of some particular
branch. All mankind is, for them, capable of the same improve-
ment ; the original type, though more or less disguised, persists
in unabated strength, and the negro, the American savage, the
Tungusian of Northern Siberia, can attain a beauty of outline
equal to that of the European, and would do so, if they were
brought up under similar conditions. This theory cannot be
accepted.

We have seen above that the strongest scientific rampart of the
unitarians lay in the fertility of human hybrids. Up to now, this
has been very difficult to refute, but perhaps it will not always be
so ; at any rate, I should not think it worth while to pause over
this argument if it were not supported by another, of a very
different kind, which, I confess, gives me more concern. It is
said that Genesis does not admit of a multiple origin for our
species.

If the text is clear, positive, peremptory, and incontestable, we
must bow our heads ; the greatest doubts must yield, reason can
only declare herself imperfect and inferior, the origin of mankind
is single, and everything that seems to prove the contrary is
merely a delusive appearance. It is better to let darkness gather
round a point of scholarship, than to enter the lists against such
an authority. But if the Bible is not explicit, if the Holy Scrip-
tures, which were written to shed light on quite other questions
than those of race, have been misunderstood, and if without
doing them violence one can draw a different meaning from them,
then I shall not hesitate to go forward.

117

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

We must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor
of the white race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so
understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly
white. This being admitted, there is nothing to show that, in
the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those
outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all.
Not a word is said about the yellow races, and it is only an
arbitrary interpretation of the text that makes us regard the
patriarch Ham as black. Of course the translators and com-
mentators, in calling Adam the common ancestor of all men,
have had to enrol among his descendants all the peoples who have
lived since his time. According to them, the European nations
are of the stock of Japhet, hither Asia was occupied by the
Semites, and the regions of Africa by the Hamites, who are,
as I say, unreasonably considered to be of negro origin. The
whole scheme fits admirably together — for one part of the world.
But what about the other part ? It is simply left out.

For the moment, I do not insist on this line of argument. I
do not wish to run counter to even literal interpretations of the
text, if they are generally accepted. I will merely point out that
we might, perhaps, doubt their value, without going beyond the
limits imposed by the Church ; and then I will ask whether we
may admit the basic principle of the unitarians, such as it is,
and yet somehow explain the facts otherwise than they do.
In other words, I will simply ask whether independently of any
question of an original unity or multiplicity, there may not exist
the most radical and far-reaching differences, both physical and
moral, between human races.

The racial identity of all the different kinds of dog is admitted
by Frederic Cuvier among others ; * but no one would say that
in all dogs, without distinction of species, we find the same shapes,
instincts, habits, and qualities. The same is true of horses, bulls,
bears, and the like. Everywhere we see identity of origin,
diversity of everything else, a diversity so deep that it cannot
be lost except by crossing, and even then the products do not
* Annates du Mustum, vol. xi, p. 458.

Il8

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

return to a real identity of nature. On the other hand, so long
as the race is kept pure, the special characteristics remain
unchanged, and are reproduced for generations without any
appreciable difference.

This fact, which is indisputable, has led some to ask whether
in the various kinds of domestic animals we can recognize the
shapes and instincts of the primitive stock. The question
seems for ever insoluble. It is impossible to determine the
form and nature of a primitive type, and to be certain how far
the specimens we see to-day deviate from it. The same problem
is raised in the case of a large number of vegetables. Man
especially, whose origin offers a more interesting study than
that of all the rest, seems to resist all explanation, from this
point of view.

The different races have never doubted that the original
ancestor of the whole species had precisely their own character-
istics. On this point, and this alone, tradition is unanimous.
The white peoples have made for themselves an Adam and an Eve
that Blumenbach would have called Caucasian ; whereas in
the " Arabian Nights " — a book which, though apparently trivial,
is a mine of true sayings and well-observed facts — we read that
some negroes regard Adam and his wife as black, and since
these were created in the image of God, God must also be black
and the angels too, while the prophet of God was naturally too
near divinity to show a white skin to his disciples.

Unhappily, modern science has been able to provide no clue
to the labyrinth of the various opinions. No likely hypothesis
has succeeded in lightening this darkness, and in all probability
the human races are as different from their common ancestor,
if they have one, as they are from each other. I will therefore
assume without discussion the principle of unity ; and my only
task, in the narrow and limited field to which I am confining
myself, is to explain the actual deviation from the primitive
type.

The causes are very hard to disentangle. The theory of the
unitarians attributes the deviation, as I have already said, to

119

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

habits, climate, and locality. It is impossible to agree with
this.* Changes have certainly been brought about in the
constitution of races, since the dawn of history, by such external
influences ; but they do not seem to have been important enough
to be able to explain fully the many vital divergences that exist.
This will become clear in a moment.

I will suppose that there are two tribes which still bear a
resemblance to the primitive type, and happen to be living,
the one in a mountainous country in the interior of a continent,
the other on an island in the midst of the ocean. The atmosphere
and the food conditions of each will be quite different. I will
assume that the one has many ways of obtaining food, the other
very few. Further, I will place the former in a cold climate,
the second under a tropical sun. By this means the external
contrast between them will be complete. The course of time
will add its own weight to the action of the natural forces,
and there is no doubt that the two groups will gradually
accumulate some special characteristics which will distinguish
them from each other. But even after many centuries no vital
or organic change will have taken place in their constitution.
This is proved by the fact that we find peoples of a very similar
type, living on opposite sides of the world and under quite
different conditions, of climate and everything else. Ethnologists
are agreed on this point and some have even believed that the

* The unitarians are continually bringing forward comparisons between
man and the animals in support of their theory ; I have just been using
such a line of argument myself. It only applies, however, within limits,
and I could not honestly avail myself of it in speaking of the modification
of species by climate. In this respect the difference between man and
the animals is radical and (one might almost say) specific. There is a
geography of animals, as there is of plants ; but there is no geography of
man. It is only in certain latitudes that certain vegetables, mammals,
reptiles, fishes, and molluscs can exist ; man, in all his varieties, can
live equally well everywhere. In the case of the animals this fully explains
a vast number of differences in organization ; and I can easily believe that
the species that cannot cross a certain meridian or rise to a certain height
above sea-level without dying are very dependent upon the influence of
climate and quick to betray its effects in their forms and instincts. It is
just, however, because man is absolutely free from such bondage that
I refuse to be always comparing his position, in face of the forces of nature,
with that of the animals.

120

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

Hottentots are a Chinese colony — a hypothesis impossible on
other grounds — on account of their likeness to the inhabitants
of the Celestial Empire.* In the same way, some have seen a
great resemblance between the portraits we have of the ancient
Etruscans and the Araucans of South America. In features
and general shape the Cherokees seem almost identical with
many of the Italian peoples, such as the Calabrians. The usual
type of face among the inhabitants of Auvergne, especially the
women, is far less like the ordinary European's than that of
many Indian tribes of North America. Thus when we grant
that nature can produce similar types in widely separated
countries, under different conditions of life and climate, it
becomes quite clear that the human races do not take their
qualities from any of the external forces that are active at the
present day.

I would not, however, deny that local conditions may favour
the deepening of some particular skin-colour, the tendency to
obesity, the development of the chest muscles, the lengthening
of the arms or the lower limbs, the increase or decrease of physical
strength. But, I repeat, these are not essential points ; and
to judge from the very slight difference made by the alteration
of local conditions in the shape of the body, there is no reason
to believe that they have ever had very much influence. This
is an argument of considerable weight.

Although we do not know what cataclysmal changes may
have been effected in the physical organization of the races
before the dawn of history, we may at least observe that this
period extends only to about half the age attributed to our
species. If for three or four thousand years the darkness is
impenetrable, we still have another period of three thousand
years, of which we can go right back to the beginning in the case
of certain nations. Everything tends to show that the races

* Barrow is the author of this theory, which he bases on certain points
of resemblance in the shape of the head and the yellowish colour of the
skin in the natives of the Cape of Good Hope. A traveller, whose name
I forget, has even brought additional evidence by observing that the
Hottentots usually wear a head-dress like the conical hat of the Chinese.

121

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

which were then known, and which have remained relatively
pure since that time, have not greatly changed in their outward
appearance, although some of them no longer live in the same
places, and so are no longer affected by the same external causes.
Take, for example, the Arabs of the stock of Ishmael. We still
find them, just as they are represented in the Egyptian monu-
ments, not only in the parched deserts of their own land, but in
the fertile, and often damp, regions of Malabar and the Coro-
mandel Coast, in the islands of the Indies, and on many points
of the north coast of Africa, where they are, as a fact, more mixed
than anywhere else. Traces of them are still found in some
parts of Roussillon, Languedoc, and the Spanish coast, although
almost two centuries have passed away since their invasion.
If the mere influence of environment had the power, as is
supposed, of setting up and taking away the limits between
organic types, it would have not allowed these to persist so long.
The change of place would have been followed by a corresponding
change of form.

After the Arabs, I will mention the Jews, who are still more
remarkable in this connexion, as they have settled in lands with
very different climates from that of Palestine, and have given
up their ancient mode of life. The Jewish type has, however,
remained much the same ; the modifications it has undergone
are of no importance and have never been enough, in any country
or latitude, to change the general character of the race. The
warlike Rechabites of the Arabian desert, the peaceful Portuguese,
French, German, and Polish Jews — they all look alike. I have
had the opportunity of examining closely one of the last kind.
His features and profile clearly betrayed his origin. His eyes
especially were unforgettable. This denizen of the north, whose
immediate ancestors had lived, for many generations, in the
snow, seemed to have been just tanned by the rays of the Syrian
sun. The Semitic face looks exactly the same, in its main
characteristics, as it appears on the Egyptian paintings of three
or four thousand years ago, and more ; and we find it also, in
an equally striking and recognizable form, under the most

122

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

varied and disparate conditions of climate. The identity of
descendant and ancestor does not stop at the features ; it
continues also in the shape of the limbs and the temperament.
The German Jews are usually smaller and more slender in build
than the men of European race among whom they have lived
for centuries. Further, the marriageable age is much earlier
among them than among their fellow-countrymen of another
race.*

This, by the way, is an assertion diametrically opposed to the
opinion of Prichard, who in his zeal for proving the unity of the
species, tries to show that the age of puberty, for the two sexes,
is the same everywhere and in all races. f The reasons which
he advances are drawn from the Old Testament in the case of
the Jews, and, in the case of the Arabs, from the religious law
of the Koran, by which the age of marriage is fixed, for girls,
at fifteen, and even (in the opinion of Abu- Hani f ah) at eighteen.

These two arguments seem very questionable. In the first

place, the Biblical evidence is not admissible on this point, as

it often includes facts that contradict the ordinary course of

nature. Sarah, for example, was brought to bed of a child in

extreme old age, when Abraham himself had reached a hundred

years ; t to such an event ordinary reasoning cannot apply.

Secondly, as to the views and ordinances of the Mohammedan

law, I may say that the Koran did not intend merely to make

sure of the physical fitness of the woman before authorizing

the marriage. It wished her also to be far enough advanced in

education and intelligence to be able to understand the serious

duties of her new position. This is shown by the pains taken

by the prophet to prescribe that the girl's religious instruction

shall be continued to the time of her marriage. It is easy to

see why, from this point of view, the day should have been put

off as long as possible and why the law-giver thought it so

important to develop the reasoning powers, instead of being as

hasty in his ordinances as nature is in hers. This is not all.

* Muller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, vol. ii, p. 639.
f Prichard, " Natural History of Man," 2nd edition, pp. 484 et sqq.
X Genesis xxi, 5.

123

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

Against the serious evidence brought forward by Prichard,
there are some conclusive arguments, though of a lighter nature,
that decide the question in favour of my view.

The poets, in their stories of love, are concerned merely with
showing their heroines in the flower of their beauty, without
thinking of their moral development ; and the Oriental poets
have always made their girl-lovers younger than the age
prescribed by the Koran. Zuleika and Leila are certainly not
yet fourteen. In India, the difference is still more marked.
Sakuntala would be a mere child in Europe. The best age of
love for an Indian girl is from nine to twelve years. It is a
very general opinion, long accepted and established among the
Indian, Persian, and Arab races, that the spring of life, for a
woman, flowers at an age that we should call a little precocious.
Our own writers have for long followed the lead, in this matter,
of their Roman models. These, like their Greek teachers,
regarded fifteen as the best age. Since our literature has been
influenced by Northern ideas,* we have seen in our novels
nothing but girls of eighteen, or even older.

Returning now to more serious arguments, we find them
equally abundant. In addition to what I have said about
the German Jews, it may be mentioned that in many parts of
Switzerland the sexual development of the people is so slow
that, in the case of the men, it is not always complete at twenty.
The Bohemians, or Zingaris, yield another set of results, which
are easily verified. They show the same early development as
the Hindus, who are akin to them ; and under the most in-
clement skies, in Russia and in Moldavia, they still keep the

* We must make an exception in the case of Shakespeare, who is painting
a picture of Italy. Thus in Romeo and Juliet Capulet says :

I' My child is yet a stranger in the world.
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years ;
Let two more summers wither in their pride
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride."

To which Paris answers :

" Younger than she are happy mothers made."

124

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

expression and shape of the face and the physical proportions,
as well as the ideas and customs, of the pariahs.*

I do not, however, mean to oppose Prichard on every point.
One of his conclusions I gratefully adopt, namely that " difference
of climate occasions very little, if any, important diversity as
to the periods of life and the physical changes to which the
human constitution is subject." f This remark is very true, and
I would not dream of contesting it. I merely add that it seems
to contradict to some slight extent the principles otherwise
upheld by the learned American physiologist and antiquary.

The reader will not fail to see that the question on which
the argument here turns is that of the permanence of types.
If we have shown that the human races are each, as it were,
shut up in their own individuality, and can only issue from it
by a mixture of blood, the unitarian theory will find itself very
hard-pressed. It will have to recognize that, if the types are
thus absolutely fixed, hereditary, and permanent, in spite of
climate and lapse of time, mankind is no less completely and
definitely split into separate parts, than it would be if specific
differences were due to a real divergence of origin.

It now becomes an easy matter for us to maintain this import-
ant conclusion, which we have seen to be amply supported, in
the case of the Arabs, by the evidence of Egyptian sculpture,
and also by the observation of Jews and gipsies. At the same
time there is no reason for rejecting the valuable help given by
the paintings in the temples and underground chambers in the

* According to Krapff, a Protestant missionary in East Africa, the
Wanikas marry at twelve, boys and girls alike (Zeitschrift der Dentschen
Morgenldndischen Gesellschaft, vol. iii, p. 317). In Paraguay the Jesuits
introduced the custom, which still holds among their disciples, of marrying
the boys at thirteen and the girls at ten. Widows of eleven and twelve
are to be seen in this country (A. d'Orbigny, L'Homme amhicain, vol. i,
p. 40). In South Brazil the women marry at ten or eleven. Menstruation
both appears and ceases at an early age (Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien
vol. i, p. 382). Such quotations might be infinitely extended ; I will
only cite one more. In the novel of Yo-kiao-Li the Chinese heroine
is sixteen years old, and her father is in despair that at such an age she
is not yet married !

f Prichard, p. 486.

125

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

valley of the Nile, which equally show the permanence of the
Negro type, with its woolly hair, prognathous head, and thick
lips. The recent discovery of the bas-reliefs at Khorsabad
confirm what was already known from the sculptured tombs
of Persepolis, and themselves prove, with absolute certainty,
that the Assyrians are physiologically identical with the peoples
who occupy their territory at the present day.

If we had a similar body of evidence with regard to other
races still living, the result would be the same. The fact of the
permanence of types would merely be more fully demonstrated.
It is enough however to have established it in all the cases where
observation was possible. It is now for those who disagree to
propose objections.

They have no means of doing so, and their line of defence
shows them either contradicting themselves from the start, or
making some assertion quite contrary to the obvious facts.
For example, they say that the Jewish type has changed with
the climate, whereas the facts show the opposite. They base
their argument on the existence in Germany of many fair-haired
Jews with blue eyes.* For this to have any value from the
unitarian point of view, climate would have to be regarded as
the sole, or at any rate the chief, cause of the phenomenon ;
whereas the unitarians ^themselves admit that the colour of the
skin, eyes, and hair in no way depends either on geographical
situation or on the influence of cold or heat.f They rightly
mention the presence of blue eyes and fair hair among the
Cingalese ; X they even notice a considerable variation from
light brown to black. Again, they admit that the Samoyedes

* It has been since discovered that this fairness, in certain Jews, is
due to a mixture of Tartar blood ; in the 9 th century a tribe of Chasars
went over to Judaism and intermarried with the German-Polish Jews
(Kutschera, Die Chasaren). — Tr.

I Edinburgh Review, M Ethnology or the Science of Races," October
1848, pp. 444-8 : ''There is probably no evidence of original diversity
of race which is so generally relied upon as that derived from the colour
of the skin and the character of the hair . . . but it will not, we think, stand
the test of a serious examination. . . .

% Ibid., p. 453 : " The Cingalese are described by Dr. Davy as varying
in colour from light brown to black. The prevalent hue of their hair and

126

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

and Tungusians, although living on the borders of the Arctic
Ocean, are very swarthy.* Thus the climate counts for nothing
so far as the colouring of the skin, hair, and eyes is concerned.
We must regard them either as having no significance at all, or
as vitally bound up with race. We know, for example, that
red hair is not, and never has been, rare in the East ; and so no
one need be surprised to find it to-day in some German Jews.
Such a fact has no influence, one way or the other, on the theory
of the permanence of types.

The unitarians are no more fortunate when they call in history
to help them. They give only two instances to prove their
theory — the Turks and the Magyars. The Asiatic origin of
the former is taken as self-evident, as well as their close relation
to the Finnish stocks of the Ostiaks and the Laplanders. Hence
they had in primitive times the yellow face, prominent cheek-
bones, and short stature of the Mongols. Having settled this
point, our unitarian turns to their descendants of to-day ; and
finding them of a European type, with long thick beards, eyes
almond-shaped, but no longer slanting, he concludes trium-
phantly, from this utter transformation of the Turks, that
there is no permanence in race.f " Some people," he says in
effect, " have certainly supposed in them a mixture of Greek,
Georgian, and Circassian blood. But this mixture has been
only partial. Not all Turks have been rich enough to buy wives
from the Caucasus ; not all have had harems filled with white
slaves. On the other hand, the hatred felt by the Greeks towards
their conquerors, and religious antipathy in general, have been
unfavourable to such alliances ; though the two peoples live
together, they are just as much separated in spirit at the present
time as on the first day of the conquest." J

These reasons are more specious than solid. We can only

eyes is black, but hazel eyes and brown hair are not very uncommon ;
grey eyes and red hair are occasionally seen, though rarely, and sometimes
the light blue or red eye and flaxen hair of the Albino."

* Edinburgh Review, " The Samoyedes, Tungusians, and others living on
the borders of the Icy Sea have a dirty brown or swarthy complexion."

t Ibid., p. 439.

J Ibid., p. 439 (summarized).

127

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

admit provisionally the Finnish origin of the Turkish race. Up
to now, it has been supported only by a single argument,
the affinity of language. I will show later how the argument
from language, when taken alone, is peculiarly open to doubt
and criticism. Assuming however that the ancestors of the
Turkish people belonged to the yellow race, we can easily show
that they had excellent reasons for keeping themselves apart
from it.

From the time when the first Turanian hordes descended from
the north-east to that when they made themselves masters of
the city of Constantine, a period comprising many centuries,
great changes passed over the world ; and the Western Turks
suffered many vicissitudes of fortune. They were in turn
victors and vanquished, slaves and masters ; and very diverse
were the peoples among whom they settled. According to the
annalists,* the Oghuzes, their ancestors, came down from the
Altai Mountains, and, in the time of Abraham lived in the
immense steppes of Upper Asia that extend from the Katai to
Lake Aral, from Siberia to Tibet. This is the ancient and
mysterious domain that was still inhabited by many Germanic
peoples, f It is a curious fact that as soon as Eastern writers
begin to speak of the peoples of Turkestan, they praise their
beauty of face and stature.:}: Hyperbolic expressions are the
rule, in this connexion ; and as these writers had the beautiful
types of the ancient world before their eyes, as a standard, it is
not very likely that their enthusiasm should have been aroused
by the sight of creatures so incontrovertibly ugly and repulsive
as the ordinary specimens of the Mongolian race. Thus in spite

* Hammer, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichs, vol. i, p. 2.

♦ Ritter, Erdkunde, Asien, vol. i, pp. 433, 1115, &c. ; Tassen, Zeitschrift
fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. ii, p. 65 ; Benfey, Ersch and Gruber's
Encyclopddie, Indien, p. 12. A. von Humboldt calls this fact one of the
most important discoveries of our time (Asie centrale, vol. ii, p. 639).
From the point of view of historical science this is absolutely true.

