The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
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Title: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
Author: Lothrop Stoddard
Author of introduction, etc.: Madison Grant
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Language: English
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THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
AGAINST WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY
BY LOTHROP STODDARD, A.M., PH.D. (Harv.)
AUTHOR OF "THE STAKES OF THE WAR,"
"PRESENT-DAY EUROPE: ITS NATIONAL STATES OF MIND,"
"THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN SAN DOMINGO," ETC.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MADISON GRANT
CHAIRMAN NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY; TRUSTEE AMERICAN
MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY; COUNCILLOR AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY;
AUTHOR OF "THE PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE"
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_All rights reserved_
Published April, 1920
Reprinted June, July, September, October, 1920;
February, 1921
PREFACE
More than a decade ago I became convinced that the key-note of
twentieth-century world-politics would be the relations between the
primary races of mankind. Momentous modifications of existing
race-relations were evidently impending, and nothing could be more vital
to the course of human evolution than the character of these
modifications, since upon the _quality_ of human life all else depends.
Accordingly, my attention was thenceforth largely directed to racial
matters. In the preface to an historical monograph ("The French Revolution
in San Domingo") written shortly before the Great War, I stated: "The
world-wide struggle between the primary races of mankind--the 'conflict of
color,' as it has been happily termed--bids fair to be the fundamental
problem of the twentieth century, and great communities like the United
States of America, the South African Confederation, and Australasia regard
the 'color question' as perhaps the gravest problem of the future."
Those lines were penned in June, 1914. Before their publication the Great
War had burst upon the world. At that time several reviewers commented
upon the above dictum and wondered whether, had I written two months
later, I should have held a different opinion.
As a matter of fact, I should have expressed myself even more strongly to
the same effect. To me the Great War was from the first the White Civil
War, which, whatever its outcome, must gravely complicate the course of
racial relations.
Before the war I had hoped that the readjustments rendered inevitable by
the renascence of the brown and yellow peoples of Asia would be a gradual,
and in the main a pacific, process, kept within evolutionary bounds by the
white world's inherent strength and fundamental solidarity. The frightful
weakening of the white world during the war, however, opened up
revolutionary, even cataclysmic, possibilities.
In saying this I do not refer solely to military "perils." The subjugation
of white lands by colored armies may, of course, occur, especially if the
white world continues to rend itself with internecine wars. However, such
colored triumphs of arms are less to be dreaded than more enduring
conquests like migrations which would swamp whole populations and turn
countries now white into colored man's lands irretrievably lost to the
white world. Of course, these ominous possibilities existed even before
1914, but the war has rendered them much more probable.
The most disquieting feature of the present situation, however, is not the
war but the peace. The white world's inability to frame a constructive
settlement, the perpetuation of intestine hatreds, and the menace of fresh
white civil wars complicated by the spectre of social revolution, evoke
the dread thought that the late war may be merely the first stage in a
cycle of ruin.
In fact, so absorbed is the white world with its domestic dissensions that
it pays scant heed to racial problems whose importance for the future of
mankind far transcends the questions which engross its attention to-day.
This relative indifference to the larger racial issues has determined the
writing of the present book. So fundamental are these issues that a candid
discussion of them would seem to be timely and helpful.
In the following pages I have tried to analyze in their various aspects
the present relations between the white and non-white worlds. My task has
been greatly aided by the Introduction from the pen of Madison Grant, who
has admirably summarized the biological and historical background. A
life-long student of biology, Mr. Grant approaches the subject along that
line. My own avenue of approach being world-politics, the resulting
convergence of different view-points has been a most useful one.
For the stimulating counsel of Mr. Grant in the preparation of this book
my thanks are especially due. I desire also to acknowledge my indebtedness
for helpful suggestions to Messrs. Alleyne Ireland, Glenn Frank, and other
friends.
LOTHROP STODDARD.
NEW YORK CITY,
February 28, 1920.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY MADISON GRANT xi
PART I
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
CHAPTER
I. THE WORLD OF COLOR 3
II. YELLOW MAN'S LAND 17
III. BROWN MAN'S LAND 54
IV. BLACK MAN'S LAND 87
V. RED MAN'S LAND 104
PART II
THE EBBING TIDE OF WHITE
VI. THE WHITE FLOOD 145
VII. THE BEGINNING OF THE EBB 154
VIII. THE MODERN PELOPONNESIAN WAR 173
IX. THE SHATTERING OF WHITE SOLIDARITY 198
PART III
THE DELUGE ON THE DIKES
X. THE OUTER DIKES 225
XI. THE INNER DIKES 236
XII. THE CRISIS OF THE AGES 299
INDEX 311
MAPS
PAGE
I DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIMARY RACES 14
II CATEGORIES OF WHITE WORLD-SUPREMACY 150
III DISTRIBUTION OF THE WHITE RACES 228
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of Color," following so closely
the Great War, may appear to some unduly alarming, while others, as his
thread of argument unrolls, may recoil at the logic of his deductions.
In our present era of convulsive changes, a prophet must be bold, indeed,
to predict anything more definite than a mere trend in events, but the
study of the past is the one safe guide in forecasting the future.
Mr. Stoddard takes up the white man's world and its potential enemies as
they are to-day. A consideration of their early relations and of the
history of the Nordic race, since its first appearance three or four
thousand years ago, tends strongly to sustain and justify his conclusions.
For such a consideration we must first turn to the map, or, better, to the
globe.