% Nushirwan, who reigned in the first half of the sixth century a.d.,
married Sharuz, daughter of the Turkish Khan. She was the most
beautiful woman of her time (Hanebcrg, Zeitschrift fiir die Kunde des
Morgenlandes, vol. i, p. 187). The Shahnameh gives many facts of the
same kind.

128

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

of the linguistic argument, which may itself be wrongly used,^
we might still make out a good case for our view. But we
will concede the point, and admit that the Oghuzes of the
Altai were really a Finnish people ; and we will pass on to the
Mohammedan period, when the Turkish tribes were established,
under different names and varied circumstances, in Persia and
Asia Minor.

The Osmanlis did not as yet exist, and their ancestors, the
Seljukians, were already closely connected in blood with the
races of Islam. The chiefs of this people, such as Gayaseddin-
Keikosrev, in 1237, freely intermarried with Arab women. They
did better still ; for Aseddin, the mother of another line of
Seljukian princes, was a Christian. In all countries the chiefs
watch more jealously than the common people over the purity
of their race ; and when a chief showed himself so free from
prejudice, it is at least permissible to assume that his subjects
were not more scrupulous. As the continual raids of the Selju-
kians offered them every opportunity to seize slaves throughout
the vast territory which they overran, there is no doubt that,
from the thirteenth century, the ancient Oghuz stock, with
which the Seljukians of Rum claimed a distant kinship, was
permeated to a great extent with Semitic blood.

From this branch sprang Osman, the son of Ortoghrul and
father of the Osmanlis. The families that collected round his
tent were not very numerous. His army was no more than a

* Just as the Scythians, a Mongolian race, had adopted an Aryan
tongue, so there would be nothing surprising in the view that the Oghouzes
were an Aryan race, although they spoke a Finnish dialect. This theory
is curiously supported by a naive phrase of the traveller Rubruquis, who
was sent by St. Louis to the ruler of the Mongols. " I was struck,"
says the good monk, "by the likeness borne by this prince to the late
M. Jean de Beaumont, who was equally ruddy and fresh-looking." Alex-
ander von Humboldt, interested, as he well might be, by such a remark,
adds with no less good sense, "This point of physiognomy is especially
worth noting if we remember that the family of Tchingiz was probably
Turkish, and not Mongolian." He confirms his conclusion by adding
that ' ' the absence of Mongolian characteristics strikes us also in the
portraits which we have of the descendants of Baber, the rulers of India "
{Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 248 and note).

I 129

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

robber-band ; and if the early successors of this nomad Romulus
were able to increase it, they did so merely by following the
practice of the founder of Rome, and opening their tents to any-
one who wished to enter.

It may be assumed that the fall of the Seljukian Empire helped
to send recruits of their own race to the Osmanlis. It is clear
that this race had undergone considerable change ; besides,
even these new resources were not enough, for from this time the
Turks began to make systematic slave-raids, with the express
object of increasing their own population. At the beginning of
the fourteenth century, Urkan, at the instance of Khalil Chen-
dereli the Black, founded the Guard of Janissaries. At first
these were only a thousand strong. But under Mohammed IV
the new guard numbered 140,000 ; and as up to this time the
Turks had been careful to fill up the ranks only with Christian
children taken from Poland, Germany, and Italy, or from
European Turkey itself, and then converted to Islam, there were
in four centuries at least 5000 heads of families who infused
European blood into the veins of the Turkish nation.

The racial admixture did not end here. The main object of
the piracy practised on such a large scale throughout the Mediter-
ranean was to fill up the harems. Further (a still more conclusive
fact) there was no battle, whether lost or won, that did not in-
crease the number of the Faithful. A considerable number of the
males changed their religion, and counted henceforth as Turks.
Again, the country surrounding the field of battle was overrun
by the troops and yielded them all the women they could seize.
The plunder was often so abundant that they had difficulty in
disposing of it ; the most beautiful girl was bartered for a jack-
boot.* When we consider this in connexion with the population
of Asiatic and European Turkey, which has, as we know, never

* Hammer, op. cit., vol. i, p. 448 : " The battle against the Hungarians
was hotly contested and the booty considerable. So many boys and girls
were seized that the most beautifui female slave was exchanged for a
jackboot, and Ashik-Pacha-Zadeh, the historian, who himself took part
in the battle and the plunder, could not sell five boy-slaves at Skopi for
more than 500 piastres.'1

130

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

exceeded twelve millions, we see clearly that the arguments for
or against the permanence of racial type find no support whatever
in the history of such a mixed people as the Turks. This is so
self-evident, that when we notice, as we often do, some charac-
teristic features of the yellow race in an Osmanli, we cannot
attribute this directly to his Finnish origin ; it is simply the effect
of Slav or Tartar blood, exhibiting, at second hand, the foreign
elements it had itself absorbed.

Having finished my observations on the ethnology of the
Ottomans, I pass to the Magyars.

The unitarian theory is backed by such arguments as the
following : " The Magyars are of Finnish origin, and allied
to the Laplanders, Samoyedes, and Eskimos. These are all
people of low stature, with wide faces and prominent cheek-bones,
yellowish or dirty brown in colour. The Magyars, however, are
tall and well set up ; their limbs are long, supple and vigorous,
their features are of marked beauty, and resemble those of the
white nations. The Finns have always been weak, unintelligent,
and oppressed. The Magyars take a high place among the
conquerors of the world. They have enslaved others, but have
never been slaves themselves. Thus, since the Magyars are
Finns, and are so different, physically and morally, from all the
other branches of their primitive stock, they must have changed
enormously." *

If such a change had really taken place, it would be so extra-
ordinary as to defy all explanation, even by the unitarians,
however great the modifications that may be assumed in these
particular types ; for the transformation-scene would have taken
place between the end of the ninth century and the present day,
that is, in about 800 years. Further, we know that in this period
St. Stephen's fellow countrymen have not intermarried to any
great extent with the nations among whom they live. Happily
for common sense, there is no need for surprise, as the argument,

* " Ethnology," &c, p. 439 : " The Hungarian nobility ... is proved by
historical and philological evidence to have been a branch of the great
Northern Asiatic stock, closely allied in blood to the stupid and feeble
Ostiaks and the untamable Laplanders."

131

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

though otherwise perfect, makes one vital mistake — the Hun-
garians are certainly not Finns.

In a well-written article, A. de Gerando * has exploded the
theories of Schlotzer and his followers. By weighty arguments
drawn from Greek and Arab historians and Hungarian annalists,
by facts and dates that defy criticism, he has proved the kinship
of the Transylvanian tribe of the Siculi with the Huns, and the
identity in primitive times of the former with the last invaders
of Pannonia. Thus the Magyars are Huns.

Here we shall no doubt be met by a further objection, namely
that though this argument may point to a different origin for the
Magyars, it connects them just as intimately as the other with the
yellow race. This is an error. The name " Huns " may denote
a nation, but it is also, historically speaking, a collective word.
The mass of tribes to which it refers is not homogeneous. Among
the crowd of peoples enrolled under the banner of Attila's
ancestors, certain bands, known as the " White Huns," have
always been distinguished. In these the Germanic element
predominated, f

Contact with the yellow races had certainly affected the purity
of their blood. There is no mystery about this ; the fact is
betrayed at once by the rather angular and bony features of the
Magyar. The language is very closely related to some Turkish
dialects. Thus the Magyars are White Huns, though they have
been wrongly made out to be a yellow race, a confusion caused

* Essai historique sur I'origine des Hongrois (Paris, 1844).

f The current opinions about the peoples of Central Asia will, it seems,
have to be greatly modified. It can no longer be denied that the blood
of the yellow races has been crossed more or less considerably by a white
strain. This fact was not suspected before, but it throws a doubt on
all the ancient notions on the subject, which must now be revised in
the light of it. Alexander von Humboldt makes a very important obser-
vation with regard to the Kirghiz-Kasaks, who are mentioned by Menander
of Byzantium and Constantine Porphyrogenetes. He rightly shows that
when the former speaks of a Kirghiz (Xep^/s) concubine given by the
Turkish Shagan Dithubul to Zemarch, the envoy of the Emperor Justin II,
in 569, he is referring to a girl of mixed blood. She corresponds exactly
to the beautiful Turkish girls who are so praised by the Persians, and
who were as little Mongolian in type as this Kirghiz (Asie centrale, vol. i,
P- 237, &c. ; vol. ii, pp. 130-31).

132

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

by their intermarriages in the past (whether voluntary or other-
wise) with Mongolians. They are really, as we have shown,
cross-breeds with a Germanic basis. The roots and general
vocabulary of their language are quite different from those of the
Germanic family ; but exactly the same was the case with the
Scythians, a yellow race speaking an Aryan dialect,* and with the
Scandinavians of Neustria, who were, after some years of con-
quest, led to adopt the Celto-Latin dialect of their subjects.f
Nothing warrants the belief that lapse of time, difference of
climate, or change of customs should have turned a Laplander
or an Ostiak, a Tungusian or a Permian, into a St. Stephen.
I conclude, from this refutation of the only arguments brought
forward by the unitarians, that the permanence of racial types is
beyond dispute ; it is so strong and indestructible that the most
complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it,
so long as no crossing takes place.

Whatever side, therefore, one may take in the controversy as
to the unity or multiplicity of origin possessed by the human
species, it is certain that the different families are to-day abso-
lutely separate ; for there is no external influence that could
cause any resemblance between them or force them into a
homogeneous mass.

JThe existing races constitute separate branches of one or many
primitive stocks. These stocks have now vanished. They are
not known in historical times at all, and we cannot form even
the most general idea of their qualities. They differed from
each other in the shape and proportion of the limbs, the structure
of the skull, the internal conformation of the body, the nature of
the capillary system, the colour of the skin, and the like ; and
they never bucceeded in losing their characteristic features except
under the powerful influence of the crossing of blood.
i This permanence of racial qualities is quite sufficient to generate
the radical unlikeness and inequality that exists between the
different branches, to raise them to the dignity of natural laws,

* Schaffarik, Slavische AJtertiimer, vol. i, p. 279 et pass.

f Aug. Thierry, Histoire de la Conqnete d'Angleterre, vol. i, p. 155.

133

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

and to justify the same distinctions being drawn with regard to
the physiological life of nations, as I shall show, later, to be
applicable to their moral life.

Owing to my respect for a scientific authority which I cannot
overthrow, and, still more, for a religious interpretation that I
could not venture to attack, I must resign myself to leaving on
one side the grave doubts that are always oppressing me as to
the question of original unity ; and I will now try to discover as
far as I can, with the resources that are still left to me, the
probable causes of these ultimate physiological differences.

As no one will venture to deny, there broods over this grave
question a mysterious darkness, big with causes that are at the
same time physical and supernatural. In the inmost recesses of
the obscurity that shrouds the problem, reign the causes which
have their ultimate home in the mind of God ; the human spirit
feels their presence without divining their nature, and shrinks
back in awful reverence. It is probable that the earthly agents
to whom we look for the key of the secret are themselves but
instruments and petty springs in the great machine. The origins
of all things, of all events and movements, are not infinitely small,
as we are often pleased to say, but on the contrary so vast, so
immeasurable by the poor foot-rule of man's intelligence, that
while we may perhaps have some vague suspicion of their exist-
ence, we can never hope to lay hands on them or attain to any
sure discovery of their nature. Just as in an iron chain that is
meant to lift up a great weight it frequently happens that the
link nearest the object is the smallest, so the proximate cause
may often seem insignificant ; and if we merely consider it in
isolation, we tend to forget the long series that has gone before.
This alone gives it meaning, but this, in all its strength and might,
derives from something that human eye has never seen. We
must not therefore, like the fool in the old adage, wonder at
the power of the roseleaf to make the water overflow ; we should
rather think that the reason of the accident lay in the depths of
the water that filled the vessel to overflowing. Let us yield all
respect to the primal and generating causes, that dwell far off in

134

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

heaven, and without which nothing would exist ; conscious of
the Divine power that moves them, they rightly claim a part of
the veneration we pay to their Infinite Creator. But let us
abstain from speaking of them here. It is not fitting for us to
leave the human sphere, where alone we may hope to meet with
certainty. All we can do is to seize the chain, if not by the
last small link, at any rate by that part of it which we can see and
touch, without trying to catch at what is beyond our reach —
a task too difficult for mortal man. There is no irreverence in
saying this ; on the contrary, it expresses the sincere conviction
of a weakness that is insurmountable.

Man is a new-comer in this world. Geology — proceeding
merely by induction, but attacking its problems in a marvellously
systematic way — asserts that man is absent from all the oldest
strata of the earth's surface. There is no trace of him among the
fossils. When our ancestors appeared for the first time in an
already aged world, God, according to Scripture, told them that
they would be its masters and have dominion over everything on
earth. This promise was given not so much to them as to their
descendants ; for these first feeble creatures seem to have been
provided with very few means, not merely of conquering the
whole of nature, but even of resisting its weakest attacks.* The
ethereal heavens had seen, in former epochs, beings far more
imposing than man rise from the muddy earth and the deep
waters. Most of these gigantic races had, no doubt, disappeared
in the terrible revolutions in which the inorganic world had
shown a power so immeasurably beyond that possessed by animate
nature. A great number, however, of these monstrous creatures
were still living. Every region was haunted by herds of elephants
and rhinoceroses, and even the mastodon has left traces of its
existence in American tradition. f

These last remnants of the monsters of an earlier day were
more than enough to impress the first members of our species
with an uneasy feeling of their own inferiority, and a very modest

* Lyell, " Principles of Geology," vol. i, p. 178.
I Link, Die UriveU und das Alferfum, vol. i, p. 84.

135

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

view of their problematic royalty. It was not merely the animals
from whom they had to wrest their disputed empire. These
could in the last resort be fought, by craft if not by force, and
in default of conquest could be avoided by flight. The case was
quite different with Nature, that immense Nature that sur-
rounded the primitive families on all sides, held them in a close
grip, and made them feel in every nerve her awful power.* The
cosmic causes of the ancient cataclysms, although feebler, were
always at work. Partial upheavals still disturbed the relative
positions of earth and ocean. Sometimes the level of the sea
rose and swallowed up vast stretches of coast ; sometimes a
terrible volcanic eruption would vomit from the depths of the
waters some mountainous mass, to become part of a continent.
The world was still in travail, and Jehovah had not calmed it by
" seeing that it was good."

This general lack of equilibrium necessarily reacted on atmo-
spheric conditions. The strife of earth, fire, and water brought
with it complete and rapid changes of heat, cold, dryness, and
humidity. The exhalations from the ground, still shaken with
earthquake, had an irresistible influence on living creatures.
The causes that enveloped the globe with the breath of battle and
suffering could not but increase the pressure brought to bear
by nature on man. Differences of climate and environment
acted on our first parents far more effectively than to-day.
Cuvier, in his " Treatise on the revolutions of the globe," says
that the inorganic forces of the present day would be quite
incapable of causing convulsions and upheavals, or new arrange-
ments of the earth's surface, such as those to which geology
bears witness. The changes that were wrought in the past on
her own body by the awful might of nature would be impossible
to-day ; she had a similar power over the human race, but has
it no longer. Her omnipotence has been so lost, or at least so
weakened and whittled away, that in a period of years covering
roughly half the life of our species on the earth, she has brought
about no change of any importance, much less one that can be
* Link, op. cif., vol. i, p. 91.

136

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

compared to that by which the different races were for ever
marked off from each other.*

Two points are certain : first that the main differences between
the branches of our race were fixed in the earliest epoch of our
terrestrial life ; secondly, that in order to imagine a period when
these physiological cleavages could have been brought about, we
must go back to the time when the influence of natural causes was
far more active than it is now, under the normal and healthy
conditions. Such a time could be none other than that imme-
diately after the creation, when the earth was still shaken by its
recent catastrophes and without any defence against the fearful
effects of their last death-throes.

Assuming the unitarian theory, we cannot give any later
date for the separation of types.

No argument can be based on the accidental deviations from
the normal which are sometimes found in certain individual
instances, and which, if transmitted, would certainly give rise
to important varieties. Without including such deformities as
a hump-back, some curious facts have been collected which
seem, at first sight, to be of value in explaining the diversity of
races. To cite only one instance, Prichard f quotes Baker's
account of a man whose whole body, with the exception of his
face, was covered with a sort of dark shell, resembling a large
collection of warts, very hard and callous, and insensible to
pain ; when cut, it did not bleed. At different periods this
curious covering, after reaching a thickness of three-quarters of

* Cuvier, op. cit. Compare also, on this point, the opinion of Alexander
von Humboldt : ''In the epochs preceding the existence of the human
race the action of the forces in the interior of the globe must, as the earth's
crust increased in thickness, have modified the temperature of the air
and made the whole earth habitable by the products which we now regard
as exclusively tropical. Afterwards the spatial relation of our planet to
the central body (the sun) began, by means of radiation and cooling down,
to be almost the sole agent in determining the climate at different latitudes.
It was also in these primitive times that the elastic fluids, or volcanic
forces, inside the earth, more powerful than they are to-day, made their
way through the oxidized and imperfectly solidified crust of our planet ' '
(Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 47).

I Second edition, pp. 92-4. The man was born in 1727.

137

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

an inch, would become detached, and fall off ; it was then re-
placed by another, similar in all respects. Four sons were born
to him, all resembling their father. One survived ; but Baker,
who saw him in infancy, does not say whether he reached man-
hood. He merely infers that since the father has produced
such offspring, " a race of people may be propagated by this man,
having such rugged coats and coverings as himself ; and if this
should ever happen, and the accidental original be forgotten, it
is not improbable they might be deemed a different species of
mankind."

Such a conclusion is possible. Individuals, however, who are
so different as these from the species in general, do not transmit
their characteristics. Their posterity either returns to the
regular path or is soon extinguished. All things that deviate
from the natural and normal order of the world can only borrow
life for a time ; they are not fitted to keep it. Otherwise, a
succession of strange accidents would, long before this, have
set mankind on a road far removed from the physiological con-
ditions which have obtained, without change, throughout the
ages. We must conclude that impermanence is one of the
essential and basic features of these anomalies. We could not
include in such a category the woolly hair and black skin of the
negro, or the yellow colour, wide face, and slanting eyes of the
Chinaman. These are all permanent characteristics ; they are
in no way abnormal, and so cannot come from an accidental
deviation.

We will now give a summary of the present chapter.

In face of the difficulties offered by the most liberal interpre-
tation of the Biblical text, and the objection founded on the law
regulating the generation of hybrids, it is impossible to pro-
nounce categorically in favour of a multiplicity of origin for the
human species.

We must therefore be content to assign a lower cause to those
clear-cut varieties of which the main quality is undoubtedly their
permanence, a permanence that can only be lost by a crossing
of blood. We can identify this cause with the amount of climatic

I3S

RACIAL DIFFERENCES ARE PERMANENT

energy possessed by the earth at a time when the human race
had just appeared on its surface. There is no doubt that the
forces that inorganic nature could bring into play were far greater
then than anything we have known since, and under their
pressure racial modifications were accomplished which would
now be impossible. Probably, too, the creatures exposed to
these tremendous forces were more liable to be affected by
them than existing types would be. Man, in his earliest stages,
assumed many unstable forms ; he did not perhaps belong, in
any definite manner, to the white, red, or yellow variety. The
deviations that transformed the primitive characteristics of the
species into the types established to-day were probably much
smaller than those that would now be required for the black race,
for example, to become assimilated to the white, or the yellow
to the black. On this hypothesis, we should have to regard
Adamite man as equally different from all the existing human
groups ; these would have radiated all around him, the distance
between him and any group being double that between one
group and another. How much of the primitive type would
the peoples of the different races have subsequently retained ?
Merely the most general characteristics of our species, the
vague resemblances of shape common to the most distant groups,
and the possibility of expressing their wants by articulate
sounds — but nothing more. The remaining features peculiar
to primitive man would have been completely lost, by the black
as well as the non-black races ; and although we are all originally
descended from him, we should have owed to outside influences
everything that gave us our distinctive and special character.
Henceforth the human races, the product of cosmic forces as
well as of the primitive Adamic stock, would be very slightly,
if at all, related to each other. The power of giving birth to
fertile hybrids would certainly be a perpetual proof of original
connexion ; but it would be the only one. As soon as the
primal differences of environment had given each group its
isolated character, as a possession for ever — its shape, features,
and colour — from that moment the link of primal unity would

139

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

have been suddenly snapped ; the unity, so far as influence on
racial development went, would be actually sterile. The strict
and unassailable permanence of form and feature to which the
earliest historical documents bear witness would be the charter
and sign-manual of the eternal separation of races.

140

CHAPTER XII

HOW THE RACES WERE PHYSIOLOGICALLY SEPARATED, AND
THE DIFFERENT VARIETIES FORMED BY THEIR INTER-
MIXTURE. THEY ARE UNEQUAL IN STRENGTH AND
BEAUTY

The question of cosmic influences is one that ought to be fully
cleared up, as I am confining myself to arguments based on it.
The first problem with which I have to deal is the following : —
" How could men, whose common origin implies a single starting-
point, have been exposed to such a diversity of influences from
without ? " After the first separation of races, the groups were
already numerous enough to be found under totally different
conditions of climate ; how then, considering the immense
difficulties they had to contend against, the vast forests and
marshy plains they had to cross, the sandy or snowy deserts,
the rivers, lakes, and oceans — how, with all these obstacles,
did they manage to cover distances which civilized man to-day,
with all his developed power, can only surmount with
great toil and trouble ? To answer these objections, we
must try to discover where the human species had its original
home.

A very ancient idea, adopted also by some great modern
minds, such as Cuvier, is that the different mountain-systems
must have served as the point of departure for certain races.
According to this theory, the white races, and even certain
African varieties whose skull is shaped like our own, had their
first settlement in the Caucasus. The yellow race came down
from the ice-bound heights of the Altai. Again, the tribes of
prognathous negroes built their first huts on the southern slopes
of Mount Atlas, and made this the starting-point of their first
migrations. Thus, the frightful places of the earth, difficult

141

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

of access and full of gloomy horror — torrents, caverns, icy moun-
tains, eternal snows, and impassable abysses — were actually
more familiar to primitive ages than any others ; while all the
terrors of the unknown lurked, for our first ancestors, in the
uncovered plains, on the banks of the great rivers, on the coasts
of the lakes and seas.

The chief motive urging the ancient philosophers to put
forward this theory, and the moderns to revive it, seems to have
been the idea that, in order to pass successfully through the
great physical crises of the world, mankind must have collected
on the mountain heights, where the floods and inundations
could not reach them. This large and general interpretation
of the tradition of Ararat may suit perhaps the later epochs,
when the children of men had covered the face of the earth ;
but it is quite inapplicable to the time of relative calm that
marked their first appearance. It is also contrary to all theories
as to the unity of the species. Again, mountains from the
remotest times have been the object of profound terror and
religious awe. On them has been set, by all mythologies, the
abode of the gods. It was on the snowy peak of Olympus, it
was on Mount Meru that the Greeks and the Brahmans imagined
their divine synods. It was on the summit of the Caucasus
that Prometheus suffered the mysterious punishment of his still
more mysterious crime. If men had begun by making their
home in the remote heights, it is not likely that their imagina-
tion would have caused them to raise these to the height of
heaven itself. We have a scant respect for what we have seen
and known and trodden underfoot. There would have been
no divinities but those of the waters and the plains. Hence I
incline to the opposite belief, that the flat and uncovered regions
witnessed the first steps of man. This is, by the way, the
Biblical notion.* After the first settlements were made in these
parts, the difficulties of accounting for migrations are sensibly
diminished ; for flat regions are generally cut by rivers and
reach down to the sea, and so there would have been no need to

* See Genesis ii, 8, 10, 15.
I42

THE SEPARATION OF RACES

undertake the difficult task of crossing forests, deserts, and
great marshes.

There are two kinds of migrations, the voluntary and the
unexpected. The former are out of the question in very early
times. The latter are more possible, and more probable too,
among shiftless and unprepared savages than among civilised
nations. A family huddled together on a drifting raft, a few
unfortunate people surprised by an inrush of the sea, clinging
to trunks of trees, and caught up by the currents — these are
enough to account for a transplantation over long distances.
The weaker man is, the more is he the sport of inorganic forces.
The less experience he has, the more slavishly does he respond
to accidents which he can neither foresee nor avoid. There are
striking examples of the ease with which men can be carried,
in spite of themselves, over considerable distances. Thus, we
hear that in 1696 two large canoes from Ancorso, containing
about thirty savages, men and women, were caught in a storm,
and after drifting aimlessly some time, finally arrived at Samal,
one of the Philippine Islands, three hundred leagues from their
starting-point. Again, four natives of Ulea were carried out to
sea in a canoe by a sudden squall. They drifted about for eight
months, and reached at last one of the Radack Islands, at the
eastern end of the Caroline Archipelago, after an involuntary
voyage of 550 leagues. These unfortunate men lived solely on
fish, and carefully collected every drop of rain they could.
When rain failed them, they dived into the depths of the sea and
drank the water there, which, they say, is less salt. Naturally,
when they reached Radack, the travellers were in a deplorable
state ; but they soon rallied, and were eventually restored to
health.*

These two examples are a sufficient witness for the rapid
diffusion of human groups in very different regions, and under
the most varied local conditions. If further proofs were re-
quired, we might mention the ease with which insects, plants,
and testaceans are carried all over the world ; it is, of course,
* Lyell, "Principles of Geology," vol. ii, p. 119.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

unnecessary to show that what happens to such things may,
a fortiori, happen more easily to man.* The land-testaceans
are thrown into the sea by the destruction of the cliffs, and are
then carried to distant shores by means of currents. Zoophytes
attach themselves to the shells of molluscs or let their tentacles
float on the surface of the sea, and so are driven along by the
wind to form distant colonies. The very trees of unknown
species, the very sculptured planks, the last of a long line, which
were cast up on the Canaries in the fifteenth century, and by
providing a text for the meditations of Christopher Columbus
paved the way for the discovery of the New World — even these
probably carried on their surface the eggs of insects ; and these eggs
were hatched, by the heat engendered by new sap, far from their
place of origin and the land where lived the others of their kind.
Thus there is nothing against the notion that the first human
families might soon have been separated, and lived under very
different conditions of climate, in regions far apart from each
other. But it is not necessary, even under present circumstances,
for the places to be far apart, in order to ensure a variation in
the temperature, and in the local conditions resulting from it.
In mountainous countries like Switzerland, the distance of a few
miles makes such a difference in the soil and atmosphere, that
we find the flora of Lapland and Southern Italy practically side
by side ; similarly in Isola Madre, on Lago Maggiore, oranges,
great cacti, and dwarf palms grow in the open, in full view of
the Simplon. We need not confine ourselves to mountains ; the
temperature of Normandy is lower than that of Jersey, while in
the narrow triangle formed by the Western coasts of France, the
vegetation is of the most varied character.!

* Alexander von Humboldt does not think that this hypothesis can
apply to the migration of plants. "What we know," he says, "of the
deleterious action exerted by sea-water, during a voyage of 500 or 600
leagues, over the reproductive power of most grains, does not favour
the theory of the migration of vegetables by means of ocean currents.
Such a theory is too general and comprehensive " (Examen critique de
I'histoire de la geographic du nouveau continent, vol. ii, p. 78).

f Alexander von Humboldt gives the law determining these facts in
the following passage (Asie centrale, vol. iii, p. 23) : " The foundation of

I44

THE SEPARATION OF RACES

The contrasts must have been tremendous, even over the
smallest areas, in the days that followed the first appearance
of our species on the globe. The selfsame place might easily
become the theatre of vast atmospheric revolutions, when the
sea retreated or advanced by the inundation or drying up of
the neighbouring regions ; when mountains suddenly rose in
enormous masses, or sank to the common level of the earth, so
that the plains covered what once was their crests ; and when
tremors, that shook the axis of the earth, and by affecting its
equilibrium and the inclination of the poles to the ecliptic,
came to disturb the general economy of the planet.

We may now consider that we have met all the objections,

that might be urged as to the difficulty of changing one's place

and climate in the early ages of the world. There is no reason

why some groups of the human family should not have gone

far afield, while others were huddled together in a limited area

and yet were exposed to very varied influences. It is thus that

j the secondary types, from which are descended the existing races,

could have come into being. As to the type of man first created,

the Adamite, we will leave him out of the argument altogether ;

for it is impossible to know anything of his specific character,

the science of climatology is the accurate knowledge of the inequalities
of a continent's surface (hypsometry). Without this knowledge we are
apt to attribute to elevation what is really the effect of other causes,
acting, in low-lying regions, on a surface of which the curve is continuous
with that of the sea, along the isothermic lines (i.e. lines along which
the temperature is the same)." By calling attention to the multiplicity
of influences acting on the temperature of any given geographical point,
Von Humboldt shows how very different conditions of climate may exist
in places that are quite near each other, independently of their height
above sea-level. Thus in the north-east of Ireland, on the Glenarn coast,
there is a region, on the same parallel of latitude as Konigsberg in Prussia,
which produces myrtles growing in the open air quite as vigorously as in
Portugal ; this region is in striking contrast with those round it. " There
are hardly any frosts in winter, and the heat in summer is not enough to
ripen the grapes. . . . The pools and small lakes of the Faroe Islands
are not frozen over during the winter, in spite of the latitude (620). . . .
In England, on the Devonshire coast, the myrtle, the camelia iaponica,
the fuchsia coccinea, and the Boddleya globosa flourish in the open,
unsheltered, throughout the winter. ... At Salcombe the winters are
so mild that orange-trees have been seen, with fruit on them, sheltered
by a wall and protected merely by screens " (pp. 147-48),

K 145

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

or how far each of the later families has kept or lost its likeness
I to him. Our investigation will not take us further back than
the races of the second stage.

j I find these races naturally divided into three, and three only —
|the white, the black, and the yellow.* If I use a basis of division
suggested by the colour of the skin, it is not that I consider it
either correct or happy, for the three categories of which I speak
are not distinguished exactly by colour, which is a very complex
and variable thing ; I have already said that certain facts in the
conformation of the skeleton are far more important. But in
default of inventing new names — which I do not consider myself
justified in doing — I must make my choice from the vocabulary
already in use. The terms may not be very good, but they are
at any rate less open to objection than any others, especially if
they are carefully defined. I certainly prefer them to all the
designations taken from geography or history, for these have
thrown an already confused subject into further confusion.
So I may say, once for all, that I understand by white men the
members of those races which are also called Caucasian, Semitic,
or Japhetic. By black men I mean the Hamites ; by yellow the
Altaic, Mongol, Finnish, and Tatar branches. These are the
three primitive elements of mankind. There is no more reason
to admit Blumenbach's twenty-eight varieties than Prichard's
seven ; for both these schemes include notorious hybrids. It
is probable that none of the three original types was ever found
in absolute simplicity. The great cosmic agents had not merely
brought into being the three clear-cut varieties ; they had also,
in the course of their action, caused many sub-species to appear.
These were distinguished by some peculiar features, quite apart
from the general character which they had in common with the
whole branch. Racial crossing was not necessary to create

* I will explain in due course the reasons why I do not include the
American Indian as a pure and primitive type. I have already given
indications of my view on p. 112. Here I merely subscribe to the opinion
of Flourens, who also recognizes only three great subdivisions of the
species — those of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The names call for criticism
but the divisions are in the main correct.

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THE SEPARATION OF RACES

these specific modifications ; they existed before any inter-
breeding took place at all. It would be fruitless to try to identify
them to-day in the hybrid agglomeration that constitutes what
we call the " white race." It would be equally impossible with
regard to the yellow race. Perhaps the black type has to some
extent kept itself pure ; at any rate it has remained nearer its
original form, and thus shows at first sight what, in the case of the
other great human divisions, is not given by the testimony of our
senses, but may be admitted on the strength of historical proof.

The negroes have always perpetuated the original forms of
their race, such as the prognathous type with woolly hair, the
Hindu type of the Kamaun and the Deccan, and the Pelagian
of Polynesia. New varieties have certainly been created from
their intermixture ; this is the origin of what we may call the
" tertiary types," which are seen in the white and yellow races,
as well as the black.

Much has been made of a noteworthy fact, which is used to-day
as a sure criterion for determining the racial purity of a nation.
This fact is the resemblance of face, shape, and general constitu-
tion, including gesture and carriage. The further these resem-
blances go, the less mixture of blood is there supposed to be in
the whole people. On the other hand, the more crossing there
has been, the greater differences we shall find in the features,
stature, walk, and general appearance of the individuals. The
fact is incontestable, and valuable conclusions may be drawn
from it ; but the conclusions are a little different from those
hitherto made.

The first series of observations by which the fact was discovered
was carried out on the Polynesians. Now, these are far from
being of pure race ; they come from mixtures, in different pro-
portions, of yellow and black. Hence the complete transmission
of the type that we see to-day among the Polynesians shows,
not the purity of the race, but simply that the more or less
numerous elements of which it is composed have at last been
fused in a full and homogeneous unity. Each man has the same
blood in his veins as his neighbour, and so there is no reason

147

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

/ why he should differ physically from him. Just as brothers and
sisters are often much alike, as being produced from like elements,
so, when two races have been so completely amalgamated that
there is no group in the resulting people in which either race
predominates, an artificial type is established, with a kind of
factitious purity ; and every new-born child bears its impress.
/ What I have defined as the " tertiary type " might in this way
/easily acquire the quality that is wrongly appropriated to a people
of absolutely pure race — namely the likeness of the individual
members to each other. This could be attained in a much
shorter time at this stage, as the differences between two varieties
of the same type are relatively slight. In a family, for example,
where the father and mother belong to different nations, the
children will be like one or the other, but there will be little
chance of any real identity of physical characteristics between
them. If, however, the parents are both from the same national
stock, such an identity will be easily produced.

We must mention another law before going further. Crossing
of blood does not merely imply the fusion of the two varieties,
but also creates new characteristics, which henceforth furnish
the most important standpoint from which to consider any
particular sub-species. Examples will be given later ; mean-
while I need hardly say that these new and original qualities
cannot be completely developed unless there has previously been
a perfect fusion of the parent-types ; otherwise the tertiary race
cannot be considered as really established. The larger the two
nations are, the greater will naturally be the time required for
their fusion. But until the process is complete, and a state of
physiological identity brought about, no new sub-species will
be possible, as there is no question of normal development from
an original, though composite source, but merely of the confusion
and disorder that are always engendered from the imperfect
mixture of elements which are naturally foreign to each other.

Our actual knowledge of the life of these tertiary races is very
slight. Only in the misty beginnings of human history can we
catch a glimpse, in certain places, of the white race when it

148

THE SEPARATION OF RACES

was still in this stage — a stage which seems to have been every-
where short-lived. The civilizing instincts of these chosen
peoples were continually forcing them to mix their blood with that
of others. As for the black and yellow types, they are mere
savages in the tertiary stage, and have no history at all.*

To the tertiary races succeed others, which I will call
" quaternary." The Polynesians, sprung from the mixture of
| black and yellow,t the mulattoes, a blend of white and black, —
these are among the peoples belonging to the quaternary type.
I need hardly say, once more, that the new type brings the
characteristics peculiar to itself more or less into harmony with
those which recall its two-fold descent.

When a quaternary race is again modified by the intervention
of a new type, the resulting mixture has great difficulty in be-
coming stable ; its elements are brought very slowly into harmony,
and are combined in very irregular proportions. The original
qualities of which it is composed are already weakened to a
considerable extent, and become more and more neutralized.
They tend to disappear in the confusion that has grown to be the
main feature of the new product. The more this product repro-
duces itself and crosses its blood, the more the confusion in-
creases. It reaches infinity, when the people is too numerous

* Cams gives his powerful support to the law I have laid down, namely
that the civilizing races are especially prone to mix their blood. He
points out the immense variety of elements composing the perfected
human organism, as against the simplicity of the infinitesimal beings on
the lowest step in the scale of creation. He deduces the following axiom :
" Whenever there is an extreme likeness between the elements of an
organic whole, its state cannot be regarded as the expression of a com-
plete and final development, but is merely primitive and elementary " (ijber
die ungleiche Befdhigkeit der verschiedenen Menschheitstdmme fur hohere
geistige EntwicHelung, p. 4). In another place he says : " The greatest
possible diversity (i.e. inequality) of the parts, together with the most
complete unity of the whole, is clearly, in every sphere, the standard of
the highest perfection of an organism." In the political world this is
the state of a society where the governing classes are racially quite distinct
from the masses, while being themselves carefully organised into a strict
hierarchy.

f Flourens (Eloge de Blumenbach, p. xi) describes the Polynesian race
as " a mixture of two others, the Caucasian and the Mongolian." Cau-
casian is probably a mere slip ; he certainly meant black.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

for any equilibrium to have a chance of being established — at any
rate, not before long ages have passed. Such a people is merely
an awful example of racial anarchy. In the individuals we find,
here and there, a dominant feature reminding us in no uncertain
way that blood from every source runs in their veins. One man
will have the negro's hair, another the eyes of a Teuton, a third
will have a Mongolian face, a fourth a Semitic figure ; and yet
all these will be akin ! This is the state in which the great
civilized nations are to-day ; we may especially see proofs of
it in their sea-ports, capitals, and colonies, where a fusion of
blood is more easily brought about. In Paris, London, Cadiz,
and Constantinople, we find traits recalling every branch of
mankind, and that without going outside the circle of the walls,
or considering any but the so-called " native population." The
lower classes will give us examples of all kinds, from the prog-
nathous head of the negro to the triangular face and slanting eyes
of the Chinaman ; for, especially since the Roman Empire, the
most remote and divergent races have contributed to the blood
of the inhabitants of our great cities. Commerce, peace, and
war, the founding of colonies, the succession of invasions, have
all helped in their turn to increase the disorder ; and if one could
trace, some way back, the genealogical tree of the first man he
met, he would probably be surprised at the strange company of
ancestors among whom he would find himself.*

We have shown that races differ physically from each other ;
we must now ask if they are also unequal in beauty and muscular
strength. The answer cannot be long doubtful.

I have already observed that the human groups to which the
European nations and their descendants belong are the most
beautiful. One has only to compare the various types of men
scattered over the earth's surface to be convinced of this. From
the almost rudimentary face and structure of the Pelagian and

* The physiological characteristics of the ancestors are reproduced in
their descendants according to fixed rules. Thus we see in South America
that though the children of a white man and a negress may have straight
soft hair, yet the crisp woolly hair invariably appears in the second genera-
tion (A. d'Orbigny, I' Homme americain, vol. i, p. 143).

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THE SEPARATION OF RACES

the Pecheray to the tall and nobly proportioned figure of Charle-
magne, the intelligent regularity of the features of Napoleon, and
the imposing majesty that exhales from the royal countenance
of Louis XIV, there is a series of gradations ; the peoples who
are not of white blood approach beauty, but do not attain it.

Those who are most akin to us come nearest to beauty ; such
are the degenerate Aryan stocks of India and Persia, and the
Semitic peoples who are least infected by contact with the
black race.* As these races recede from the white type, their
features and limbs become incorrect in form ; they acquire
defects of proportion which, in the races that are completely
foreign to us, end by producing an extreme ugliness. This is
the ancient heritage and indelible mark of the greater number
of human groups. We can no longer subscribe to the doctrine
(reproduced by Helvetius in his book on the " Human Intellect ")
which regards the idea of the beautiful as purely artificial and
variable. All who still have scruples on that point should con-
sult the admirable " Essay on the Beautiful " of the Piedmontese
philosopher, Gioberti ; and their doubts will be laid to rest.
Nowhere is it better brought out that beauty is an absolute and
necessary idea, admitting of no arbitrary application. I take
my stand on the solid principles established by Gioberti, and
have no hesitation in regarding the white race as superior
to all others in beauty ; these, again, differ among them-
selves in the degree in which they approach or recede from
their model. Thus the human groups are unequal in beauty ;
and this inequality is rational, logical, permanent, and in-
destructible.

Is there also an inequality in physical strength ? The

American savages, like the Hindus, are certainly our inferiors in

this respect, as are also the Australians. The negroes, too, have

* It may be remarked that the happiest blend, from the point of view
of beauty, is that made by the marriage of white and black. We need
only put the striking charm of many mulatto, Creole, and quadroon
women by the side of such mixtures of yellow and white as the Russians
and Hungarians. The comparison is not to the advantage of the latter.
It is no less certain that a beautiful Rajput is more ideally beautiful
than the most perfect Slav.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

less muscular power ; * and all these peoples are infinitely less
able to bear fatigue. We must distinguish, however, between
purely muscular strength, which merely needs to spend itself
for a single instant of victory, and the power of keeping up a
prolonged resistance. The latter is far more typical than the
former, of which we may find examples even in notoriously feeble
races. If we take the blow of the fist as the sole criterion of
strength, we shall find, among very backward negro races, among
the New Zealanders (who are usually of weak constitution), among
Lascars and Malays, certain individuals who can deliver such a
blow as well as any Englishman. But if we take the peoples as
a whole, and judge them by the amount of labour that they can
go through without flinching, we shall give the palm to those
belonging to the white race.

The different groups within the white race itself are as unequal
in strength as they are in beauty, though the difference is less
marked. The Italians are more beautiful than the Germans or
the Swiss, the French or the Spanish. Similarly, the English
show a higher type of physical beauty than the Slav nations.