Viewed in the light of geography and zoology, Europe west of Russia is but
a peninsula of Asia with the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea
included. True Africa, or rather Ethiopia, lies south of the Sahara Desert
and has virtually no connection with the North except along the valley of
the Nile.
This Eurasiatic continent has been, perhaps, since the origin of life
itself, the most active centre of evolution and radiation of the higher
forms.
Confining ourselves to the mammalian orders, we find that a majority of
them have originated and developed there and have spread thence to the
outlying land areas of the globe. All the evidence points to the origin of
the Primates in Eurasia and we have every reason to believe that this
continent was also the scene of the early evolution of man from his
anthropoid ancestors.
The impulse that inaugurated the development of mankind seems to have had
its basic cause in the stress of changing climatic conditions in central
Asia at the close of the Pliocene, and the human inhabitants of Eurasia
have ever since exhibited in a superlative degree the energy developed at
that time. This energy, however, has not been equally shared by the
various species of man, either extinct or living, and the survivors of the
earlier races are, for the most part, to be found on the other continents
and islands or in the extreme outlying regions of Eurasia itself.
In other words those groups of mankind which at an early period found
refuge in the Americas, in Australia, in Ethiopia, or in the islands of
the sea, represent to a large extent stages in man's physical and cultural
development, from which the more energized inhabitants of Eurasia have
long since emerged. In some cases, as in Mexico and Peru, the outlying
races developed in their isolation a limited culture of their own, but,
for the most part, they have exhibited, and continue to this day to
exhibit, a lack of capacity for sustained evolution from within as well as
a lack of capacity to adjust themselves of their own initiative to the
rapid changes which modern times impose upon them from without.
In Eurasia itself this same inequality of potential capacity is found, but
in a lesser degree, and consequently, in the progress of humanity, there
has been constant friction between those who push forward and those who
are unable to keep pace with changing conditions.
Owing to these causes the history of mankind has been that of a series of
impulses from the Eurasiatic continent upon the outlying regions of the
globe, but there has been an almost complete lack of reaction, either
racial or cultural, from them upon the masses of mankind in Eurasia
itself. There have been endless conflicts between the different sections
of Eurasia, but neither Amerinds, nor Austroloids, nor Negroes, have ever
made a concerted attack upon the great continent.
* * * * *
Without attempting a scientific classification of the inhabitants of
Eurasia, it is sufficient to describe the three main races. The first are
the yellow-skinned, straight black-haired, black-eyed, round-skulled
Mongols and Mongoloids massed in central and eastern Asia north of the
Himalayan system.
To the west of them, and merged with them, lie the Alpines, also
characterized by dark, but not straight, hair, dark eyes, relatively
short stature, and round skulls. These Alpines are thrust like a wedge
into Europe between the Nordics and the Mediterraneans, with a tip that
reaches the Atlantic Ocean. Those of western Europe are derived from one
or more very ancient waves of round-skulled invaders from the East, who
probably came by way of Asia Minor and the Balkans, but they have been so
long in their present homes that they retain little except their
brachycephalic skull-shape to connect them with the Asiatic Mongols.
South of the Himalayas and westward in a narrow belt to the Atlantic, and
on both sides of the Inland Sea, lies the Mediterranean race, more or less
swarthy-skinned, black-haired, dark-eyed, and long-skulled.
On the northwest, grouped around the Baltic and North Seas, lies the great
Nordic race. It is characterized by a fair white skin, wavy hair with a
range of color from dark brown to flaxen, light eyes, tall stature, and
long skulls.
These races show other physical characters which are definite but
difficult to describe, such as texture of skin and cast of features,
especially of the nose. The contrast of mental and spiritual endowments is
equally definite, but even more elusive of definition.
It is with the action and interaction of these three groups, together with
internal civil wars, that recorded history deals.
While, so far as we know, these three races have occupied their present
relative positions from the beginning, there have been profound changes
in their distribution.
The two essential phenomena, however, are, first, the retreat of the
Nordic race westward from the Grasslands of western Asia and eastern
Europe to the borders of the Atlantic, until it occupies a relatively
small area on the periphery of Eurasia.
The second phenomenon is of equal importance, namely, the more or less
thorough Nordicizing of the westernmost extensions of the other two races,
namely, the Mediterranean on the north coast of the Inland Sea, who have
been completely Aryanized in speech, and have been again and again
saturated with Nordic blood, and the even more profound Nordicization in
speech and in blood of the short, dark, round-skulled inhabitants of
central Europe, from Brittany through central France, southern Germany,
and northern Italy into Austrian and Balkan lands. So thorough has been
this process that the western Alpines have at the present time no separate
race consciousness and are to be considered as wholly European.
As to the Alpines of eastern and central Europe, the Slavs, the case is
somewhat different. East of a line drawn from the Adriatic to the Baltic
the Nordicizing process has been far less perfect, although nearly
complete as to speech, since all the Slavic languages are Aryan.
Throughout these Slavic lands, great accessions of pure Mongoloid blood
have been introduced within relatively recent centuries.
East of this belt of imperfectly Nordicized Alpines we reach the Asiatic
Alpines, as yet entirely untouched by western blood or culture. These
groups merge into the Mongoloids of eastern Asia.
So we find, thrust westward from the Heartland, a race touching the
Atlantic at Brittany, thoroughly Asiatic and Mongoloid in the east, very
imperfectly Nordicized in the centre, and thoroughly Nordicized culturally
in the far west of Europe, where it has become, and must be accepted as,
an integral part of the White World.