In strength of fist, the English are superior to all the other
European races ; while the French and Spanish have a greater
power of resisting fatigue and privation, as well as the inclemency
of extreme climates. The question is settled, so far as the
French are concerned, by the terrible campaign in Russia.
Nearly all the Germans and the northern troops, accustomed
though they were to very low temperatures, sank down in the
snow ; while the French regiments, though they paid their awful
tribute to the rigours of the retreat, were yet able to save most
of their number. This superiority has been attributed to their
better moral education and military spirit. But such an ex-
planation is insufficient. The German officers, who perished by

* See (among other authorities), for the American aborigine, Martius
and Spix, Reise in Brasilien, vol. i, p. 259 ; for the negroes, Pruner, Der
Neger, eine aphoristisc/ie Skizze aus der medizinischen Topographie von
Cairo, in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen morgenldndischen Gesellschafi, vol. i,
p. 131 ; for the muscular superiority of the white race over all the others,
Carus, op. oil., p. 84.

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THE SEPARATION OF RACES

hundreds, had just as high a sense of honour and duty as our
soldiers had ; but this did not prevent them from going under.
We may conclude that the French have certain physical qualities
that are superior to those of the Germans, which allow them to
brave with impunity the snows of Russia as well as the burning
sands of Egypt.

153

CHAPTER XIII

THE HUMAN RACES ARE INTELLECTUALLY UNEQUAL ; MAN-
KIND IS NOT CAPABLE OF INFINITE PROGRESS

In order to appreciate the intellectual differences between races,
we ought first to ascertain the degree of stupidity to which
mankind can descend. We know already the highest point that
it can reach, namely civilization.

Most scientific observers up to now have been very prone
to make out the lowest types as worse than they really are.

Nearly all the early accounts of a savage tribe paint it in
hideous colours, far more hideous than the reality. They give
it so little power of reason and understanding, that it seems to be
on a level with the monkey and below the elephant. It is true
that we find the contrary opinion. If a captain is well received
in an island, if he meets, as he believes, with a kind and hospitable
welcome, and succeeds in making a few natives do a small amount
of work with his sailors, then praises are showered on the happy
people. They are declared to be fit for anything and capable
of everything ; and sometimes the enthusiasm bursts all bounds,
and swears it has found among them some higher intelligences.

We must appeal from both judgments — harsh and favourable
alike. The fact that certain Tahitians have helped to repair a
whaler does not make their nation capable of civilization. Be-
cause a man of Tonga-Tabu shows goodwill to strangers, he is not
necessarily open to ideas of progress. Similarly, we are not
entitled to degrade a native of a hitherto unknown coast to the
level of the brute, just because he receives his first visitors with a
flight of arrows, or because he is found eating raw lizards and
mud pies. Such a banquet does not certainly connote a very
high intelligence or very cultivated manners. But even in the
most hideous cannibal there is a spark of the divine fire, and to

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INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

some extent the flame of understanding can always be kindled
in him. There are no tribes so low that they do not pass some
judgments, true or false, just or unjust, on the things around them ;
the mere existence of such judgments is enough to show that
in every branch of mankind some ray of intelligence is kept alive.
It is this that makes the most degraded savages accessible to the
teachings of religion and distinguishes them in a special manner,
of which they are themselves conscious, from even the most
intelligent beasts.

Are however these moral possibilities, which lie at the back
of every man's consciousness, capable of infinite extension ?
Do all men possess in an equal degree an unlimited power of
intellectual development ? In other words, has every human
race the capacity for becoming equal to every other ? The
question is ultimately concerned with the infinite capacity for
improvement possessed by the species as a whole, and with the
equality of races. I deny both points.

The idea of an infinite progress is very seductive to many
modern philosophers, and they support it by declaring that
our civilization has many merits and advantages which our
differently trained ancestors did not possess. They bring forward
all the phenomena that distinguished our modern societies. I
have spoken of these already ; but I am glad to be able to go
through them again.

We are told that our scientific opinions are truer than they
were ; that our manners are, as a rule, kindly, and our morals
better than those of the Greeks and Romans. Especially with
regard to political liberty, they say, have we ideas and feelings,
beliefs and tolerances, that prove our superiority. There are
even some hopeful theorists who maintain that our institutions
should lead us straight to that garden of the Hesperides which
was sought so long, and with such ill-success, since the time
when the ancient navigators reported that it was not in the
Canaries. . . .

A little more serious consideration of history will show what
truth there is in these high claims.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

We are certainly more learned than the ancients. This is
because we have profited by their discoveries. If we have
amassed more knowledge than they, it is merely because we are
their heirs and pupils, and have continued their work. Does it
follow that the discovery of steam-power and the solution of a
few mechanical problems have brought us on the way to om-
niscience ? At most, our success may lead us to explore all the
secrets of the material world. Before we achieve this conquest,
there are many things to do which have not even been begun,
nay of which the very existence is not yet suspected ; but even
when the victory is ours, shall we have advanced a single step
beyond the bare affirmation of physical laws ? We shall, I
agree, have greatly increased our power of influencing nature and
harnessing her to our service. We shall have found different ways
of going round the world, or recognized definitely that certain
routes are impossible. We shall have learnt how to move freely
about in the air, and, by mounting a few miles nearer the limits
of the earth's atmosphere, discovered or cleared up certain astro-
nomical or other problems ; but nothing more. All this does not
lead us to infinity. Even if we had counted all the planetary
systems that move through space, should we be any nearer ?
Have we learnt a single thing about the great mysteries that was
unknown to the ancients ? We have, merely, so far as I can see,
changed the previous methods of circling the cave where the
secret lies. We have not pierced its darkness one inch further.

Again, admitting that we are in certain directions more en-
lightened, yet we must have lost all trace of many things that
were familiar to our remote ancestors. Can we doubt that at
the time of Abraham far more was known about primeval history
than we know to-day ? How many of our discoveries, made by
chance or with great labour, are merely re-discoveries of forgotten
knowledge ! Further, how inferior we are in many respects to
those who have lived before us ! As I said above, in a different
connexion, can one compare even our most splendid works to the
marvels still to be seen in Egypt, India, Greece, and America ?
And these bear witness to the vanished magnificence of many

156

INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

other buildings, which have been destroyed far less by the heavy
hand of time than by the senseless ravages of man. What are
our arts, compared with those of Athens ? What are our thinkers,
compared with those of Alexandria and India ? What are our
poets, by the side of Valmiki, Kalidasa, Homer, and Pindar ?

Our work is, in fact, different from theirs. We have turned our
minds to other inquiries and other ends than those pursued by
the earlier civilized groups of mankind. But while tilling our
new field, we have not been able to keep fertile the lands already
cultivated. We have advanced on one flank, but have given
ground on the other. It is a poor compensation ; and far from
proving our progress, it merely means that we have changed our
position. For a real advance to have been made, we should at
least have preserved in their integrity the chief intellectual
treasures of the earlier societies, and set up, in addition, certain
great and firmly based conclusions at which the ancients had
aimed as well as ourselves. Our arts and sciences, using theirs
as the starting-point, should have discovered some new and
profound truths about life and death, the genesis of living
creatures, and the basic principles of the universe. On all these
questions, modern science, as we imagine, has lost the visionary
gleam that played round the dawn of antiquity, and its own
efforts have merely brought it to the humiliating confession, " I
seek and do not find." There has been no real progress in
the intellectual conquests of man. Our power of criticism is
certainly better than that of our forefathers. This is a con-
siderable gain, but it stands alone ; and, after all, criticism
merely means classification, not discovery.

As for our so-called new ideas on politics, we may allow our-
selves to be more disrespectful to them than to our sciences.

The same fertility in theorizing, on which we so pride ourselves,
was to be found at Athens after the death of Pericles. Anyone
may be convinced of this by reading again the comedies of
Aristophanes, and allowing for satirical exaggeration ; they were
recommended by Plato himself as a guide to the public life of the
city of Athene. We have always despised such comparisons,

*57

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

since we persuaded ourselves that a fundamental difference
between our present social order and the ancient Greek State
was created by slavery. It made for a more far-reaching
demagogy, I admit ; but that is all. People spoke of slaves
in the same way as one speaks to-day of workmen and the lower
classes ; and, further, how very advanced the Athenians must
have been, when they tried to please their servile population
after the battle of Arginusae !

Let us now turn to Rome. If you open the letters of Cicero,
you will find the Roman orator a moderate Tory of to-day.
His republic is exactly like our constitutional societies, in all that
relates to the language of parties and Parliamentary squabbles.
There too, in the lower depths, seethed a population of degraded
slaves, with revolt ever in their hearts, and sometimes in their
fists also. We will leave this mob on one side ; and we can do it
the more readily as the law did not recognize their civil existence.
They did not count in politics, and their influence was limited
to times of uproar. Even then, they merely carried out the
commands of the revolutionaries of free birth.

Regarding, then, the slaves as of no account, does not the
Forum offer us all the constituents of a modern social State ?
The populace, demanding bread and games, free doles and the
right to enjoy them ; the middle class, which succeeded in its
aim of monopolizing the public services ; the patriciate, always
being transformed and giving ground, always losing its rights,
until even its defenders agreed, as their one means of defence,
to refuse all privileges and merely claim liberty for all ; — have
we not here an exact correspondence with our own time ?

Does anyone believe that of the opinions we hear expressed
to-day, however various they may be, there is a single one,
or any shade of one, that was not known at Rome ? I spoke
above of the letters written from the Tusculan Villa : they con-
tain the thoughts of a Conservative with progressive leanings.
As against Sulla, Pompeius and Cicero were Liberals. They were
not liberal enough for Caesar, and were too much so for Cato.
Later, under the Principate, we find a moderate Royalist in

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INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

Pliny the Younger, though one who loved tranquillity. He was
against excessive liberty for the people, and excessive power for
the Emperor. His views were positivist ; he thought little of
the vanished splendours of the age of the Fabii, and preferred
the prosaic administration of a Trajan. Not everyone agreed
with him. Many feared another insurrection like that of Spar-
tacus, and thought that the Emperor could not make too despotic
a use of his power. On the other hand, some of the provincials
asked for, and obtained, what we should call constitutional
guarantees ; while Socialist opinions found so highly placed a
representative as the Gallic Emperor Gaius Junius Postumus,
who set down, among his subjects for declamation, Dives et
pauper inimici, " The rich and the poor are natural enemies."

In fact, every man who had any claim to share in the enlighten-
ment of the time strongly asserted the equality of the human race,
the right of all men to have their part in the good things of this
world, the obvious necessity of the Grseco-Roman civilization,
its perfection and refinement, its certainty of a future progress
even beyond its present state, and, to crown all, its existence for
ever. These ideas were not merely the pride and consolation of
the pagans ; they inspired also the firm hopes of the first and
most illustrious Fathers of the Church, of whose views Tertullian
was the self-constituted interpreter.*

Finally — to complete the picture with a last striking trait —
the most numerous party of all was formed by the indifferent,
the people who were too weak or timid, too sceptical or con-
temptuous, to find truth in the midst of all the divergent theories
that passed kaleidoscopically before their eyes ; who loved order
when it existed, and (so far as they could) endured disorder
when it came ; who were always wondering at the progress of
material comforts unknown to their fathers, and who, without
wishing to think too much of the other side, consoled themselves
by repeating over and over again, " Wonderful are the works of
to-day ! "

* Amedee Thierry, Histoive de la Gentle sous V administration romaine,
vol. i, p. 241.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

There would be more reason to believe that we have made
improvements in political science, if we had invented some
machinery that was unknown, in its essentials, before our time.
Such a glory is not ours. Limited monarchies, for example, have
been familiar to every age, and curious instances can be seen
among certain American tribes, which in other respects have
remained savage. Democratic and aristocratic republics of all
kinds, balanced in the most various ways, have existed in the
New as well as the Old World. Tlaxcala is just as good an example
as Athens, Sparta, and Mecca before Mohammed's time. Even
if it were shown that we had ourselves made some secondary
improvements in the art of government, would this be enough
to justify such a sweeping assertion as that the human race is
capable of unlimited progress ? Let us be as modest as that
wisest of kings, when he said, " There is nothing new under the
sun." *

* One is sometimes led to consider the government of the United States
of America as an original creation, peculiar to our time ; its most remark-
able feature is taken to be the small amount of opportunity left for Govern-
ment initiative or even interference. Yet if we cast our eyes over the
early years of all the States founded by the white race, we shall find exactly
the same phenomenon. "Self-government" is no more triumphant in
New York to-day, than it was in Paris, at the time of the Franks. It is
true that the Indians are treated far less humanely by the Americans
than the Gallo-Romans were by the nobles of Chlodwig. But we must
remember that the racial difference between the enlightened Republicans
of the New World and their victims is far greater than that between the
Germanic conqueror and those he conquered.

In fact, all Aryan societies began by exaggerating their independence
as against the law and the magistrates.

The power of political invention possessed by the world cannot, I think,
travel outside the boundaries traced by two particular peoples, one of
them living in the north-east of Europe, the other on the banks of the
Nile, in the extreme south of Egypt. The Government of the first of
these peoples (in Bolgari, near Kazan) was accustomed to " order men of
intelligence to be hanged " as a preventive measure. We owe our know-
ledge of this interesting fact to the Arabian traveller Ibn Foszlan (A.
von Humboldt, Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 494). In the other nation, living at
Fazoql, whenever the king did not give satisfaction, his relations and
ministers came and told him so. They informed him that since he no
longer pleased " the men, women, children, oxen, asses," &c, the best
thing he could do was to die ; they then proceeded to help him to his
death as speedily as possible (Lepsius, Briefe aus Agypten, Athiopien, und
der Halbinsel des Sinai ; Berlin, 1852).

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INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

We come now to the question of manners. Ours are said to
be gentler than those of the other great human societies ; but
this is very doubtful.

There are some rhetoricians to-day who would like to abolish
war between nations. They have taken this theory from Seneca.
Certain wise men of the East had also, on this subject, views that
are precisely similar to those of the Moravian brotherhood.
But even if the friends of universal peace succeeded in making
Europe disgusted with the idea of war, they would still have to
bring about a permanent change in the passions of mankind.
Neither Seneca nor the Brahmans obtained such a victory. It is
doubtful whether we are to succeed where they failed ; especially
as we may still see in our fields and our streets the bloody traces
left by our so-called " humanity."

I agree that our principles are pure and elevated. Does our
practice correspond to them ?

Before we congratulate ourselves on our achievements, let us
wait till our modern countries can boast of two centuries of peace,
as could Roman Italy,* the example of which has unfortunately
not been followed by later ages ; for since the beginning of
modern civilization fifty years have never passed without
massacres.

The capacity for infinite progress is, thus, not shown by the
present state of our civilization. Man has been able to learn
some things, but has forgotten many others. He has not added
one sense to his senses, one limb to his limbs, one faculty to his
soul. He has merely explored another region of the circle in
which he is confined, and even the comparison of his destiny
with that of many kinds of birds and insects does not always
inspire very consoling thoughts as to his happiness in this life.

The bees, the ants, and the termites have found for themselves,
from the day of their creation, the land of life that suited them.
The last two, in their communities, have invented a way of
building their houses, laying in their provisions, and looking after
their eggs, which in the opinion of naturalists could be neither
* Amedee Thierry, op. cil., vol. i, p. 241.

L l6l

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

altered nor improved.* Such as it is, it has always been sufficient
for the small wants of the creatures who use it. Similarly the
bees — with their monarchical government, which admits of the
deposition of the sovereign but not of a social revolution — have
never for a single day turned aside from the manner of life that is
most suitable to their needs. Metaphysicians were allowed for a
long time to call animals machines, and to assign the cause of
their movements to God, who was the " soul of the brutes,"
anima brutomm. Now that the habits of these so-called automata
are studied in a more careful way, we have not merely given up
this contemptuous theory ; we have even recognized that
instinct has a capacity that raises it almost to the dignity of
reason.

In the bee-kingdom, we see the queens a prey to the anger of
their subjects ; this implies either a spirit of mutiny in the latter,
or the inability of the former to fulfil their lawful obligations.
We see too the termites sparing their conquered enemies, and
then making them prisoners, and employing them in the public
service by giving them the care of the young. What are we to
conclude from such facts as these ?

Our modern States are certainly more complicated, and satisfy
our needs in larger measure : but when I see the savage wandering
on his way, fierce, sullen, idle, and dirty, lazily dragging his feet
along his uncultivated ground, carrying the pointed stick that is
his only weapon, and followed by the wife whom he has bound
to him by a marriage-ceremony consisting solely in an empty and
ferocious violence ; | when I see the wife carrying her child, whom
she will kill with her own hands if he falls ill, or even if he worries

* Martius and Spix, Reise in Brasilien, vol. iii, p. 950, &c.

f In many tribes of Oceania the institution of marriage is conceived as
follows : — A man sees a maiden, who, he thinks, will suit him. He obtains
her from her father, by means of a few presents, among which a bottle of
brandy, if he has been able to get one, holds the most distinguished place.
Then the young suitor proceeds to conceal himself in a thicket, or behind
a rock. The maiden passes by, thinking no harm. He knocks her down
with a blow of his stick, beats her until she becomes unconscious, and
carries her lovingly to his house, bathed in her blood. The formalities
have been complied with, and the legal union is accomplished.

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INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

her ; * when I see this miserable group under the pressure of
hunger, suddenly stop, in its search for food, before a hill peopled
by intelligent ants, gape at it in wonder, put their feet through
it, seize the eggs and devour them, and then withdraw sadly into
the hollow of a rock, — when I see all this, I ask myself whether the
insects that have just perished are not more highly gifted than
the stupid family of the destroyer, and whether the instinct of
the animals, restricted as it is to a small circle of wants, does not
really make them happier than the faculty of reason which has
left our poor humanity naked on the earth, and a thousand times
more exposed than any other species to the sufferings caused
by the united agency of air, sun, rain, and snow. Man, in his
wretchedness, has never succeeded in inventing a way of pro-
viding the whole race with clothes or in putting them beyond
the reach of hunger and thirst. It is true that the knowledge
possessed by the lowest savage is more extensive than that of
any animal ; but the animals know what is useful to them, and
we do not. They hold fast to what knowledge they have, but we
often cannot keep what we have ourselves discovered. They are
always, in normal seasons, sure of satisfying their needs by their
instincts. But there are numerous tribes of men that from the
beginning of their history have never been able to rise above a
stinted and precarious existence. So far as material well-being
goes, we are no better than the animals ; our horizon is wider than
theirs, but, like theirs, it is still cramped and bounded.

I have hardly insisted enough on this unfortunate tendency
of mankind to lose on one side what it gains on the other. Yet
this is the great fact that condemns us to wander through our
intellectual domains without ever succeeding, in spite of their
narrow limits, in holding them all at the same time. If this fatal
law did not exist, it might well happen that at some date in the

* D'Orbigny tells how Indian mothers love their children to distraction,
and take such care of them as to be really their slaves. If however the
child annoys the mother at any time, then she drowns him or crushes
him to death, or abandons him in the forest, without any regret. I know
no other example of such an extraordinary change (D'Orbigny, L'Homme
americain, vol. ii, p. 232).

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

dim future, when man had gathered together all the wisdom of all
the ages, knowing what he had power to know and possessing all
that was within his reach, he might at last have learnt how to
apply his wealth, and live in the midst of nature, at peace with
his kind and no longer at grips with misery ; and having gained
tranquillity after all his struggles, he might find his ultimate rest,
if not in a state of absolute perfection, at any rate in the midst
of joy and abundance.

Such happiness, with all its limitations, is not even possible for
us, since man unlearns as fast as he learns ; he cannot gain
intellectually and morally without losing physically, and he does
not hold any of his conquests strongly enough to be certain of
keeping them always.

We moderns believe that our civilization will never perish,
because we have discovered printing, steam, and gunpowder.
Has printing, which is no less known to the inhabitants of Tonkin
and Annam* than in Europe, managed to give them even a
tolerable civilization ? They have books, and many of them —
books which are sold far cheaper than ours. How is it that these
peoples are so weak and degraded, so near the point where
civilized man, strengthless, cowardly, and corrupted, is inferior
in intellectual power to any barbarian who may seize the oppor-
tunity to crush him ? f The reason is, that printing is merely
a means and not an end. If you use it to disseminate healthy and
vigorous ideas, it will serve a most fruitful purpose and help to
maintain civilization. If, on the other hand, the intellectual
life of a people is so debased that no one any longer prints such
works of philosophy, history, and literature, as can give strong

* " The native Indian trade in books is very active, and many of the
works produced are never seen in the libraries of Europeans, even in
India. Sprenger says, in a letter, that in Lucknow alone there are thirteen
lithographic establishments occupied purely in printing school-books,
and he gives a considerable list of works of which probably not one has
reached Europe. The same is the case at Delhi, Agra, Cawnpore, Alla-
habad, and other towns " (Mohl, Rapport annuel a la Sociitt asiatique,
1851, p. 92).