As to the great Nordic race, within relatively recent historic times it
occupied the Grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas eastward to
the Himalayas. Traces of Nordic peoples in central Asia are constantly
found, and when archaeological research there becomes as intensive as in
Europe we shall be astonished to find how long, complete, and extended was
their occupation of western Asia.
During the second millennium before our era successive waves of Nordics
began to cross the Afghan passes into India until finally they imposed
their primitive Aryan language upon Hindustan and the countries lying to
the east.
All those regions lying northwest of the mountains appear to have been
largely a white man's country at the time of Alexander the Great. In
Turkestan the newly discovered Tokharian language, an Aryan tongue of the
western division, seems to have persisted down to the ninth century. The
decline of the Nordics in these lands, however, began probably far
earlier than Alexander's time, and must have been nearly completed at the
beginning of our era. Such blond traits as are still found in western Asia
are relatively unimportant, and for the last two thousand years these
countries must be regarded as lost to the Nordic race.
The impulse that drove the early Nordics like a fan over the Himalayan
passes into India, the later Nordics southward into Mesopotamian lands, as
Kassites, Mitanni, and Persians, into Greece and Anatolia as Achaeans,
Dorians, and Phrygians, westward as the Aryan-speaking invaders of Italy
and as the Celtic vanguards of the Nordic race across the Rhine into Gaul,
Spain, and Britain, may well have been caused by Mongoloid pressure from
the heart of central Asia. Of course, we have no actual knowledge of this,
but the analogy to the history of later migrations is strong, and the
conviction is growing among historians that the impulse that drove the
Hellenic Nordics upon the early AEgean culture world was the same as that
which later drove Germanic Nordics into the Roman Empire.
North of the Caspian and Black Seas the boundaries of Europe receded
steadily before Asia for nearly a thousand years after our era opened, but
we have scant record of the struggles which resulted in the eviction of
the Nordics from their homes in Russia, Poland, the Austrian and east
German lands.
By the time of Charlemagne the White Man's world was reduced to
Scandinavia, Germany west of the Elbe, the British Isles, the Low
Countries, and northern France and Italy, with outlying groups in southern
France and Spain. This was the lowest ebb for the Nordics and it was the
crowning glory of Charlemagne's career that he not only turned back the
flood, but began the organization of a series of more or less Nordicized
marches or barrier states from the Baltic to the Adriatic, which have
served as ramparts against Asiatic pressure from his day to ours. West of
this line the feudal states of mediaeval Europe developed into western
Christendom, the nucleus of the civilized world of to-day.
South of the Caspian and Black Seas, after the first swarming of the
Nordics over the mountains during the second millennium before Christ, the
East pressed steadily against Europe until the strain culminated in the
Persian Wars. The defeat of Asia in these wars resulted later in
Alexander's conquest of western Asia to the borders of India.
Alexander's empire temporarily established Hellenic institutions
throughout western Asia and some of the provinces remained superficially
Greek until they were incorporated in the Roman Empire and ultimately
became part of early Christendom. On the whole, however, from the time of
Alexander the elimination of European blood, classic culture, and,
finally, of Christianity, went on relentlessly.
By later Roman times the Aryan language of the Persians, Parthians, and
people of India together with some shreds of Greek learning were about all
the traces of Europe that were to be found east of the oscillating
boundary along the Euphrates.
The Roman and Byzantine Empires struggled for centuries to check the
advancing tide of Asiatics, but Arab expansions under the impulse of the
Mohammedan religion finally tore away all the eastern and southern coasts
of the Mediterranean Sea, while from an Arabized Spain they threatened
western Europe. With the White Man's world thus rapidly receding in the
south, a series of pure Mongol invasions from central Asia, sweeping north
of the Caspian and Black Seas, burst upon central Europe. Attila and his
Huns were the first to break through into Nordic lands as far as the
plains of northern France. None of the later hordes were able to force
their way so far into Nordic territories, but spent their strength upon
the Alpines of the Balkans and eastern Europe.
Eastern Germany, the Austrian states, Poland, and Russia had been Nordic
lands before the Slavs emerged after the fall of Rome. Whether the
occupation of Teutonic lands by the Wends and Slavs in eastern Europe was
an infiltration or a conquest is not known, but the conviction is growing
that, like other movements which preceded and followed, it was caused by
Mongoloid pressure.
That the western Slavs or Wends had been long Nordicized in speech is
indicated by the thoroughly Aryan character of the Slavic languages. They
found in the lands they occupied an underlying Teutonic population. They
cannot be regarded as the original owners of Poland, Bohemia, Silesia, or
other Wendish provinces of eastern Germany and Austria. The Teutonic
Marcomanni and Quadi were in Bohemia long before the Czechs came in
through the Moravian Gate in the sixth century. Pomerania and the Prussias
were the home of Teutonic Lombards, Burgunds, Vandals, and Suevi, while
the Crimea and the northwestern coast of the Black Sea were long held by
the Nordic Goths, who, just before our era, had migrated overland from the
Baltic by way of the Vistula.
No doubt some of this Nordic blood remained to ennoble the stock of the
later invaders, but by the time of Charlemagne, in the greater part of
Europe east of the Elbe, the Aryan language was the only bond with Europe.
When the Frankish Empire turned the tide and Christianized these Wendish
and Polish lands, civilization was carried eastward until it met the
Byzantine influences which brought to Russia and the lands east of the
Carpathians the culture and Orthodox Christianity of the Eastern or Greek
Empire.
The nucleus of Russia was organized in the ninth century by Scandinavian
Varangians, the Franks of the East, who founded the first civilized state
amid a welter of semi-Mongoloid tribes. How much Nordic blood they found
in the territories which afterward became Russia we have no means of
knowing, but it must have been considerable because we do know that from
the Middle Ages to the present time there has been a progressive increase
in brachycephaly or broad-headedness, to judge from the rise in the
percentage of round skulls found in the cemeteries of Moscow and elsewhere
in Russia.
Such was the condition of eastern Europe when a new and terrible series of
Mongoloid invasions swept over it, this time directly from the centre of
Asia.
The effect of these invasions was so profound and lasting that it may be
well to consider briefly the condition of eastern Europe after the
elimination of the Nordics and its partial occupation by the so-called
Slavs. Beginning with Attila and his Huns, in the fourth century, there
was a series of purely Mongoloid tribes entering from Asia in wave after
wave.
Similar waves ultimately passed south of the Black and Caspian Seas, and
were called Turks, but these were long held back by the power of the
Byzantine Empire, to which history has done scant justice.
In the north these invaders, called in the later days Tatars, but all
essentially of central Asiatic Mongol stock, occupied Balkan lands after
the expansion of the south Slavs in those countries. They are known by
various names, but they are all part of the same general movement,
although there was a gradual slowing down of the impulse. Prior to Jenghiz
Khan the later hordes did not reach quite as far west as the earlier ones.
The first wave, Attila's Huns, were followed during the succeeding
centuries by the Avars, the Bulgars, the Hunagar Magyars, the Patzinaks
and the Cumans. All of these tribes forced their way over the Carpathians
and the Danube, and much of their blood, notably in that of the Bulgars
and Magyars, is still to be found there. Most of them adopted Slavic
dialects and merged in the surrounding population, but the Magyars retain
their Asiatic speech to this day.
Other Tatar and Mongoloid tribes settled in southern and eastern Russia.
Chief among these were the Mongol Chazars, who founded an extensive and
powerful empire in southern and southeastern Russia as early as the eighth
century. It is interesting to note that they accepted Judaism and became
the ancestors of the majority of the Jews of eastern Europe, the
round-skulled Ashkenazim.
Into this mixed population of Christianized Slavs and more or less
Christianized and Slavized Mongols burst Jenghiz Khan with his great
hordes of pure Mongols. All southern Russia, Poland, and Hungary collapsed
before them, and in southern Russia the rule of the Mongol persisted for
centuries, in fact the Golden Horde of Tatars retained control of the
Crimea down to 1783.
Many of these later Tatars had accepted Islam, but entire groups of them
have retained their Asiatic speech and to this day profess the Mohammedan
religion.
The most lasting result of these Mongol invasions was that southern Poland
and all the countries east and north of the Carpathians, including Rumania
and the Ukraine, were saturated anew with Tatar blood, and, in dealing
with these populations and with the new nations founded among them, this
fact must not be forgotten.
The conflict between the East and the West--Europe and Asia--has thus
lasted for centuries, in fact it goes back to the Persian Wars and the
long and doubtful duel between Rome and Parthia along the eastern boundary
of Syria. As we have already said, the Saracens had torn away many of the
provinces of the Eastern Empire, and the Crusades, for a moment, had
rolled back the East, but the event was not decided until the Seljukian
and Osmanli Turks accepted Islam.
If these Turks had remained heathen they might have invaded and conquered
Asia Minor and the Balkan States, just as their cousins, the Tartars, had
subjected vast territories north of the Black Sea, but they could not have
held their conquests permanently unless they had been able to incorporate
the beaten natives into their own ranks through the proselytizing power of
Islam.
Even in Roman times the Greek world had been steadily losing, first its
Nordic blood and then later the blood of its Nordicized European
population, and it became in its declining years increasingly Asiatic
until the final fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium once fallen, the Turks advanced unchecked, conquering the Alpine
Slav kingdoms of the Balkans and menacing Christendom itself.
In these age-long conflicts between Asia and Europe the Crusades seem but
an episode, although tragically wasteful of Nordic stock. The Nordic
Frankish nobility of western Europe squandered its blood for two hundred
years on the desert sands of Syria and left no ethnic trace behind, save,
perhaps, some doubtful blond remnants in northern Syria and Edessa.
If the predictions of Mr. Stoddard's book seem far-fetched, one has but to
consider that four times since the fall of Rome Asia has conquered to the
very confines of Nordic Europe. The Nordicized Alpines of eastern Europe
and the Nordicized Mediterraneans of southern Europe have proved too
feeble to hold back the Asiatic hordes, Mongol or Saracen. It was not
until the realms of pure Nordics were reached that the invaders were
turned back. This is shown by the fact that the Arabs had quickly mastered
northern Africa and conquered Spain, where the Nordic Goths were too few
in number to hold them back, while southern France, which was not then,
and is not now, a Nordic land, had offered no serious resistance. It was
not until the Arabs, in 732, at Tours, dashed themselves to pieces against
the solid ranks of heavy-armed Nordics, that Islam receded.
The same fate had already been encountered by Attila and his Huns, who,
after dominating Hungary and southern Germany and destroying the
Burgundians on the Rhine, had pushed into northern France as far as
Chalons. Here, in 376, he was beaten, not by the Romanized Gauls but by
the Nordic Visigoths, whose king, Roderick, died on the field. These two
victories, one against the Arab south and the other over the Mongoloid
east, saved Nordic Europe, which was at that time shrunken to little more
than a fringe on the seacoast.
How slender the thread and how easily snapped, had the event of either day
turned out otherwise! Never again did Asia push so far west, but the
danger was not finally removed until Charlemagne and his successors had
organized the Western Empire.