I " The Siamese are the most shameless people in the world. They are
at the lowest point of Indo-Chinese civilization ; and yet they can all read
and write " (Ritter, Erdkunde, Asien, vol. iii, p. 11 52).

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INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

nourishment to a nation's genius ; if the degraded press merely
serves to multiply the unhealthy and poisonous compilations of
enervated minds, if its theology is the work of sectaries, it's
politics of libellers, its poetry of libertines, — then how and why
should the printing-press be the saviour of civilization ?

Because copies of the great masterpieces can be easily multi-
plied, it is supposed that printing helps to preserve them ; and
that in times of intellectual barrenness, when they have no other
competitors, printing can at least make them accessible to the
nobler minds of the age. This is of course true. Yet if a man
is to trouble himself about an ancient book at all, or gain any
improvement from it, he must already have the precious gift of
an enlightened mind. In evil times, when public virtue has
left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no
one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries. A man must be
already worth something before he thinks of entering these
august portals ; but in such times no one is worth anything. . . .

Further, the length of life assured by Gutenberg's discovery
to the achievements of the human mind is greatly exaggerated.
With the exception of a few works which are from time to time
reprinted, all books are dying to-day, as manuscripts died in the
old days. Scientific works especially, which are published in
editions of a few hundred copies, soon disappear from the common
stock. They can still be found, though with difficulty, in large
collections. The intellectual treasures of antiquity were in
exactly the same case ; and, I repeat, learning will not save
a people which has fallen into its dotage.

What have become of the thousands of admirable books
published since the first printing-press was set up ? Most of
them have been forgotten. Many of those that are still spoken of
have no longer any readers, while the very names of the authors
who were in demand fifty years ago are gradually fading from
memory.

In the attempt to heighten the influence of printing, too little
stress has been laid on the great diffusion of manuscripts that
preceded it. At the time of the Roman Empire, opportunities

165

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

for education were very general, and books must have been
very common indeed, if we look at the extraordinary number of
out-at-elbows grammarians, whose poverty, licentiousness, and
passionate search for enjoyment live for us in the Satyricon of
Petronius. They swarmed even in the smallest towns, and may
be compared to the novelists, lawyers, and journalists of our
own age. Even when the decadence was complete, anyone
who wanted books could get them. Virgil was read everywhere.
The peasants who heard his praises took him for a dangerous
enchanter. The monks copied him. They copied also Pliny,
Dioscorides, Plato, Aristotle, even Catullus and Martial. From
the great number of mediaeval manuscripts that remain after so
much war and pillage, after the burning of so many castles and
abbeys, we may guess that far more copies than one thinks were
made of contemporary works, literary, scientific, and philoso-
phical. We exaggerate the real services done by printing to
science, poetry, morality, and civilization ; it would be better
if we merely touched lightly on these merits and spoke more of the
way in which the invention of printing is continually helping all
kinds of religious and political interests. Printing, I say again,
is a marvellous tool ; but when head and hand fail, a tool cannot
work by itself.

Gunpowder has no more power than printing to save a society
that is in danger of death. The knowledge of how to make it
will certainly never be forgotten. I doubt, however, whether
the half-civilized peoples who use it to-day as much as we do
ourselves, ever look upon it from any other point of view than
that of destruction.

As for steam-power and the various industrial discoveries,
they too, like printing, are most excellent means, but not ends
in themselves. I may add that some processes which began as
scientific discoveries ended as matters of routine, when the
intellectual movement that gave them birth had stopped for ever,
and the theoretical secrets at the back of the processes had been
lost. Finally, material well-being has never been anything but
an excrescence on civilization ; no one has ever heard of a

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INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES

society that persisted solely through its knowledge of how to
travel quickly and make fine clothes.

All the civilizations before our own have thought, as we do,
hat th ey were set firmly on the rock of time by their unforgettable
discoveries. They all believed in their immortality. The Incas
and their families, who travelled swiftly in their palanquins on
the excellent roads, fifteen hundred miles long, that still link
Cuzco to Quito, were certainly convinced that their conquests
would last for ever. Time, with one blow of his wing, has hurled
their empire, like so many others, into the uttermost abyss.
These kings of Peru also had their sciences, their machinery,
their powerful engines, at the work of which we still stand
amazed without being able to guess their construction. They
too knew the secret of carrying enormous masses from place to
place. They built fortresses by piling, one upon the other,
blocks of stone thirty-eight feet long and eighteen wide, such as
may be seen in the ruins of Tihuanaco, to which these gigantic
building-materials must have been brought from a distance of
many miles. Do we know the means used by the engineers of
this vanished people to solve such a problem ? No more than
we know how the vast Cyclopean walls were constructed, the
ruins of which, in many parts of Southern Europe, still defy the
ravages of time.

We must not confuse the causes of a civilization with its results.
The causes disappear, and the results are forgotten, when the
spirit that gave them birth has departed. If they persist, it is
because of a new spirit that takes hold of them, and often succeeds
in giving quite a new direction to their activities. The human
mind is always in motion. It runs from one point to another,
but cannot be in all places at once. It exalts what it embraces,
and forgets what it has abandoned. Held prisoner for ever
within a circle whose bounds it may not overstep, it never
manages to cultivate one part of its domain without leaving the
others fallow. It is always at the same time superior and inferior
to its forbears. Mankind never goes beyond itself, and so isi
not capable of infinite progress. 5

167

CHAPTER XIV

PROOF OF THE INTELLECTUAL INEQUALITY OF RACES (con-
tinued). DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS ARE MUTUALLY
REPULSIVE. HYBRID RACES HAVE EQUALLY HYBRID
CIVILIZATIONS

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 prog-
nathous 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,

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MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

rich in understanding, and founding everywhere societies re-
sembling 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 suffi-
cient 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 Ice-
landers. 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

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

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 man-
kind 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 Phoenicians, 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

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MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

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.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

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 com-
plexity, 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.*
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 absorp-
tion 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
* Prichard, " Natural History of Man," sec. 41.

172

MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

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 con-
querors to combine together to form the basic elements of a new
social state. It is not surprising that these remnants of civiliza-
tion 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 venera-
tion. 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 inter-
esting 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

173

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

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 civili-
zation 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

174

MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

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 heredi-
tary, 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 out-
ward 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.

175

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

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 Graeco-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 ail 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
Grseco-Syrian jurists. We see how the different racial elements
were balanced, and to which side the scale inclined.

176

MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

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 mediaeval
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 eager-
ness 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 civiliza-
tion. 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 in-
corporated 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
Phoenicians 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 Arsacidae and Sassanidae,
while some of their princes, like Odenathus,* were proclaimed
Caesar, 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 them-
selves to the Imperial purple. Thus this hybrid nation had
never ceased, from the most ancient times, to make itself felt

* King of Palmyra in Syria, and husband of Zenobia. He was recog-
nized by the Emperor Gallienus as co-regent of the East in 267, and was
murdered in the same year. — Tr.

M 177

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

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, Grseco-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 GraBco-Syrian * 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

* " The impulse towards this science given them by their kinship with
the Graeco-Syrians made them capable of really absorbing the Greek
language and spirit ; for the Arabs preferred to confine themselves to the
purely scientific results of Greek speculation " (W. von Humboldt, t/ber
die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. cclxiii).

I78

MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

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 Grseco-Syrian civiliza-
tion, 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

179

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

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."* 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
phoenix, 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 in-
telligence, 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

* The severest judgment on the negro that has perhaps been passed
up to now comes from one of the pioneers of the doctrine of equality.
Franklin defines the negro as " an animal who eats as much, and works
as little, as possible."

180

MUTUAL REPULSION OF CIVILIZATIONS

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 ac-
curately, 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 recog-
nize, 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.*

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, f (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.

* I have no hesitation in regarding the exaggerated development of
instinct among savage races as a specific mark of intellectual inferiority.
The sharpening of certain senses can only be gained by the deterioration
of the mental facilities. On this point, compare what Lesson says of the
Papuans, in a paper printed in the Annates des sciences naturelles, vol. x.

f See p. 139.

I8l

CHAPTER XV

THE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES ARE UNEQUAL, AND CORRE-
SPOND PERFECTLY IN RELATIVE MERIT TO THE RACES
THAT USE THEM

If a degraded people, at the lowest rung of the racial ladder, with
as little significance for the " male " as for the " female " progress
of mankind, could possibly have invented a language of philo-
sophic depth, of aesthetic beauty and flexibility, rich in charac-
teristic forms and precise idioms, fitted alike to express the
sublimities of religion, the graces of poetry, the accuracy of
physical and political science, — such a people would certainly
possess an utterly useless talent, that of inventing and perfecting
an instrument which their mental capacity would be too weak
to turn to any account.

We should have, in such a case, to believe that our observation
has been suddenly brought to a stop, not by something unknown
or unintelligible (as often happens) but by a mere absurdity.

At first sight, this tantalizing answer seems the correct one.
If we take the races as they are to-day, we must admit that the
perfection of idiom is very far from corresponding, in all cases,
to the degree of civilization reached. The tongues of modern
Europe, to speak of no others, are unequal in merit, and the
richest and most beautiful do not necessarily belong to the most
advanced people. Further, they are one and all vastly inferior
to many languages which have been at different times spoken in
the world.

A still more curious fact is that the languages of whole groups
of peoples which have stopped at a low level of culture may be of
considerable merit. Thus the net of language, with its varied
meshes, might seem to have been cast over mankind at random,
the silk and the gold sometimes covering rude, feiocious, and
miserable tribes, while wise and learned peoples are still caught

182

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

in the hemp, the wool, and the horsehair. Happily, this is so only
in appearance. If, with the aid of history, -we apply our doctrine
of the difference of races, we shall soon find that our proofs of
their intellectual inequality are even strengthened.

The early philologists were doubly in error, when they thought,
first that all languages are formed on the same principle, secondly
that language was invented merely under the stress of material
needs. In the former point they were influenced by the unitarian
doctrine that all human groups have a common origin.

With regard to language, doubt is not even possible. The
modes of formation are completely different ; and whether
the classifications of philology require revision or not, we cannot
believe for a moment that the Altaic, Aryan, and Semitic families
were not from the first absolutely foreign to each other. Nothing
is the same. The vocabulary has its own peculiar character
in each of these groups. There is a different modulation of the
voice in each. In one, the lips are used to produce the sounds ;
in another, the contraction of the throat ; in another the nasal
passage and the upper part of the head. The composition of the
parts of speech, according as they confuse or distinguish the
various shades of thought, points equally to a difference of
origin. The most striking proof of the divergence in thought
and feeling between one group and another are seen in the
inflexions of the substantive and the conjugations of the
verb. When, therefore, the philosopher tries to give an account
of the origin of language by a process of purely abstract con-
jecture, and begins by conceiving an " original man," without
any specific racial or linguistic character, he starts from an
absurdity, and continues on the same lines. There is no such
being as " man " in the abstract ; and I am especially sure that
he will not be discovered by the investigation of language.
I cannot argue on the basis that mankind started from some
one point in its creation of idiom. There were many points of de-
parture, because there were many forms of thought and feeling.*

* W. von Humboldt, in one of the most brilliant of his minor works,
has admirably expressed this fact, in its essentials. " In language," he

183

THE INEOUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

The second view, I think, is just as false. According to this
theory, there would have been no development save as dictated
by necessity. The result would be that the " male " races would
have a richer and more accurate language than the " female " ;
further, as material needs are concerned with objects apprehended
by the senses, and especially with actions, the main factor of
human speech would be vocabulary.

There would be no necessity for the syntax and grammatical
structure to advance beyond the simplest and most elementary
combinations. A series of sounds more or less linked together
is always enough to express a need ; and a gesture, as the Chinese
know well, is an obvious form of commentary, when the phrase
is obscure without it.* Not only would the synthetic power of
language remain undeveloped ; it would also be the poorer for
dispensing with harmony, quantity, and rhythm. For what
is the use of melody when the sole object is to obtain some
positive result ? A language, in fact, would be a mere chance
collection of arbitrary sounds.

Certain questions are apparently cleared up by such a theory.
Chinese, the tongue of a masculine race, seems to have been at
first developed with a purely utilitarian aim. The word has never
risen above a mere sound, and has remained monosyllabic.
There is no evolution of vocabulary, no root giving birth to a
family of derivatives. All the words are roots ; they are not
modified by suffixes, but by each other, according to a very crude
method of juxtaposition. The grammar is extremely simple ;
which makes the phraseology very monotonous. The very idea
of aesthetic value is excluded, at any rate for ears that are ac-
customed to the rich, varied, and abundant forms, the inex-
haustible combinations of happier tongues. We must however

says, " the work of time is helped everywhere [by national idiosyncrasies.
The characteristic features in the idioms of the warrior hordes of America
and Northern Asia were not necessarily those of the primitive races of
India and Greece. It is not possible to trace a perfectly equal, and as
it were natural, development of any language, whether it was spoken
by one nation or many " (W. von Humboldt, Uber das Enlstehen der
grammatischen Formen, und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwickelung).
* W. von Humboldt, Uber die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction.

184

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

add that this may not be the impression produced on the Chinese
themselves ; and their spoken language certainly aims at some
kind of beauty, since there are definite rules governing the
melodic sequence of sounds. If it does not succeed in being so
euphonious as other languages, we must still recognize that it
aims at euphony no less than they. Further, the primary
elements of Chinese are something more than a mere heaping
together of useful sounds.*

I admit that the masculine races may be markedly inferior in
aesthetic power to the others,! and their inferiority may be repro- J
duced in their idioms. This is shown, not merely by the relative (

* I am inclined to believe that the monosyllabic quality of Chinese is
not really a specific mark of the language at all ; and though a striking
characteristic, it does not seem to be an essential one. If it were, Chinese
would be an " isolating ' ' language, connected with others having the
same structure. We know that this is not so. Chinese belongs to the
Tatar or Finnish system, of which some branches are polysyllabic. On
the other hand, we find monosyllabic languages among groups with quite
a different origin. I do not lay any stress on the example of Othomi. a
Mexican dialect which, according to du Ponceau, has the monosyllabic
quality of Chinese, and yet in other respects belongs to the American
family among which it is found, as Chinese does to the Tatar group (see
Morton, "An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the aboriginal
race of America," Philadelphia, 1844). My reason for neglecting this
apparently important example is that these American languages may
one day be recognized as forming merely a vast branch of the Tatar
family ; and thus any conclusion I might draw from them would simply
go to confirm what I have said as to the relation of Chinese to the sur-
rounding dialects, a relation which is in no way disproved by the peculiar
character of Chinese itself.

I find therefore a more conclusive instance in Coptic, which will not
easily be shown to have any relation to Chinese. But here also every
syllable is a root ; and the simple affixes that modify the root are so
independent that even the determining particle that marks the time
of the verb does not always remain joined to the word. Thus hon means
" to command " ; a-hon, " he commanded " ; but a Moyses hon, " Moses
commanded " (see E. Meier, Hebrdisches Wurzelworterbuch).

Thus it seems possible for monosyllabism to appear in every linguistic
family. It is a kind of infirmity produced by causes which are not yet
understood ; it is not however a specific feature, separating the language
in which it occurs from the rest, and setting it in a class by itself.

•f Goethe says in Wilhelm Meisler : " Few Germans, and perhaps few
men of modern nations, have the sense of an aesthetic whole. We only
know how to praise and blame details, we can only show a fragmentary
admiration."

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

poverty of Chinese, but also by the careful way in which certain
Western races have robbed Latin of its finest rhythmic qualities,
and Gothic of its sonority, The inferiority of our modern
languages, even the best of them, to Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin,
is self-evident, and corresponds exactly to the mediocrity of the
Chinese civilization and our own, so far as art and literature are
|| concerned. I admit that this difference, alone with others, may
' serve to mark off the languages of the masculine races. They still,
however, have a feeling for rhythm (less than that of the ancient
tongues, but still powerful), and make a real attempt to create
and obey laws of correspondence between sounds and the forms
by which thought is modified in speech. I conclude that even
in the languages of masculine races there still flickers the in-
tellectual spark, the feeling for beauty and logic ; this feeling,
as well as that of material need, must preside at the birth of every
language.

I said above that if material need had reigned alone, a set of
any chance sounds would have been enough for human neces-
sities, in the first ages of man's existence. Such a theory cannot
be maintained.

Sounds are not assigned to ideas by pure chance. The choice
is governed by the instinctive recognition of a certain logical
relation between noises heard outwardly by man's ear and ideas
that his throat or tongue wishes to express. In the eighteenth
century men were greatly struck by this truth. Unfortunately,
it was caught in the net of etymological exaggeration so charac-
teristic of the time ; and its results were so absurd that they
justly fell into disrepute. For a long time the best minds were
warned off the land that had been so stupidly exploited by the
early pioneers. They are now beginning to return to it again,
and if they have learnt prudence and restraint in the bitter school
of experience, they may arrive at valuable conclusions. With-
out pushing a theory, true in itself, into the realm of chimeras,
we may allow that primitive speech knew how to use as far as
possible the different impressions received by the ear, in order to
form certain classes of words ; in creating others it was guided

1 86

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

by the feeling of a mysterious relation between certain abstract
ideas and some particular noises. Thus, for example, the sound
of e seems to suggest death and dissolution, that of v or w, vague-
ness in the moral or physical realm, vows, wind, and the like ;
s suggests starkness and standing fast, m maternity, and so on.*
Such a theory is sufficiently well founded for us to take it seriously,
if kept within due limits. But it must be used with great circum-
spection, if we are not to find ourselves in the dark paths where
even common sense is soon led astray.

The last paragraph may show, however imperfectly, that
material need is not the only element that produces a language,
but that the best of man's powers have helped in the task.
Sounds were not applied arbitrarily to ideas and objects, and in
this respect men followed a pre-established order, one side of
which was manifested in themselves. Thus the primitive tongues,
however crude and poor they may have been, contained all the
elements from which their branches might at a later time be
developed in a logical and necessary sequence.

W. von Humboldt has observed, with his usual acuteness,
that every language is independent of the will of those who speak
it. It is closely bound up with their intellectual condition, and
is beyond the reach of arbitrary caprice. It cannot be altered
at will, as is curiously shown by the efforts that have been made
to do so.

The Bushmen have invented a system of changing their
language, in order to prevent its being understood by the un-
initiated. We find the same custom among certain tribes of the
Caucasus. But all their efforts come to no more than the mere
insertion of a subsidiary syllable at the beginning, middle, or end
of words. Take away this parasitic element, and the language
remains the same, changed neither in forms nor syntax.

De Sacy has discovered a more ambitious attempt, in the

* Cf. W. von Humboldt, Uber die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xcv :
" We may call the sound that imitates the meaning of a word symbolic,
although the symbolic element in speech goes far deeper than this. . . .
This kind of imitation undoubtedly had a great, and perhaps exclusive,
influence over the early attempts at word-building."

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

language called " Balaibalan." This curious idiom was invented
by the Sufis, to be used in their mystical books, with the object
of wrapping the speculations of their theologians in still greater
mystery. They made up, on no special plan, the words that
seemed to them to sound most strangely to their ears. If how-
ever this so-called language did not belong to any family and
if the meaning given to its sounds was entirely arbitrary, yet
the principles of euphony, the grammar and the syntax, every-
thing in fact which gives a language its special character, bore the
unmistakable stamp of Arabic and Persian. The Sufis produced
a jargon at once Aryan and Semitic, and of no importance what-
ever. The pious colleagues of Djelat-Eddin-Rumi were not able
to invent a language ; and clearly this power has not been given
to any single man.*

Hence the language of a race is closely bound up with its
intelligence, and has the power of reflecting its various mental
stages, as they are reached. This power may be at first only
implicit.!

Where the mental development of a race is faulty or imperfect,
the language suffers to the same extent. This is shown by
Sanscrit, Greek, and the Semitic group, as well as by Chinese,

* There is probably another jargon of the same kind as Balaibalan.
This is called " Afnskoe," and is spoken by the pedlars and horse-dealers
of Greater Russia, especially in the province of Vladimir. It is confined
to men. The grammar is entirely Russian, though the roots are foreign.
(See Pott, Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopddie, Indogermanischer Sprach-
stamm, p. no.)

f C. O. Muller, in an admirable passage which I cannot resist the temp-
tation of transcribing, shows the true nature of language : " Our age has
learnt, by the study of the Hindu and especially the Germanic languages,
that the laws of speech are as fixed as those of organic life. Between
different dialects, developing independently after their separation, there
are still mysterious links, which reciprocally determine the sounds and
their sequences. Literature and science set limits to this growth, and
arrest perhaps some of its richer developments ; but they cannot impose
any law on it higher than that ordained by nature, mother of all things.
Even a long time before the coming of decadence and bad taste, languages
may fall sick, from outward or inward causes, and suffer vast changes ;
but so long as life remains in them, their innate power is enough to heal
their wounds, to set their torn limbs, and to restore unity and regularity,
even when the beauty and perfection of the noble plants has almost entirely
disappeared " (Die Etrusker, p. 65).