Christendom, however, had sore trials ahead when the successors of Jenghiz
Khan destroyed Moscovy and Poland and devastated eastern Europe. The
victorious career of the Tatars was unchecked, from the Chinese Sea on the
east to the Indian Ocean on the south, until in 1241, at Wahlstatt in
Silesia, they encountered pure Nordic fighting men. Then the tide turned.
Though outnumbering the Christians five to one and victorious in the
battle itself, the Tatars were unable to push farther west and turned
south into Hungary and other Alpine lands.
Some conception of the almost unbelievable horrors that western Europe
escaped at this time may be gathered from the fate of the countries which
fell before the irresistible rush of the Mongols, whose sole discernible
motive seems to have been blood lust. The destruction wrought in China,
central Asia, and Persia is almost beyond conception. In twelve years, in
China and the neighboring states, Jenghiz Khan and his lieutenants
slaughtered more than 18,500,000 human beings. After the sack of Merv in
Khorasan, the "Garden of Asia," the corpses numbered 1,300,000, and after
Herat was taken 1,600,000 are said to have perished. Similar fates befell
every city of importance in central Asia, and to this day those once
populous provinces have never recovered. The cities of Russia and Poland
were burned, their inhabitants tortured and massacred, with the
consequence that progress was retarded for centuries.
Almost in modern times these same Mongoloid invaders, entering by way of
Asia Minor, and calling themselves Turks, after destroying the Eastern
Empire, the Balkan States, and Hungary, again met the Nordic chivalry of
western Europe under the walls of Vienna, in 1683, and again the Asiatics
went down in rout.
On these four separate occasions the Nordic race and it alone saved modern
civilization. The half-Nordicized lands to the south and to the east
collapsed under the invasions.
Unnumbered Nordic tribes, nameless and unsung, have been massacred, or
submerged, or driven from their lands. The survivors had been pushed ever
westward until their backs were against the Northern Ocean. There the
Nordics came to bay--the tide was turned. Few stop to reflect that it was
more than sixty years after the first American legislature sat at
Jamestown, Virginia, that Asia finally abandoned the conquest of Europe.
One of the chief results of forcing the Nordic race back to the seacoast
was the creation of maritime power and its development to a degree never
before known even in the days of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians.
With the recession of the Turkish flood, modern Europe emerges and
inaugurates a counter-attack on Asia which has placed virtually the entire
world under European domination.
* * * * *
While in the mediaeval conflicts between Europe and Asia the latter was the
aggressor, the case was otherwise in the early wars between the Nordic and
the Mediterranean peoples. Here for three thousand years the Nordics were
the aggressors, and, although these wars were terribly destructive to
their numbers, they were the medium through which classic civilization was
introduced into Nordic lands. As to the ethnic consequences, northern
barbarians poured over the passes of the Balkans, Alpines, and Pyrenees
into the sunny lands of the south only to slowly vanish in the languid
environment which lacked the stimulus of fierce strife with hostile nature
and savage rivals.
Nevertheless, long before the opening of the Christian era the Alpines of
western Europe were thoroughly Nordicized, and in the centuries that
followed, the old Nordic element in Spain, Italy, and France has been
again and again strongly reinforced, so that these lands are now an
integral part of the White World.
In recent centuries Russia was again superficially Nordicized with a top
dressing of Nordic nobility, chiefly coming from the Baltic provinces.
Along with this process there was everywhere in Europe a resurgence among
the submerged and forgotten Alpines and among the Mediterranean elements
of the British Isles, while Bolshevism in Russia means the elimination of
the Nordic aristocracy and the dominance of the half-Asiatic Slavic
peasantry.
* * * * *
All wars thus far discussed have been race wars of Europe against Asia, or
of the Nordics against Mediterraneans. The wars against the Mongols were
necessary and vital; there was no alternative except to fight to the
finish. But the wars of northern Europe against the south, from the racial
point of view, were not only useless but destructive. Bad as they were,
however, they left untouched to a large extent the broodland of the race
in the north and west.
Another class of wars, however, has been absolutely deadly to the Nordic
race. There must have been countless early struggles where one Nordic
tribe attacked and exterminated its rival, such as the Trojan War, fought
between Achaeans and Phrygians, both Nordics, while the later Peloponnesian
War was a purely civil strife between Greeks and resulted in the racial
collapse of Hellas.
Rome, after she emerged triumphant from her struggle with the
Carthaginians, of Mediterranean race, plunged into a series of civil wars
which ended in the complete elimination of the native Nordic element in
Rome. Her conquests also were destructive to the Nordic race; particularly
so was that of Caesar in Gaul, one of the few exceptional cases where the
north was permanently conquered by the south. The losses of that ten-year
conquest fell far more heavily upon the Nordic Celts in Gaul and Britain
than on the servile strata of the population.
In the same way the Saxon conquest of England destroyed the Nordic
Brythons to a greater degree than the pre-Nordic Neolithic Mediterranean
element. From that time on all the wars of Europe, other than those
against the Asiatics and Saracens, were essentially civil wars fought
between peoples or leaders of Nordic blood.
Mediaeval Europe was one long welter of Nordic immolation until the Wars of
the Roses in England, the Hundred Years' War in the Lowlands, the
religious, revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars in France, and the ghastly
Thirty Years' War in Germany dangerously depleted the ruling Nordic race
and paved the way for the emergence from obscurity of the servile races
which for ages had been dominated by them.
To what extent the present war has fostered this tendency, time alone will
show, but Mr. Stoddard has pointed out some of the immediate and visible
results. The backbone of western civilization is racially Nordic, the
Alpines and Mediterraneans being effective precisely to the extent in
which they have been Nordicized and vitalized.
If this great race, with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should
ultimately pass, with it would pass that which we call civilization. It
would be succeeded by an unstable and bastardized population, where worth
and merit would have no inherent right to leadership and among which a
new and darker age would blot out our racial inheritance.
Such a catastrophe cannot threaten if the Nordic race will gather itself
together in time, shake off the shackles of an inveterate altruism,
discard the vain phantom of internationalism, and reassert the pride of
race and the right of merit to rule.
The Nordic race has been driven from many of its lands, but still grasps
firmly the control of the world, and it is certainly not at a greater
numerical disadvantage than often before in contrast to the teeming
population of eastern Asia.
It has repeatedly been confronted with crises where the accident of
battle, or the genius of a leader, saved a well-nigh hopeless day. It has
survived defeat, it has survived the greater danger of victory, and, if it
takes warning in time, it may face the future with assurance. Fight it
must, but let that fight be not a civil war against its own blood kindred
but against the dangerous foreign races, whether they advance sword in
hand or in the more insidious guise of beggars at our gates, pleading for
admittance to share our prosperity. If we continue to allow them to enter
they will in time drive us out of our own land by mere force of breeding.
The great hope of the future here in America lies in the realization of
the working class that competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal,
whether the latter be the lowly immigrant from southern or eastern Europe
or whether he be the more obviously dangerous Oriental against whose
standards of living the white man cannot compete. In this country we must
look to such of our people--our farmers and artisans--as are still of
American blood to recognize and meet this danger.
Our present condition is the result of following the leadership of
idealists and philanthropic doctrinaires, aided and abetted by the
perfectly understandable demand of our captains of industry for cheap
labor.
To-day the need for statesmanship is great, and greater still is the need
for thorough knowledge of history. All over the world the first has been
lacking, and in the passions of the Great War the lessons of the past have
been forgotten both here and in Europe.
The establishment of a chain of Alpine states from the Baltic to the
Adriatic, as a sequel to the war, all of them organized at the expense of
the Nordic ruling classes, may bring Europe back to the days when
Charlemagne, marching from the Rhine to the Elbe, found the valley of that
river inhabited by heathen Wends. Beyond lay Asia, and his successors
spent a thousand years pushing eastward the frontiers of Europe.
Now that Asia, in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and
Chinese executioners, is organizing an assault upon western Europe, the
new states--Slavic-Alpine in race, with little Nordic blood--may prove to
be not frontier guards of western Europe but vanguards of Asia in central
Europe. None of the earlier Alpine states have held firm against Asia, and
it is more than doubtful whether Poland, Bohemia, Rumania, Hungary, and
Jugo-Slavia can face the danger successfully, now that they have been
deprived of the Nordic ruling classes through democratic institutions.
Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in
England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white
man to share his blood with, or intrust his ideals to, brown, yellow,
black, or red men.
This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing
folly will be the white man himself.
MADISON GRANT.
NEW YORK, March 1, 1920.
_PART I_
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD OF COLOR
The man who, on a quiet spring evening of the year 1914, opened his atlas
to a political map of the world and pored over its many-tinted patterns
probably got one fundamental impression: the overwhelming preponderance of
the white race in the ordering of the world's affairs. Judged by accepted
canons of statecraft, the white man towered the indisputable master of the
planet. Forth from Europe's teeming mother-hive the imperious Sons of
Japhet had swarmed for centuries to plant their laws, their customs, and
their battle-flags at the uttermost ends of the earth. Two whole
continents, North America and Australia, had been made virtually as white
in blood as the European motherland; two other continents, South America
and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while even
huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the
white man's abode. Even where white populations had not locked themselves
to the soil few regions of the earth had escaped the white man's imperial
sway, and vast areas inhabited by uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed
the white man's will.
Beside the enormous area of white settlement or control, the regions under
non-white governance bulked small indeed. In eastern Asia, China, Japan,
and Siam; in western Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia; in Africa,
Abyssinia, and Liberia; and in America the minute state of Haiti: such was
the brief list of lands under non-white rule. In other words, of the
53,000,000 square miles which (excluding the polar regions) constitute the
land area of the globe, only 6,000,000 square miles had non-white
governments, and nearly two-thirds of this relatively modest remainder was
represented by China and its dependencies.
Since 1914 the world has been convulsed by the most terrible war in
recorded history. This war was primarily a struggle between the white
peoples, who have borne the brunt of the conflict and have suffered most
of the losses. Nevertheless, one of the war's results has been a further
whittling down of the areas standing outside white political control.
Turkey is to-day practically an Anglo-French condominium, Persia is
virtually a protectorate of the British Empire, while the United States
has thrown over the endemic anarchy of Haiti the aegis of the _Pax
Americana_. Study of the political map might thus apparently lead one to
conclude that white world-predominance is immutable, since the war's
ordeal has still further broadened the territorial basis of its authority.
At this point the reader is perhaps asking himself why this book was ever
undertaken. The answer is: the dangerous delusion created by viewing world
affairs solely from the angle of politics. The late war has taught many
lessons as to the unstable and transitory character of even the most
imposing political phenomena, while a better reading of history must bring
home the truth that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics, but
race. The reader has already encountered this fundamental truth on every
page of the Introduction. He will remember, for instance, how west-central
Asia, which in the dawn of history was predominantly white man's country,
is to-day racially brown man's land in which white blood survives only as
vestigial traces of vanishing significance. If this portion of Asia, the
former seat of mighty white empires and possibly the very homeland of the
white race itself, should have so entirely changed its ethnic character,
what assurance can the most impressive political panorama give us that the
present world-order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?