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THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

in which I have already pointed out a utilitarian tendency
corresponding to the intellectual bent of the people. The super-
abundance of philosophical and ethnological terms in Sanscrit
corresponds to the genius of those who spoke it, as well as its
richness and rhythmic beauty. The same is the case with Greek ;
while the lack of precision in the Semitic tongues is exactly
paralleled by the character of the Semitic peoples.

If we leave the cloudy heights of the remoter ages, and come
down to the more familiar regions of modern history, we shah
be, as it were, presiding at the birth of many new tongues ; and
this will make us see with even greater clearness how faithfully
language mirrors the genius of a race.

As soon as two nations are fused together, a revolution takes
place in their respective languages ; this is sometimes slow, some-
times sudden, but always inevitable. The languages are changed
and, after a certain time, die out as separate entities. The new
tongue is a compromise between them, the dominant element
being furnished by the speech of the race that has contributed
most members to the new people.* Thus, from the thirteenth
century, the Germanic dialects of France have had to yield
ground, not to Latin, but to the lingua romana, with the revival
of the Gallo-Roman power.f Celtic, too, had to retreat before
the Italian colonists. It did not yield to Italian civilization ;
in fact, one might say, that, thanks to the number of those who
spoke it, Celtic finally gained a kind of victory. For after the
complete fusion of the Gauls, the Romans, and the northern
tribes, it was Celtic that laid the foundations of modern French
syntax, abolished the strong accentuation of Germanic as well as
the sonority of Latin, and introduced its own equable rhythm.
The gradual development of French is merely the effect of this

* Pott, op. cit., p. 74.

I That the mixture of idioms is proportionate to that of the races
constituting a nation had already been noticed before philology, in the
modern sense, existed at all. Kampf er for example says in his ' ' History
of Japan " (published in 1729) : " We may take it as a fixed rule that the
settlement of foreigners in a country will bring a corresponding proportion
of foreign words into the language ; these will be naturalized by degrees,
and become as familiar as the native words themselves."

189

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

patient labour, that went on, without ceasing, under the surface.
Again, the reason why modern German has lost the striking forms
to be seen in the Gothic of Bishop Ulfilas lies in the presence of
a strong Cymric element in the midst of the small Germanic
population that was still left to the east of the Rhine,* after the
great migrations of the sixth and following centuries of our era.

The linguistic results of the fusion of two peoples are as indi-
vidual as the new racial character itself. One may say generally
that no language remains pure after it has come into close contact
with a different language. Even when their structures are
totally unlike each other, the vocabulary at any rate suffers
some changes. If the parasitic language has any strength at all,
it will certainly attack the other in its rhythmic quality, and
even in the unstable parts of its syntax. Thus language is one of
the most fragile and delicate forms of property ; and we may
often see a noble and refined speech being affected by barbarous
idioms and passing itself into a kind of relative barbarism. By
degrees it will lose its beauty ; its vocabulary will be impover-
ished, and many of its forms obsolete, while it will show an
irresistible tendency to become assimilated to its inferior neigh-
bour. This has happened in the case of Wallachian and Rha^tian,
Kawi and Birman. The two latter have been leavened
with Sanscrit elements ; but in spite of this noble alliance,
they have been declared by competent judges to be inferior to
Delaware, f

The group of tribes speaking this dialect are of the Lenni-
Lenapes family, and they originally ranked higher than the two
yellow peoples who were caught in the sweep of Hindu civiliza-
tion. If, in spite of their primitive superiority, they are now

* Keferstein shows that German is merely a hybrid language made up
of Celtic and Gothic {Ansichten iiber die keltischen Altertumer , Halle, 1846-
51 ; Introduction, p. xxxviii). Grimm is of the same opinion.

t W. von Humboldt says : "Languages, that are apparently crude and
unrefined, may show some striking qualities in their structure, and often
do so. In this respect they may quite possibly surpass more highly
developed tongues. The comparison of Birman with Delaware, not to
speak of Mexican, can leave no doubt of the superiority of the latter ;
yet a strand of Indian culture has certainly been interwoven into Birman
by Pali" (fiber die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xxxiv).

190

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

inferior to the Asiatics, it is because these live under the influence
of the social institutions of a noble race and have profited by
them, though in themselves they are of slight account. Contact
with the Hindus has been enough to raise them some way in
the scale, while the Lenapes, who have never been touched by
any such influence, have not been able to rise above their present
civilization. In a similar way (to take an obvious example)
the young mulattoes who have been educated in London or
Paris may show a certain veneer of culture superior to that of
some Southern Italian peoples, who are in point of merit in-
finitely higher ; for once a mulatto, always a mulatto, When
therefore we come upon a savage tribe with a language better
than that of a more civilized nation, we must examine carefully
whether the civilization of the latter really belongs to it, or is
merely the result of a slight admixture of foreign blood. If so,
a low type of native language helped out by a hybrid mixture of
foreign idioms may well exist side by side with a certain degree
of social culture.*

I have already said that, as each civilization has a special
character, we must not be surprised if the poetic and philosophic
sense was more developed among the Hindus and the Greeks
than among ourselves ; whereas our modern societies are marked
rather by their practical, scientific, and critical spirit. Taken
as a whole, we have more energy and a greater genius for action
than the conquerors of Southern Asia and Hellas. On the other
hand, we must yield them the first place in the kingdom of beauty,
and here our languages naturally mirror our humble position.
The style of the Indian and Ionian writers takes a more powerful
flight towards the sphere of the ideal. Language, in fact, while
being an excellent index of the general elevation of races, is
in a special degree the measure of their aesthetic capacities.

* This difference of level between the intellect of the conqueror and that
of the conquered is the cause of the " sacred languages " that we find used
in the early days of an empire ; such as that of the Egyptians, or the Incas
of Peru. These languages are the object of a superstitious veneration ;
they are the exclusive property of the upper classes, and often of a sacer-
dotal caste, and they furnish the strongest possible proof of the existence
of a foreign race that has conquered the country where they are found.

191

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

This is the character it assumes when we use it as a means of
comparing different civilizations.

To bring out this point further, I will venture to question a
view put forward by William von Humboldt, that in spite of the
obvious superiority of the Mexican to the Peruvian language,
the civilization of the Incas was yet far above that of the people
of Anahuac*

The Peruvian customs were certainly more gentle than the
Mexican ; and their religious ideas were as inoffensive as those
of Montezuma's subjects were ferocious. In spite of this, their
social condition was marked by far less energy and variety.
Their crude despotism never developed into more than a dull
kind of communism ; whereas the Aztec civilization had made
various political experiments of great complexity. Its military
system was far more vigorous ; and though the use of writing
was equally unknown in both empires, it seems that poetry,
history, and ethics, which were extensively studied at the time
of Cortes, would have advanced further in Mexico than in Peru,
the institutions of which were coloured by an Epicurean in-
differentism that was highly unfavourable to intellectual progress.
Clearly we must regard the more active people as superior.

Von Humboldt's view is simply a consequence of the way in
which he defines civilization.! Without going over the same
ground again, I was yet bound to clear up this point ; for if two
civilizations had really been able to develop in inverse ratio to
the merits of their respective languages, I should have had to
give up the idea of any necessary connexion between the intelli-
gence of a people and the value of the language spoken by it. But
I cannot do this, in view of what I have already said about
Greek and Sanscrit, as compared with English, French, and
German.

It would be, however, a very difficult task to assign a reason,
along these lines, for the exact course taken by the language of
a hybrid people. We have seldom sufficient knowledge either

* W. von Humboldt, jjber die Kawi-Sprache, Introduction, p. xxxiv
■J- See p. 82 above.

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THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

of the quantity or quality of the intermixture of blood to be
able properly to trace its effects. Yet these racial influences
persist, and if they are not unravelled, we may easily come to
false conclusions. It is just because the connexion between
race and language is so close, that it lasts much longer than the
political unity of the different peoples, and may be recognized
even when the peoples are grouped under new names. The
language changes with their blood, but does not die out until
the last fragment of the national life has disappeared. This is
the case with modern Greek. Sadly mutilated, robbed of its
wealth of grammar, impoverished in the number of its sounds,
with the pure stream of its vocabulary troubled and muddy, it
has none the less retained the impress of its original form.* In
the intellectual world it corresponds to the sullied and deflowered
'Parthenon, which first became a church for the Greek popes,
and then a powder-magazine ; which had its pediments
and columns shattered in a thousand places by the Venetian
bullets of Morosini ; but which still stands, for the wonder and
adoration of the ages, as a model of pure grace and unadorned
majesty.

Not every race has the power of being faithful to the tongue
of its ancestors. This makes our task still more difficult, when
we try to determine the origin or relative value of different
human types by the help of philology. Not only do languages
change without any obvious reason, at any rate from the racial
point of view ; but there are also certain nations which give up
their own language altogether, when they are brought for some
time into contact with a foreign race. This happened, after the
conquests of Alexander, in the case of the more enlightened
nations of Western Asia, such as the Carians, Cappadocians, and
Armenians. The Gauls are another instance, as I have already
said. Yet all these peoples brought a foreign element into the

* Ancient Greece contained many dialects, but not so many as the
Greece of the sixteenth century, when seventy were counted by Simeon
Kavasila ; further we may notice (in connexion with the following
paragraph) that in the thirteenth century French was spoken throughout
Greece, and especially in Attica (Heilmayer, quoted by Pott, op. cit., p. 73).

N 193

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

conquering tongue, which was transformed in its turn. Thus
they could all be regarded as using their own intellectual tools,
though to a very imperfect extent ; while others, more tenacious
of theirs, such as the Basques, the Berbers of Mount Atlas, and
the Ekkhilis of Southern Arabia, speak even at the present day
the same tongue as was spoken by their most primitive ancestors.
But there are certain peoples, the Jews for example, who
seem never to have held to their ancestral speech at all ; and
we can discover this indifference from the time of their earliest
migrations. When Terah left the land of his fathers, Ur of the
Chaldees, he certainly had not learnt the Canaanitish tongue
that henceforth became the national speech of the children of
Israel. It was probably influenced to some extent by their
earlier recollections, and in their mouth became a special dialect
of the very ancient language which was the mother of the earliest
Arabic we know, and the lawful inheritance of tribes closely
allied to the black Hamites.* Yet not even to this language
were the Jews to remain faithful. The tribes who were brought
back from captivity by Zerubbabel had forgotten it during
their short stay of sixty-two years by the rivers of Babylon.
Their patriotism was proof against exile, and still burned with
its original fire ; but the rest had been given up, with remark-
able facility, by a people which is at the same time jealous of its
own traditions and extremely cosmopolitan. Jerusalem was
rebuilt, and its inhabitants reappeared, speaking an Aramaic or
Chaldaean jargon, which may have had some slight resemblance
to the speech of the fathers of Abraham.

At the time of Christ, this dialect offered only a feeble resist-
ance to the invasion of Hellenistic Greek, which assailed the
Jewish mind on all sides. Henceforth all the works produced
by Jewish writers appeared in the new dress, which fitted them
more or less elegantly, and copied to some extent the old Attic
fashions. The last canonical books of the Old Testament, as

* The Hebrews themselves did not call their language " Hebrew " ;
they called it, quite properly, the " language of Canaan " (Isaiah xix, 18).
Compare Roediger's preface to the Hebrew grammar of Gesenius (16th
edition, Leipzig, 1851, p. 7 et passim).

I94

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

well as the works of Philo and Josephus, are Hellenistic in
spirit.

When the Holy City was destroyed" and the Jewish nation
scattered, the favour of God departed from them, and the East
came again into its own. Hebrew culture broke with Athens as
it had broken with Alexandria, and the language and ideas of
the Talmud, the teaching of the school of Tiberias, were again
Semitic, sometimes in the form of Arabic, sometimes in that of
the " language of Canaan," to use Isaiah's phrase. I am speak-
ing of what was henceforth to be the sacred language of religion
and the Rabbis, and was regarded as the true national speech.
In their everyday life, however, the Jews used the tongue of
the country where they settled ; and, further, these exiles
were known everywhere by their special accent. They never
succeeded in fitting their vocal organs to their adopted language,
even when they had learnt it from childhood. This goes to
confirm what William von Humboldt says as to the connexion
between race and language being so close that later generations
never get quite accustomed to pronounce correctly words that
were unknown to their ancestors.*

Whether this be true or not, we have in the Jews a remarkable
proof of the fact that one must not always assume, at first sight,
a close connexion between a race and its language, for the
language may not have belonged to it originally.t
I We see how cautiously we must tread if we attempt to infer
1 an identity of race from the affinity, or even the resemblance, of
languages. Not only have most of the nations of Western Asia
and nearly all those of Southern Europe merely adapted the
speech of others to their own use, while leaving its main elements

* This is also the view of W. Edwards (" Physical Characteristics of the
Human Races ").

t Besides the Jews, I might also mention the Gipsies. There is,
further, the case where a people speaks two languages. In Grisons
almost all the peasants of the Engadine speak Roumansch and German
with equal facility, the former among themselves, the latter to foreigners.
In Courland there is a district where the peoples speak Esthonian (a
Finnish dialect) to each other and Lithuanian to every one else (Pott,
op. cit., p. 104).

195

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

untouched ; but there are also some who have taken over
languages absolutely foreign to them, to which they have made
no contribution whatever. The latter case is certainly rarer,
and may even be regarded as an anomaly. But its mere existence
is enough to make us very careful in admitting a form of proof
in which such exceptions are possible. On the other hand, since
they are exceptions, and are not met with so often as the opposite
case, of a national tongue being preserved for centuries by even
a weak nation ; since we also see how a language is assimilated
to the particular character of the people that has created it,
and how its changes are in exact proportion to the successive
modifications in the people's blood ; since the part played by a
language in forming its derivatives varies with the numerical
strength, in the new groups, of the race that speaks it, we may
justly conclude that no nation can have a language of greater
value than itself, except under special circumstances. As this
point is of considerable importance, I will try to bring it out by
a new line of proof.

We have already seen that the civilization of a composite
people does not include all its social classes.* The racial in-
fluences that were at work in the lower strata from the first still
go on ; and they prevent the directing forces of the national
culture from reaching the depths at all, — if they do, their action
is weak and transitory. In France, about five-eighths of the total
population play merely an unwilling and passive part in the
development of modern European culture, and that only by
fits and starts. With the exception of Great Britain, of which the
insular position produces a greater unity of type, the proportion
is even higher in the rest of the Continent. I will speak of France
at greater length, as an instance of the exact correspondence
between language and racial type ; for in France we have a
particular instance that strikingly confirms our main thesis.

We know little, or rather we have no real evidence at all, of
the phases which Celtic and rustic Latin f passed through before

See pp. 97-102.
f The way was not so long from rustic Latin, lingua rustica Romanorum,
to the lingua romana and thence to corruption, as it was from the classical

I96

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

they met and coalesced. Nevertheless, St. Jerome and his
contemporary Sulpicius Severus tell us (the former in his " Com-
mentaries " on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, the second
in his " Dialogue on the virtues of the Eastern Monks ") that
in their time at least two languages were generally spoken in
Gaul. There was, first, Celtic, which was preserved on the banks
of the Rhine in so pure a form, that it remained identical with
the language spoken by the Galatians of Asia Minor, who had
been separated from their mother country for more than six
centuries.* Secondly, there was the language called " Gallic,"
which according to a commentator, can only have been a form,
already broken down, of Popular Latin. This fourth century
dialect, while different from the Gallic of Treves, was spoken
neither in the West nor in Aquitaine. It was found only in the
centre and south of what is now France, and was itself probably
split up into two great divisions. It is the common source of the
currents, more or less Latinized, which were mingled with other
elements in different proportions, and formed later the langue d'oil
and the lingua romana, in the narrower sense. I will speak first
of the latter.

In order to bring it into being, all that was necessary was a
slight alteration in the vocabulary of Latin, and the introduction
of a few syntactical notions borrowed from Celtic and other
languages till then unknown in the West of Europe. The
Imperial colonies had brought in a fair number of Italian, African,
and Asiatic elements. The Burgundian, and especially the
Gothic, invasions added another, which was marked by consider-
able harmony, liveliness, and sonority. Its vocabulary was
further increased after the inroads of the Saracens. Thus the
lingua romana became, in its rhythmic quality, quite distinct from
Gallic, and soon assumed a character of its own. It is true that

tongue, the precise and elaborate forms of which offered more resistance
to decay. We may add that, as every foreign legionary brought his
own provincial patois into the Gallic colonies, the advent of a common
dialect was hastened, not merely by the Celts, but by the immigrants
themselves.

* Sulp. Severus, Dial. I de virtutibus monachorum orientalium.

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THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

we do not find this in its perfection, in the " Oath of the Sons of
Ludwig the Pious," as we do later in the poems of Raimbaut de
Vaqueiras or Bertran de Born.* Yet even in the " Oath " we can
recognize the language for what it is ; it has already acquired its
main features, and its future path is clearly mapped out. It
formed henceforth (in its different dialects of Limousin, Provencal,
and Auvergnat) the speech of a people of as mixed an origin as
any in the world. It was a refined and supple language, witty,
brilliant, and satirical, but without depth or philosophy. It was
of tinsel rather than gold, and had never been able to do more
than pick up a few ingots on the surface of the rich mines that
lay open to it. Without any serious principles, it was destined
to remain an instrument of indifference, of universal scepticism
and mockery. It did not fail to be used as such. The people
cared for nothing but pleasure and parade. Brave to a fault,
beyond measure gay, spending their passion on a dream, and
their vitality on idle toys, they had an instrument that was
exactly suited to their character, and which, though admired
by Dante, was put to no better use in poetry than to tag satires,
love-songs, and challenges, and in religion to support heresies
such as that of the Albigenses, a pestilent Manicheism, without
value even for literature, from which an English author, in no way
Catholic in his sympathies, congratulates the Papacy on having
delivered the Middle Ages.f Such was the lingua romana of old,
and such do we find it even to-day. It is pretty rather than
beautiful, and shows on the surface how little it is fitted to serve
a great civilization.

Was the langue d'oil formed in a similar way ? Obviously not.
However the Celtic, Latin, and Germanic elements were fused
(for we cannot be certain on this point, in the absence of records

* Both troubadours who flourished in the latter half of the twelfth
century. — Tr.

f Macaulay, " History of England," ad init. The Albigenses are the
special favourites of revolutionary writers, especially in Germany {see
Lenau's poem, Die Albigenser). Nevertheless the sectaries of Languedoc
were recruited mainly from the knightly orders and the dignitaries of the
Church. Their doctrines were indeed antisocial ; and for this reason
much may be pardoned to them.

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THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

going back to the earliest period of the language *), it is at any rate
clear that it rose from a strongly marked antagonism between the
three tongues, and that it would thus have a character and energy
quite incompatible with such compromises and adaptations as
those which gave birth to the lingua romana. In one moment
of its life, the langue d'oil was partly a Germanic tongue. In
the written remains that have survived, we find one of the best
qualities of the Aryan languages, the power of forming com-
pounds. This power, it is true, is limited ; and though still
considerable, is less than in Sanscrit, Greek, and German. In
the nouns, we find a system of inflexion by suffix, and, in con-
sequence, an ease in inverting the order which modern French
has lost, and which the language of the sixteenth century retained
only to a slight extent, its inversions being gained at the expense
of clearness. Again, the vocabulary of the langue d'oil included
many words brought in by the Franks. t Thus it began by being
almost as much Germanic as Gallic ; Celtic elements appeared
in its second stage, and perhaps fixed the melodic principles of the
language. The best possible tribute to its merits is to be found
in the successful experiment of Littre,J who translated the first
book of the " Iliad " literally, line for line, into French of the
thirteenth century. Such a tour de force would be impossible in
modern French.

Such a language belonged to a people that was evidently very
different from the inhabitants of Southern Gaul. It was more
deeply attached to Catholicism ; its politics were permeated
by a lively idea of freedom, dignity, and independence, its
institutions had no aim but utility. Thus the mission set before
the popular literature was not to express the fancies of the mind
or heart, the freakishness of a universal scepticism, but to put
together the annals of the nation, and to set down what was at
that time regarded as the truth. It is to this temper of the people

* See the curious remarks of Genin in his preface to the Chanson de
Roland (edited 1 8 5 1 ).

f See Hickes, Thesaurus litter aturcs septentrionalis ; also L'Histoire
HttSraire de France, vol. xvii, p. 633.