The force of this query is exemplified when we turn from the political to
the racial map of the globe. What a transformation! Instead of a world
politically nine-tenths white, we see a world of which only four-tenths at
the most can be considered predominantly white in blood, the rest of the
world being inhabited mainly by the other primary races of
mankind--yellows, browns, blacks, and reds. Speaking by continents,
Europe, North America to the Rio Grande, the southern portion of South
America, the Siberian part of Asia, and Australasia constitute the real
white world; while the bulk of Asia, virtually the whole of Africa, and
most of Central and South America form the world of color. The respective
areas of these two racially contrasted worlds are 22,000,000 square miles
for the whites and 31,000,000 square miles for the colored races.
Furthermore it must be remembered that fully one-third of the white area
(notably Australasia and Siberia) is very thinly inhabited and is thus
held by a very slender racial tenure--the only tenure which counts in the
long run.
The statistical disproportion between the white and colored worlds becomes
still more marked when we turn from surveys of area to tables of
population. The total number of human beings alive to-day is about
1,700,000,000. Of these 550,000,000 are white, while 1,150,000,000 are
colored. The colored races thus outnumber the whites more than two to one.
Another fact of capital importance is that the great bulk of the white
race is concentrated in the European continent. In 1914 the population of
Europe was approximately 450,000,000. The late war has undoubtedly caused
an absolute decrease of many millions of souls. Nevertheless, the basic
fact remains that some four-fifths of the entire white race is
concentrated on less than one-fifth of the white world's territorial area
(Europe), while the remaining one-fifth of the race (some 110,000,000
souls), scattered to the ends of the earth, must protect four-fifths of
the white territorial heritage against the pressure of colored races
eleven times its numerical strength.
As to the 1,150,000,000 of the colored world, they are divided, as already
stated, into four primary categories: yellows, browns, blacks, and reds.
The yellows are the most numerous of the colored races, numbering over
500,000,000. Their habitat is eastern Asia. Nearly as numerous and much
more wide-spread than the yellows are the browns, numbering some
450,000,000. The browns spread in a broad belt from the Pacific Ocean
westward across southern Asia and northern Africa to the Atlantic Ocean.
The blacks total about 150,000,000. Their centre is Africa south of the
Sahara Desert, but besides the African continent there are vestigial black
traces across southern Asia to the Pacific and also strong black outposts
in the Americas. Least numerous of the colored race-stocks are the
reds--the "Indians" of the western hemisphere. Mustering a total of less
than 40,000,000, the reds are almost all located south of the Rio Grande
in "Latin America."
Such is the ethnic make-up of that world of color which, as already seen,
outnumbers the white world two to one. That is a formidable ratio, and its
significance is heightened by the fact that this ratio seems destined to
shift still further in favor of color. There can be no doubt that at
present the colored races are increasing very much faster than the white.
Treating the primary race-stocks as units, it would appear that whites
tend to double in eighty years, yellows and browns in sixty years, blacks
in forty years. The whites are thus the slowest breeders, and they will
undoubtedly become slower still, since section after section of the white
race is revealing that lowered birth-rate which in France has reached the
extreme of a stationary population.
On the other hand, none of the colored races shows perceptible signs of
declining birth-rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available
subsistence. Such checks as now limit the increase of colored populations
are wholly external, like famine, disease, and tribal warfare. But by a
curious irony of fate, the white man has long been busy removing these
checks to colored multiplication. The greater part of the colored world is
to-day under white political control. Wherever the white man goes he
attempts to impose the bases of his ordered civilization. He puts down
tribal war, he wages truceless combat against epidemic disease, and he so
improves communications that augmented and better distributed
food-supplies minimize the blight of famine. In response to these
life-saving activities the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept
the colored races from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions
comparable with the death-rate of white countries. But to lower the
colored world's prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. The
consequence is a portentous increase of population in nearly every portion
of the colored world now under white political sway. In fact, even those
colored countries which have maintained their independence, such as China
and Japan, are adopting the white man's life-conserving methods and are
experiencing the same accelerated increase of population.
Now what must be the inevitable result of all this? It can mean only one
thing: a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus
colored men from overcrowded colored homelands. Remember that these
homelands are already populated up to the available limits of subsistence.
Of course present limits can in many cases be pushed back by better living
conditions, improved agriculture, and the rise of modern machine industry
such as is already under way in Japan. Nevertheless, in view of the
tremendous population increases which must occur, these can be only
palliatives. Where, then, should the congested colored world tend to pour
its accumulating human surplus, inexorably condemned to emigrate or
starve? The answer is: into those emptier regions of the earth under white
political control. But many of these relatively empty lands have been
definitely set aside by the white man as his own special heritage. The
upshot is that the rising flood of color finds itself walled in by white
dikes debarring it from many a promised land which it would fain deluge
with its dusky waves.
Thus the colored world, long restive under white political domination, is
being welded by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of
self-preservation, into a common solidarity of feeling against the
dominant white man, and in the fire of a common purpose internecine
differences tend, for the time at least, to be burned away. Before the
supreme fact of white political world-domination, antipathies within the
colored world must inevitably recede into the background.
The imperious urge of the colored world toward racial expansion was well
visualized by that keen English student of world affairs, Doctor E. J.