X Published in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

IO9

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

and their language that we owe the great rhymed chronicles,
especially " Garin le Loherain," which bear witness, though it
has since been denied, to the predominance of the North. Un-
fortunately, since the compilers of these traditions, and even their
original authors, mainly aimed at preserving historical facts or
satisfying their desire for positive and solid results, poetry in the
true sense, the love of form and the search for beauty, does not
always bulk as large as it should in their long narratives. The
literature of the langue d'oil was, above all, utilitarian ; and so the
race, the language, and the literature were in perfect harmony.

The Germanic element in the race, however, being far less than
the Gallic basis or the Roman accretions, naturally began to
lose ground. The same thing took place in the language ;
Celtic and Latin advanced, Germanic retreated. That noble
speech, which we know only at its highest stage, and which might
have risen even higher, began to decline and become corrupted
towards the end of the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth,
it was no more than a patois, from which the Germanic elements
had completely disappeared. The treasury was exhausted ; and
what remained was an illogical and barbarous anomaly in the
midst of the progress of Celtic and Latin. Thus in the sixteenth
century the revival of classical studies found the language in
ruins, and tried to remodel it on the lines of Greek and Latin.
This v/as the professed aim of the writers of this great age. They
did not succeed, and the seventeenth century, wisely seeing that
the irresistible march of events could in no wise be curbed by the
hand of man, set itself merely to improve the language from
within ; for every day it was assuming more and more the forms
best suited to the dominant race, trie forms, in other words, into
which the grammatical life of Celtic had formerly been cast.

Although both the langue d'oil and French proper are marked
by a greater unity than the lingua romana (since the mixture of
races and languages that gave birth to them was less complex)
yet they have produced separate dialects which survive to this
day. It is not doing these too much honour to call them dialects,
not patois. They arose, not from the corruption of the^dominant

200

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

type, with which they were at least contemporary, but from the
different proportions in which the Celtic, Latin, and Germanic
elements, that still make up the French nationality, were mingled.
To the north of the Seine, we find the dialect of Picardy ; this is,
in vocabulary and rhythmic quality, very near Flemish, of which
the Germanic character is too obvious to be dwelt upon. Flemish,
in this respect, shows the same power of choice as the langue d'oil,
which could in a certain poem, without ceasing to be itself, admit
forms and expressions taken bodily from the language spoken at
Arras.*

As we go south of the Seine towards the Loire, the Celtic
elements in the provincial dialects grow more numerous. In
Burgundian, and the dialects of Vaud and Savoy, even the
vocabulary has many traces of Celtic ; these are not found in
French, where the predominant factor is rustic Latin. f

I have shown above $ how from the sixteenth century the
influence of the north had given ground before the growing pre-
ponderance of the peoples beyond the Loire. The reader has
merely to compare the present sections on language with my
former remarks on blood to see how close is the relation between
the speech of a people and its physical constitution^

I have dealt in detail with the special case of France, but the
principle could easily be illustrated from the rest of Europe ; and
it would be seen, as a universal rule, that the successive changes
and modifications of a language are not, as one usually hears, the
work of centuries. If they were, Ekkhili, Berber, Euskara, and
Bas-Breton would long have disappeared ; and yet they still
survive. The changes in language are caused by corresponding

* P. Paris, Garin le Loherain, preface.

f It may however be observed that the accent of Vaud and Savoy has
a southern ring, strongly reminiscent of the colony of Aventicum.

X Seep. 43.

§ Pott brings out very well the fact that the different dialects maintain
the balance between the blood of a race and its language, when he says,
" Dialects are the diversity in unity, the prismatic sections of the mono-
chromatic light and the primordial One " (Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopadie,
p. 66). The phraseology is obscure ; but it shows his meaning clearly
enough.

201

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

changes in the blood of successive generations, and the parallelism
is exact.

I must here explain a phenomenon to which I have already
referred, namely the renunciation by certain racial groups (under
pressure of special necessity, or their own nature) of their native
tongue in favour of one which is more or less foreign to them.
I took the Jews and the Parsees as examples. There are others
more remarkable still ; for we find, in America, savage tribes
speaking languages superior to themselves.

In America, by a curious stroke of fate, the most energetic
nations have developed, so to speak, in secret. The art of writing
was unknown to them, and their history proper begins very late
and is nearly always very obscure. The New World contains a
great number of peoples which, though they are neighbours and
derive in different directions from a common origin, have very
little resemblance to each other.

According to d'Orbigny, the so-called " Chiquitean group " in
Central America is composed of tribes, of which the largest contain
about 1500 souls, and the least numerous 50 and 300. All these,
even the smallest, have distinct languages. Such a state of things
can only be the result of a complete racial anarchy.

On this hypothesis, I am not at all surprised to see many of
these tribes, like the Chiquitos, in possession of a complicated and
apparently scientific language. The words used by the men are
sometimes different from those of the women ; and in every case
when a man borrows one of the women's phrases, he changes the
terminations. Where such luxury in vocabulary is possible, the
language has surely reached a very refined stage. Unfortunately,
side by side with this we find that the table of numerals does not
go much further than ten. Such poverty, in the midst of so
much careful elaboration, is probably due to the ravaging hand
of time, aided by the barbarous condition of the natives to-day.
When we see anomalies like these, we cannot help recalling the
sumptuous palaces, once marvels of the Renaissance, which have
come, by some revolution, into the hands of rude peasants. The
eye may rove with admiration over delicate columns, elegant

202

THE INEQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

trellis-work, sculptured porches, noble staircases, and striking
gables — luxuries which are useless to the wretchedness that lives
under them ; for the ruined roofs let in the rain, the floors crack,
and the worm eats into the mouldering walls.

I can now say with certainty that, with regard to the special
character of races, philology confirms all the facts of physiology
and history. Its conclusions however must be handled with
extreme care, and when they are all we have to go upon, it is very
dangerous to rest content with them. Without the slightest
doubt, a people's language corresponds to its mentality, but not
always to its real value for civilization. In order to ascertain this,
we must fix our eyes solely on the race by which, and for which,
the language was at first designed. Now with the exception of
the negroes, and a few yellow groups, we meet only quaternary
races in recorded history. All the languages we know are thus
derivative, and we cannot gain the least idea of the laws govern-
ing their formation except in the comparatively later stages.
Our results, even when confirmed by history, cannot be regarded
as infallibly proved. The further we go back, the dimmer be-
comes the light, and the more hypothetical the nature of any
arguments drawn from philology. It is exasperating to be
thrown back on these when we try to trace the progress of any
human family or to discover the racial elements that make it up.
We know that Sanscrit and Zend are akin. That is something ;
but their common roots are sealed to us. The other ancient
tongues are in the same case. We know nothing of Euskara
except itself. As no analogue to it has been discovered up to now,
we are ignorant of its history, and whether it is to be regarded as
itself primitive or derived. It yields us no positive knowledge
as to whether the people who speak it are racially simple or
composite.

Ethnology may well be grateful for the help given by philology.
But the help must not be accepted unconditionally, or any
theories based on it alone.*

* This caution applies only when the history of a single people is in
question, not that of a group of peoples. Although one nation may

203

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

This rule is dictated by a necessary prudence. All the facts,
however, mentioned in this chapter"go to prove that, originally,
there is a perfect correspondence between the intellectual virtues
of a race and those of its native speech ; that languages are, in
consequence, unequal in value and significance, unlike in their
forms and basic elements, as races are also ; that their modifica-
tions, like those of races, come merely from intermixture with
other idioms ; that their qualities and merits, like a people's
blood, disappear or become absorbed, when they are swamped by
too many heterogeneous elements ; finally, that when a language
of a higher order is used by some human group which is unworthy
of it, it will certainly become mutilated and die out. Hence,
though it is often difficult to infer at once, in a particular case,
the merits of a people from those of its language, it is quite
certain that in theory this can always be done.

I may thus lay it down, as a universal axiom, that the hierarchy

of languages is in strict correspondence with the hierarchy of

races.

sometimes change its language, this never happens, and could not happen,
in the case of a complex of nationalities, racially identical though politically-
independent. The Jews have given up their national speech ; but the
Semitic nations as a whole can neither lose their native dialects nor acquire
others.

204

CHAPTER XVI

RECAPITULATION; THE RESPECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF
THE THREE GREAT RACES ; THE SUPERIORITY OF THE
WHITE TYPE, AND, WITHIN THIS TYPE, OF THE ARYAN
FAMILY

I have shown the unique place in the organic world occupied by
the human species, the profound physical, as well as moral,
differences separating it from all other kinds of living creatures.
Considering it by itself, I have been able to distinguish, on physio-
logical grounds alone, three great and clearly marked types,
the black, the yellow, and the white. However uncertain the
aims of physiology may be, however meagre its resources, however
defective its methods, it can proceed thus far with absolute
certainty.

The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the
ladder. The animal character, that appears in the shape of the
pelvis, is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his
destiny. His intellect will always move within a very narrow
circle. He is not however a mere brute, for behind his low
receding brow, in the middle of his skull, we can see signs of
a powerful energy, however crude its objects. If his mental
faculties are dull or even non-existent, he often has an intensity
of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. Many of
his senses, especially taste and smell, are developed to an extent
unknown to the other two races.*

The very strength of his sensations is the most striking proof

of his inferiority. All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts

or repels him. What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to

excess ; no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him. It

p * "Taste and smell in the negro are as powerful as they are undis-
criminating. He eats everything, and odours which are revolting to us
are pleasant to him " (Pruner).

205

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

is the same with odours ; his inordinate desires are satisfied with
all, however coarse or even horrible. To these qualities may be
added an instability and capriciousness of feeling, that cannot be
tied down to any single object, and which, so far as he is concerned,
do away with all distinctions of good and evil. We might even
say that the violence with which he pursues the object that has
aroused his senses and inflamed his desires is a guarantee of the
desires being soon satisfied and the object forgotten. Finally,
he is equally careless of his own life and that of others : he kills
willingly, for the sake of killing ; and this human machine, in
whom it is so easy to arouse emotion, shows, in face of suffering,
either a monstrous indifference or a cowardice that seeks a
voluntary refuge in death.

The yellow race is the exact opposite of this type. The skull
points forward, not backward. The forehead is wide and bony,
often high and projecting. The shape of the face is triangular,
the nose and chin showing none of the coarse protuberances that
mark the negro. There is further a general proneness to obesity,
which, though not confined to the yellow type, is found there
more frequently than in the others. The yellow man has little
physical energy, and is inclined to apathy ; he commits none of
the strange excesses so common among negroes. His desires are
feeble, his will-power rather obstinate than violent ; his longing
for material pleasures, though constant, is kept within bounds.
A rare glutton by nature, he shows far more discrimination in his
choice of food. He tends to mediocrity in everything ; he under-
stands easily enough anything not too deep or sublime.* He has
a love of utility and a respect for order, and knows the value of a
certain amount of freedom. He is practical, in the narrowest
sense of the word. He does not dream or theorize ; he invents
little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him.
His whole desire is to live in the easiest and most comfortable way
possible. The yellow races are thus clearly superior to the black.
Every founder of a civilization would wish the backbone of his
society, his middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized
* Carus, op. cit., p. 60.

206

CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN RACES

society could be created by them ; they could not supply its
nerve-force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.

We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with
reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They
have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher,
more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races ; a perseverance
that takes account of obstacles and ultimately finds a means of
overcoming them ; a greater physical power, an extraordinary
instinct for order, not merely as a guarantee of peace and tran-
quillity, but as an indispensable means of self-preservation. At
the same time, they have a remarkable, and even extreme, love of
liberty, and are openly hostile to the formalism under which the
Chinese are glad to vegetate, as well as to the strict despotism
which is the only way of governing the negro.

The white races are, further, distinguished by an extraordinary
attachment to life. They know better how to use it, and so, as it
would seem, set a greater price on it ; both in their own persons
and those of others, they are more sparing of life. When they are
cruel, they are conscious of their cruelty ; it is very doubtful
whether such a consciousness exists in the negro. At the same
time, they have discovered reasons why they should surrender
this busy life of theirs, that is so precious to them. The principal
motive is honour, which under various names has played an
enormous part in the ideas of the race from the beginning. I
need hardly add that the word honour, together with all the
civilizing influences connoted by it, is unknown to both the
yellow and the black man.

On the other hand, the immense superiority of the white
peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an
inferiority in the intensity of their sensations. In the world of
the senses, the white man is far less gifted than the others, and
so is less tempted and less absorbed by considerations of the
body, although in physical structure he is far the most vigorous.*

Such are the three constituent elements of the human race.

* Martius observes that the European is superior to the coloured man
in the pressure of the nervous fluid (Reise in Brasilien, vol. i, p. 259).

207

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

I call them secondary types, as I think myself obliged to omit
all discussion of the Adamite man. From the combination, by
intermarriage, of the varieties of these types come the tertiary
groups. The quaternary formations are produced by the union
of one of these tertiary types, or of a pure-blooded tribe, with
another group taken from one of the two foreign species.

Below these categories others have appeared — and still appear.
Some of these are very strongly characterized, and form new and
distinct points of departure, coming as they do from races that
have been completely fused. Others are incomplete, and ill-
ordered, and, one might even say, anti-social, since their elements,
being too numerous, too disparate, or too barbarous, have had
neither the time nor the opportunity for combining to any
fruitful purpose. No limits, except the horror excited by the
possibility of infinite intermixture, can be assigned to the number
of these hybrid and chequered races that make up the whole of
mankind.

It would be unjust to assert that every mixture is bad and
harmful. If the three great types had remained strictly separate,
the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands
of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties
would have crawled for ever at the feet of the lowest of the whites.
Such a state is so far ideal, since it has never been beheld in
history ; and we can imagine it only by recognizing the undis-
puted superiority of those groups of the white races which have
remained the purest.

It would not have been all gain. The superiority of the white
race would have been clearly shown, but it would have been
bought at the price of certain advantages which have followed
the mixture of blood. Although these are far from counter-
balancing the defects they have brought in their train, yet they
are sometimes to be commended. Artistic genius, which is \
equally foreign to each of the three great types, arose only after ,t
the intermarriage of white and black. Again, in the Malayan j)
variety, a human family was produced from the yellow and black
races that had more intelligence than either of its ancestors.

208

CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN RACES

Finally, from the union of white and yellow, certain intermediary
peoples have sprung, who are superior to the purely Finnish
tribes as well as to the negroes.

I do not deny that these are good results. The world of art
and great literature that comes from the mixture of blood, the
improvement and ennoblement of inferior races — all these are
wonders for which we must needs be thankful. The small have
been raised. Unfortunately, the great have been lowered by the
same process ; and this is an evil that nothing can balance or
repair. Since I am putting together the advantages of racial
mixtures, I will also add that to them is due the refinement of
manners and beliefs, and especially the tempering of passion and
desire. But these are merely transitory benefits, and if I recog-
nize that the mulatto, who may become a lawyer, a doctor, or
a business man, is worth more than his negro grandfather, who
was absolutely savage, and fit for nothing, I must also confess
that the Brahmans of primitive India, the heroes of the Iliad
and the Shahnameh, the warriors of Scandinavia — the glorious
shades of noble races that have disappeared — give us a higher
and more brilliant idea of humanity, and were more active,
intelligent, and trusty instruments of civilization and grandeur
than the peoples, hybrid a hundred times over, of the present
day. And the blood even of these was no longer pure.

However it has come about, the human races, as we find them
in history, are complex ; and one of the chief consequences has
been to throw into disorder most of the primitive characteristics
of each type. The good as well as the bad qualities are seen
to diminish in intensity with repeated intermixture of blood ;
but they also scatter and separate off from each other, and are
often mutually opposed. The white race originally possessed
the monopoly of beauty, intehigence, and strength. By its
union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were
beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or, if
intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quantity of
white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive
infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried

o 209

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

with it its natural advantages, and often merely increased the
confusion already existing in the racial elements. Its strength,
in fact, seemed to be its only remaining quality, and even its
strength served only to promote disorder. The apparent
anomaly is easily explained. Each stage of a perfect mixture
produces a new type from diverse elements, and develops special
faculties. As soon as further elements are added, the vast diffi-
culty of harmonizing the whole creates a state of anarchy. The
more this increases, the more do even the best and richest of
the new contributions diminish in value, and by their mere
presence add fuel to an evil which they cannot abate. If mix-
tures of blood are, to a certain extent, beneficial to the mass of
mankind, if they raise and ennoble it, this is merely at the expense
of mankind itself, which is stunted, abased, enervated, and
humiliated in the persons of its noblest sons. Even if we admit
that it is better to turn a myriad of degraded beings into mediocre
men than to preserve the race of princes whose blood is adul-
terated and impoverished by being made to suffer this dis-
honourable change, yet there is still the unfortunate fact that the
change does not stop here ; for when the mediocre men are once
created at the expense of the greater, they combine with other
mediocrities, and from such unions, which grow ever more and
more degraded, is born a confusion which, like that of Babel, ends
in uttere impotence, and leads societies down to the abyss of
nothingness whence no power on earth can rescue them.

Such is the lesson of history. It shows us that all civilizations
derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help,
and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves
the blood of the noble group that created it, provided that this
group itself belongs to the most illustrious branch of our species.

Of the multitude of peoples which live or have lived on the
earth, ten alone have risen to the position of complete societies.
The remainder have gravitated round these more or less inde-
pendently, like planets round their suns. If there is any element
of life in these ten civilizations that is not due to the impulse
of the white races, any seed of death that does not come from

210

LIST OF CIVILIZATIONS

the inferior stocks that mingled with them, then the whole theory
on which this book rests is false. On the other hand, if the facts
are as I say, then we have an irrefragable proof of the nobility
of our own species. Only the actual details can set the final
seal of truth on my system, and they alone can show with suffi-
cient exactness the full implications of my main thesis, that
peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various admixtures
of blood which they undergo ; that their degeneration corresponds
exactly to the quantity and quality of the new blood, and that
the rudest possible shock to the vitality of a civilization is given
when the ruling elements in a society and those developed by
racial change have become so numerous that they are clearly
moving away from the homogeneity necessary to their life, and
it therefore becomes impossible for them to be brought into
harmony and so acquire the common instincts and interests,
the common logic of existence, which is the sole justification for
any social bond whatever. There is no greater curse than such
disorder, for however bad it may have madfe the present state of
things, it promises still worse for the future.

Note. — The " ten civilizations " mentioned in the last para-
graph are as follows. They are fully discussed in the subsequent
books of the " Inequality of Races," of which the present volume
forms the first.

I. The Indian civilization, which reached its highest point
round the Indian Ocean, and in the north and east of the Indian
Continent, south-east of the Brahmaputra. It arose from a
branch of a white people, the Aryans.

II. The Egyptians, round whom collected the Ethiopians, the
Nubians, and a few smaller peoples to the west of the oasis of
Ammon. This society was created by an Aryan colony from
India, that settled in the upper valley of the Nile.

III. The Assyrians, with whom may be classed the Jews, the
Phoenicians, the Lydians, the Carthaginians, and the Hymiarites.

211

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES

They owed their civilizing qualities to the great white invasions
which may be grouped under the name of the descendants of
Shem and Ham. The Zoroastrian Iranians who ruled part of
Central Asia under the names of Medes, Persians, and Bactrians,
were a branch of the Aryan family.

IV. The Greeks, who came from the same Aryan stock, as
modified by Semitic elements.

V. The Chinese civilization, arising from a cause similar to
that operating in Egypt. An Aryan colony from India brought
the light of civilization to China also. Instead however of
becoming mixed with black peoples, as on the Nile, the colony
became absorbed in Malay and yellow races, and was reinforced,
from the north-west, by a fair number of white elements, equally
Aryan but no longer Hindu.

VI. The ancient civilization of the Italian peninsula, the cradle
of Roman culture. This was produced by a mixture of Celts,
Iberians, Aryans, and Semites.

VII. The Germanic races, which in the fifth century trans-
formed the Western mind. These were Aryans.

VIII. -X. The three civilizations of America, the Alleghanian,
the Mexican, and the Peruvian.

Of the first seven civilizations, which are those of the Old
World, six belong, at least in part, to the Aryan race, and the
seventh, that of Assyria, owes to this race the Iranian Renaissance,
which is, historically, its best title to fame. Almost the whole
of the Continent of Europe is inhabited at the present time by
groups of which the basis is white, but in which the non-Aryan
elements are the most numerous. There is no true civilization,
among the European peoples, where the Aryan branch is not
predominant.

In the above list no negro race is seen as the initiator of a
civilization. Only when it is mixed with some other can it even
be initiated into one.

Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among
the yellow races ; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted
stagnation supervenes.

212

INDEX

Abraham, 123

Abu-Hanifah, 123

Achaemenidae, 176

Adair, 72

Adam, n 8-9, 145

^Eschylus, 14, 99

Agrippa, 17

Albigenses, 198

Alcaeus, 94

Alexander the Great, 44, 175-6,

193
Alexandria, 61
Alexandrians, 38, 176
Algiers, 171

Alleghany race, 71, 172
Altaic languages, 183
Altai Mountains, 128, 141
Amalfi, 61
America, Anglo-Saxons of North,

39, 71, 160 n.
Anabaptists, 20
Anaxagoras, 14
Ancorso, 143
Andes, 115
Anglo-Saxons, 30, 69
Annam, 164
Anne, Queen, 42
Antilles, 50
Antioch, 60
Antonines, 1 5
Antoninus Pius, 1 1
Anubis, 66
Apollo, 108-9
Appius Claudius, 9
Arabs, 21, 58, 122-5, I77~9
Aral, Lake, 128
Aramaic, 194
Aranda, Count of, 52
Ararat, Mount, 142
Araucans, 119
Arbela, 33
Arcadia, 59
Arginusae, 158
Aristophanes, 14, 157
Aristotle, 166
Arkansas, 71 '

Armagnacs, 12

Armenians, 58, 193

Arsacidae, 177

Artibonite, 48

Aryan languages, 183, 188, 199

Aryavarta, 32

Aseddin, 129

Ashik-Pacha-Zadeh, 130 n.

Aspasia, 14

Assyria, 2, 7, 56, 79

Assyrians, 87, 126

Athene, 94

Athenians, 7 ; religion, 13, 17 ; art

and politics, 157-8
Athens, 59, 104
Atlas, Mount, 141
Attila, 132
Aurelian, 17
Auvergne, 121
Aymaras, 85
Aztecs, 8, 13, 192

Baber, 129 n.

Babylon, 10, 194

Bagdad, 178

Baker, 137-8

Balaibalan, 188

Bambaras, 180

Barrow, 121 n.

Basques, 194

Belgium, 92, 99

Berbers, 194, 201

Berlin, climate of, 38

Bernard, St., 69

Bichat, 24

Birman, 190

Blumenbach, 109-10, 119, 146

Boeotia, 59

Bordeaux, 60

Born, Bertran de, 197

Bossuet, 12

Brahmans, 32, 65 ; civilization, 83,
97, 209 ; religion, 142 ; pa-
cifism, 161

Brazil, 125 n.

Bremen, 60

213

INDEX

Breton, language, 201
Brittany, 17, 44, 101 n.
Buddhists, 65, 97
Burgundian, 201
Bushmen, 187

Caciques, 171

Cadiz, 1 50

Caesar, Julius, 15, 158

Calabrians, 121

Calvinists, 41

Camper, 108-10

Canaries, 144, 155

Cappadocians, 193

Capri, 60

Carians, 193

Caroline Islands, 173

Carthage, 13

Carthaginians, 35, 38, 66, 79

Carus, 54 n., 74 n., 11 1-4, 149

Catalans, 92

Catawhas, 172

Cato, 158

Catullus, 166

Caucasian, 119, 146

Caucasus, 127, 141-2, 187

Celtic languages, 189-90, 196-201

Celts, 32, 35, 172

Chagres, 61

Charlemagne, 1 50

Charles I, of England, 41 ; VII, of
France, 43

Cherokees, 69, 71-2, 74, 121, 172

China, 7, 20 ; climate of, 56-7

Chinese, 33 ; as traders, 58 • Chinese
Christians, 64-5 ; material
civilization, 87, 95-7 ; per-
manent characteristics, 138 ;
language, 184-5

Chiquitos, 202

Chlodwig, 160 n.

Christianity, its fight against pagan-
ism, 45 ; relation to civiliza-
tion, chap, vii passim

Cicero, 158

Cincinnatus, 1 1

Cingalese, 126

Cirionos, 53

Civilization, Guizot's definition,
80-1 ; von Humboldt's defini-
tion, 82 ; Gobineau's definition,
91 ; list of — s, 211-12

Co-adjutor, 41

Columbus, 144

Confucius, 74 n.

Constantine, 1 5

Constantinople, 61 , 128, 150

Coptic, 185 11.

Cordilleras, the, 64

Cordova, 29, 177

Corinth, 59

Coromandel Coast, 122

Cortes, 8, 192

Creeks, 71

Croats, 29

Cuba, 51

Cuvier, 118, 136 141

Cuzco, 167

Cyrus the Great, 10

Dahomey, 48, 85

Damascus, 57

Dante, 198

Darius, 10, 33, 176

Davis, 96

Deccan, 147

Decius, 17

Degeneration, meaning of, 25

Delaware, 190

Delhi, 34

Demeter, 59, 94

Diocletian, 17, 96

Djelat-Eddin-Rumi, 188

Dodona, 175

Draco, 40

Druids, 44

Ecbatana, 175
Egypt, 2, 7, 56
Egyptians, 30, 80 ; civilization, 87 ;

relations with Islam, 178
Ekkhili, 201
England, luxury in, 8 ; change in

institutions, 42
English, as rulers of India, 34 ;

civilization, 81, 92, 97-102
Epicurus, 13
Erie, Lake, 55
Eskimos, 64-5, 69, 131
Etruscans, 80, 121
Euhemerus, 16
Euphrates, 56
Europeans, physical and mental

characteristics of, 107-8 and

chaps, x, xii, xvi, passim
Euskara, 201, 203
Eve, 119

Fabii, 33, 159
Farnese Hercules, 108
Fatimites, 7
Fellatahs, 48

214

INDEX

Fenelon, 12

Ferdinand the Catholic, 41
Finns, 38, 127-32, 146
Flourens, 116

France, luxury in, 8 ; under English
rule, 20 ; change in institutions,

Franklin, 180 n.

Franks, 199

French, civilization of, 81, 92 ;
power of resistance, 152; lan-
guage, 189, 196-201

Galerius, 16

Galla, 67

Gallatin, 72.

Gallo-Romans, 11, 197

Gar in le Loherain, 200-1

Gauls, the, independence of, 1 70

Gayaseddin-Keikosrev, 129

Genesis, Book of, 11 7-8

Genoese, 8, 79

Gerando, 132

Germanic tribes, 87, 91, 93, 128 ;

language, 189-90, 198-9
Germany, religious wars in, 2 1
Gioberti, 151
Goethe, 83, 185 n.
Gothic, 190
Goths, 10, 197
Greece, 2, 7 ; Christianity in, 17 ;

climate of, 59
Greeks, 8, 10 ; civilization, 87-8,

92, 94 ; religion, 142 ; relation

to Persians, 174-6; language,

191-4
Grenada, 29
Grimm, Monsieur de, 49
Guaranis, 52-3
Guizot, 77-82
Gutenberg, 165

Ham, 29, 48

Hamites, 118, 146

Hanover, 92

Hanseatic towns, 60

Harmodius, 10

Hawaii, 47

Hayti, 48-51

Hedjaz, 178

Helvetius, 151

Henry IV, of France, 43

Heracles, Tyrian, 66

Hindus, 29-30, 76 ; civilization, 80,

87, 91 ; age of marriage

among, 124

Holbach, Baron, 49

Holland, 92, 99

Homer, 157

Hottentots, 121, 180

Humboldt, A. von, 129 n., 132 «.,

137 n, 144 n
Humboldt, W. von, 82-4, 183 n.,

187, 192, 195
Hungary, 29
Huns, 132
Huron, 37
Hussites, 20

Hybrids, fertility of, 1 1 5-7
Hyderabad, 34

Iberians, 172-3

Ibn-Foszlan, 160 n.

Iliad, the, 199, 209

Illyrians, 172

India, 7 ; government of, by the
English, 34 ; climate, 56-7 ;
art, 104

Indians, North-American, see Red-
skins

Indians, South-American, 171

Ishmael, 122, 177

Isis, 66

Isola Madre, 144

Jamaica, 51

James I, of England, 42

Janissaries, 130

Japanese, 64, 80

Japhet, 118

Javanese, 45, 171

Jerome, St., 197

Jesuits, 51-3, 68, 125 n.

Jews, 3, 29 ; growth, 58-9; religion,

66; physical identity, 122-3 ;

language, 194-5
Jovian, 1 1
Judaea, 13
Julia, 15 n.
Julian, 16
Jupiter, 13

Kabyles, 57
Kaffirs, 85, 180
Kalidasa, 157
Kalmucks, 108
Kamaun, 147
Kamehameha III, 47
Katai Mountains, 128
Kawi, 190

Khalil Chendereli, 130
Khor^abad, 126

215

INDEX

Kirghiz-Kasaks, 132
Klemm, 86 n.
Koran, 123-4
Krapff, 125 «.
Kurds, 29

L^lius, 14

Lahore, 34

Lander, 180

Languedoc, 122

Langue d'oil, 197, 199-201

Lapps, 69, 127, 131, 133

Latin, rustic, 196-7

Leila, 124

Lenni-Lenapes, 55 n., 190-1

Lingua romana, 189, 197-9

Littre, 199

London, mixture of races in, 1 50

Louis XIV, 12, 21, 151

Lucrece, 9

Ludolf, 114 n.

Lutherans, Danish, 69

Lycurgus, 40, 42

Lyons, 60

Macaulay, Lord, 198

Macedonians, the, 30, 175

Magadha, 7

Magi, 13

Magyars, 29, 131-3

Malabar, 122

Malays, 58, 11 1-3, 152, 208

Manchus, 20

Manu, Code of, 32

Marcius, Ancus, 15 n.

Marianne Islands, the, 172

Marseilles, 60

Martial, 166

Martinique, 51

Maximin, 16

Medusa, 109

Meiners, 107 n.

Memphis, 38

Meru, 142

Mexico, Gulf of, 55

Mieris, 113 n.

Milan, 60

Mississippi, 71

Missouri, 55

Mohammedans, 51, 177-9

Mohammed IV, 1 30

Mohammed (the Prophet), 177-8

Mongols, 20 ; Mongol Christians,
64 ; material civilization, 85 ;
physical characteristics, n 1-5,
1 50. See also Yellow Races

3l6

Montausier, the, 12

Montpellier, 178

Moors, 41

Moravians, 69, 161

Morosini, 193

Morton, 111

Mulattoes, 149, 209

Muskhogees, 172

Mussulmans, see Mohammedans

Napoleon, 41, 151

Narbonese Gaul, 44

Narbonne, 60

Natchez, 172

Negroes, incapacity for civilization,
74_S ; physical and mental
characteristics, chaps, x, xii,
xvi, passim

Nero, 17

Nestorians, 29

Neustria, 133

New Zealanders, 1 52

Nimrud, 168

Nineveh, 104

Normandy, climate of, 144

Normans, 31, 60

Novgorod, 60

Numidia, 94

Nushirwan, 128 w.

Oceania, 46, 57, 107, 116, 162

Odenathus, 177

Oghuzes, 128-9

Olympia, 175

Olympus, Mount, 142

d'Orbigny, 163 «., 202

Orenburg, 76

Ortoghrul, 129

Osman, 129-30

Osmanlis, 129-30

Ostiaks, 127, 133

Othomi, 185 n.

Owen, 1 09-1 1

Palestine, climate of, 59

Palmyra, 177

Panama, 61

Paraguay, 51-3, 125 n.

Parana, 53

Paris, 10, 43, 60 ; mixture of races

in, 150
Park, Mungo, 180
Parsees, 29
Parthenon, 193
Pathans, 76
Paul, St., 17

INDEX

Pecheray, 150

Pelagian, 1 50

Perm, 39

Pericles, 14, 94, 1 57

Permians, 133

Persepolis, 126, 176

Persians, 8, 13, 29-30, 33 ; relation

to Greeks, 174-6 ; relation to

Arabs, 178-9
Peru, 13, 85
Peruvians, 80, 115; civilization,

167 ; language, 192
Philae, 104

Philip of Macedon, 94
Philip the Arabian, 177
Phoenicians, 9, 35, 57, 79
Picardy, 201
Piedmont, 87
Pindar, 94, 1 57
Pisans, 8, 79
Plato, 157, 166
Pliny, 159, 166
Plutarch, 5

Polynesians, 27, 85, 147
Pompeius, 158
Pontus, 7

Postumus, C. Junius, 159
Praetorian Guard, 16
Prakriti, 86
Prichard, 8, 73, chap, x passim, 123,

125, 137, 146
Prometheus, 142
Purusha, 86

Quaternary type, 149
Quichuas, 85, 115
Quito, 167

Radack Islands, the, 143

Ravenna, 61

Raynal, Abbe, 6

Rechabites, 122

Redskins of North America, their
treatment, 46 ; skull-measure-
ment, 1 1 1-2; exclusiveness,
1 70- 1

Regent of France (Anne of Austria),

Rocky Mountains, 55

Roman Empire, fall of, 2-3, 33

Romans, 8, 9 ; civilization, 87, 92,
94-7 ; modernity, 158-9 ; dif-
fusion of books among, 166

Rome, luxury in, 8 ; religion in, 13,
17, 66 ; climate of, 59-60

Rosa, St., 68

Roussillon, 122
Rubens, 113 «.
Rum, 129
Russia, 8, 152
Russians, 76

de Sacy, 187

Sakuntala, 124

Salsette, 104

Samal, 143

Samoyedes, 27, 85, 127, 131

San Domingo, 48-51

Sandwich Islands, 46-7

Sanscrit, 188-91, 203

Saracens, 197

Sarah, 123

Sassanidae, 177

Saxons, 29

Scandinavians, 133, 209

Schlotzer, 132

Scilly Isles, 173

Scipio, 14, 35

Scythians, 129 n., 133

Seljukians, 129-30

Seminoles, 172

Semites, 29, 118, 146

Semitic languages, 184, 188-9

Seneca, 161

Septimius Severus, 1 1

Shahnameh , the, 209

Sharuz, 128

Shelley, u n.

Shem, 29

Siamese, 164 ».

Siculi, 132

Sicyon, 175

Sidon, 57

Slavs, 32, 74, 92

Socrates, 14

Sophocles, 14

Spain, 20 ; Arabs in, 29

Spaniards, in South America, 46,

52 ; independence of, 170
Sparta, 59, 175
Spartacus, 159
Spartans, 9, 40, 79
Squier, 55 n.

St. Bartholomew's day, 12
Strafford, Earl of, 41
Suetonius, 15 n.
Sufis, 188
Sulla, 158

Sulpicius Severus, 197
Swabia, 79

Switzerland, 124 ; climate of, 144
Syria, 79

217

INDEX

Syrians, 94, 172, 177-9

Tacitus, 5, 17
Tahitians, 154
Talmud, 195
Tatars, 146
Tchingiz, 129 11.
Tenochtitlan, 104
Terah, 194
Teresa, St., 69
Tertiary type, 147
Tertullian, 159
Teutates, 13
Thebaid, 69
Thirty Tyrants, 20
Thucydides, 6
Thuringia, 79
Tiberius, 60
Tibetans, 80, 91, 97
Tigris, 56
Tihuanaco, 167
Tlaxcala, 159
Tocqueville, de, 72 n.
Toledo, 29
Tonga -Tabu, 154
Tonkin, 164
Toulouse, 60
Touraine, 100 n.
Trajan, 11, 159
Treves, 60, 197
Tribunate, the, 9
Triptolemus, 59
Tungusians, 117, 127, 133
Turanians, 128
Turkestan, 128
Turkey, 29
Turks, 29, 127-31
Tylos, 57
Tyre, 13, 57

Ulea, 143
Ulfilas, 190

Ur, 194
Urkan, 130
Uruguay, 53

Valentia, 29

Valerius Publicola, 10

Valmiki, 157

Vaqueiras, Raimbaut de, 198

Venetians, 8, 79

Venice, 60

Venus, 108

Virgil, 166

Voltaire, 5

Vrolik, 1 1 4- 5

Wallachians, 29, 190

Wanikas, 125 n.

Washington, 39

White races, definition, 146 ; see

also Europeans
William III, of England, 21, 81

Xerxes, 176 -

Yellow races, physical and mental
characteristics of, chaps, x, xii,
xvi passim ; definition, 146 ;
see also Mongols

Yemen, 178

Yolofs, 180

Yo-kiao-li, 125 n.

Yunnan, 87

Zama, battle of, 35
Zend, 201
Zeno, 14
Zenobia, 177
Zerubbabel, 194
Zingaris, 124, 195 n.
Zita, St., 69
Zuleika, 124

PRINTED AT
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON &> EDINBURGH

THE RENAISSANCE

By COUNT ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU

Translated by Paul V. Cohn, with an Introductory

Essay on Count Gobineau's Life and Work,

by Dr. Oscar Levy

One Volume, Demy 8vo, Illustrated, ios net

LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

THESE five historical dramas cover the flowering time of
the Italian Renaissance from the rise to prominence of
Savonarola (1492) to the last days of Michael Angelo
(about 1560). While grouped round the leading figures
who provide the titles — Savonarola, Cesare Borgia, Julius II,
Leo X, and Michael Angelo — the plays introduce almost every
interesting character of the period. Nor are we only concerned
with the great names ; the author aims at catching the spirit of the
people, and the thoughts and feelings of soldier, artisan, trader, and
their womenfolk find ample voice in his pages.

The Italian Renaissance is an epoch of peculiar interest to
English readers, not least because of its profound influence on our
own Elizabethan age. It is perhaps the most many-sided period
in history : even fifth-century Greece scarcely contributed so
much — or at any rate so much that has survived — to the world of
politics, art, and thought. Now while this interest is amply
reflected in contemporary literature, from the monumental work
of Symonds down to the flotsam and jetsam of everyday fiction,
there is one kind of man who more than an historian would show
insight into this age, and that is a poet.

It is as a poet's work that Gobineau's "Historical Scenes" recom-
mend themselves to the public. But there are many kinds of
poets ; there is the religious and moral kind, there is the irreligious
and sub-moral kind, and there is the super-religious and super-
moral kind. Only the last-named can understand, can feel, can
sympathise with such mighty figures as Cesare Borgia and
Julius II — the religious poet being inclined to paint them as

THE RENAISSANCE— continued

monsters, the sub-religious as freaks and neurotics. Similia
similibus : equals can only be recognised by their equals, and
Gobineau was himself a type of the Renaissance flung by destiny
into an age of low bourgeois and socialist ideals. In a century
swayed by romanticism and democracy, Gobineau was a classic
and an aristocrat. He is a forerunner of Nietzsche (" the only
European spirit I should care to converse with," said Nietzsche
of him in a letter), and as such is peculiarly fitted to deal with one
of the few periods that was not dominated by the moral law. For
this reason Gobineau cannot fail to attract the large and ever-
growing circle of students of Nietzsche in this country and
America.

" I can only add that this is a volume of serious import, worth reading from cover to
cover, a book which even a jaded reviewer closes with a sigh of regret that he has not
got to read it all over again.'' — G. S. Layard in the Bookman.

" We scarcely know whether to be more struck with the truth or liveliness of these
portraits. Savonarola, for example, is something more than the Savonarola of history
and tradition. Not only is the character of the man subtly brought out ; not only are
we made aware, for the first time, adequately, of that devouring egotism which could
see nothing but self as God's instrument, self as the scourge of Florence, self as the
inspired prophet ; but beneath all this and vouching for it is the consciousness of the
reality of the man, the consciousness that his cries of distress are real cries, and his
moments of fierce aspiration and black despair genuine experiences. More touching
and even more lifelike is the figure of Michael Angelo, a figure in the main familiar
to us, but endowed with advancing years with a peace of mind, a lucidity of in-
telligence, and a breadth of sympathy such as were foreign to its young and stormy
epoch. The last scene between Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna is a noble one,
and can be read more than once with pleasure." — The (^Morning Post.

"A debt is due to Dr. Oscar Levy for bringing before English readers this translation
of that great work of Count Gobineau, in which, through the medium of the drama,
he reveals his reverence for the spirit that inspired the Italian Renaissance. The
plays constituting the book are five in number, 'Savonarola,' 'Cesare Borgia,'
' Julius II," 'Leo X,' and ' Michael Angelo,' — and nothing more brilliant has appeared
in recent times. In scope we can only compare with it Mr. Hardy's ' Dynasts,' but
no more striking contrast could be conceived than the creations of these two geniuses.
Through the pages of these plays moves the whole glittering pageant of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, a mob of soldiers, priests, artists, men and women, slaying,
plundering, preaching, poisoning, painting, rioting, and loving, while out of the surgent
mass rise the figures of the splendid three. Borgia, Julius, and Michael Angelo,
dominating all by the sheer greatness of their ideas and their contempt for other men's
opinions. They are the great aristocrats of their time, and the five plays — really one
in conception — are an assertion of the saving grace of aristocracy, of the glory of race,
at a time when the democratic flood, whose source is Christianity, was beginning to
pour over Europe, to the overwhelming of all greatness of thought and art. The
translation, which is excellent, is by Paul V. Cohn." — Glasgow Herald.

LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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