Dillon, when he wrote more than a decade ago: "The problem is one of life
and death--a veritable sphinx-question--to those most nearly concerned.
For, no race, however inferior it may be, will consent to famish slowly in
order that other people may fatten and take their ease, especially if it
has a good chance to make a fight for life."[1]
This white statement of the colored thesis is an accurate reflection of
what colored men say themselves. For example, a Japanese scholar,
Professor Ryutaro Nagai, writes: "The world was not made for the white
races, but for the other races as well. In Australia, South Africa,
Canada, and the United States, there are vast tracts of unoccupied
territory awaiting settlement, and although the citizens of the ruling
Powers refuse to take up the land, no yellow people are permitted to
enter. Thus the white races seem ready to commit to the savage birds and
beasts what they refuse to intrust to their brethren of the yellow race.
Surely the arrogance and avarice of the nobility in apportioning to
themselves the most and the best of the land in certain countries is as
nothing compared with the attitude of the white races toward those of a
different hue."[2]
The bitter resentment of white predominance and exclusiveness awakened in
many colored breasts is typified by the following lines penned by a brown
man, a British-educated Afghan, shortly before the European War.
Inveighing against our "racial prejudice, that cowardly, wretched
caste-mark of the European and the American the world over," he exultantly
predicts "a coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and
America. You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia
Holy War, a gigantic day of reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and
Tamerlane--who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears.
You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be
taught with the whirring swish of the sword when it is red."[3]
Of course in these statements there is nothing either exceptional or
novel. The colored races never welcomed white predominance and were always
restive under white control. Down to the close of the nineteenth century,
however, they generally accepted white hegemony as a disagreeable but
inevitable fact. For four hundred years the white man had added continent
to continent in his imperial progress, equipped with resistless sea-power
and armed with a mechanical superiority that crushed down all local
efforts at resistance. In time, therefore, the colored races accorded to
white supremacy a fatalistic acquiescence, and, though never loved, the
white man was usually respected and universally feared.
During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, to be sure,
premonitory signs of a change in attitude began to appear. The yellow and
brown races, at least, stirred by the very impact of Western ideas,
measured the white man with a more critical eye and commenced to wonder
whether his superiority was due to anything more than a fortuitous
combination of circumstances which might be altered by efforts of their
own. Japan put this theory to the test by going sedulously to the white
man's school. The upshot was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, an event the
momentous character of which is even now not fully appreciated. Of course,
that war was merely the sign-manual of a whole nexus of forces making for
a revivified Asia. But it dramatized and clarified ideas which had been
germinating half-unconsciously in millions of colored minds, and both Asia
and Africa thrilled with joy and hope. Above all, the legend of white
invincibility lay, a fallen idol, in the dust. Nevertheless, though freed
from imaginary terrors, the colored world accurately gauged the white
man's practical strength and appreciated the magnitude of the task
involved in overthrowing white supremacy. That supremacy was no longer
acquiesced in as inevitable and hopes of ultimate success were confidently
entertained, but the process was usually conceived as a slow and difficult
one. Fear of white power and respect for white civilization thus remained
potent restraining factors.
Then came the Great War. The colored world suddenly saw the white peoples
which, in racial matters had hitherto maintained something of a united
front, locked in an internecine death-grapple of unparalleled ferocity; it
saw those same peoples put one another furiously to the ban as
irreconcilable foes; it saw white race-unity cleft by political and moral
gulfs which white men themselves continuously iterated would never be
filled. As colored men realized the significance of it all, they looked
into each other's eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The
white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and
shattered. And--fear of white power and respect for white civilization
together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia
ran the sibilant whisper: "The East will see the West to bed!"
The chorus of mingled exultation, hate, and scorn sounded from every
portion of the colored world. Chinese scholars, Japanese professors, Hindu
pundits, Turkish journalists, and Afro-American editors, one and all
voiced drastic criticisms of white civilization and hailed the war as a
well-merited Nemesis on white arrogance and greed. This is how the
Constantinople _Tanine_, the most serious Turkish newspaper, characterized
the European Powers: "They would not look at the evils in their own
countries or elsewhere, but interfered at the slightest incident in our
borders; every day they would gnaw at some part of our rights and our
sovereignty; they would perform vivisection on our quivering flesh and cut
off great pieces of it. And we, with a forcibly controlled spirit of
rebellion in our hearts and with clinched but powerless fists, silent and
depressed, would murmur as the fire burned within: 'Oh, that they might
fall out with one another! Oh, that they might eat one another up!' And
lo! to-day they are eating each other up, just as the Turk wished they
would."[4]
The Afro-American author, W. E. Burghardt Dubois, wrote of the colored
world: "These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of
humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and
not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight, and the War of the
Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet
seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget."[5]
"What does the European War mean to us Orientals?" queried the Japanese
writer, Yone Noguchi. "It means the saddest downfall of the so-called
western civilization; our belief that it was builded upon a higher and
sounder footing than ours was at once knocked down and killed; we are
sorry that we somehow overestimated its happy possibility and were
deceived and cheated by its superficial glory. My recent western journey
confirmed me that the so-called dynamic western civilization was all
against the Asiatic belief. And when one does not respect the others,
there will be only one thing to come, that is, fight, in action or
silence."[6]
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIMARY RACES]
Such was the colored world's reaction to the white death-grapple, and as
the long struggle dragged on both Asia and Africa stirred to their very
depths. To be sure, no great explosions occurred during the war years,
albeit lifting veils of censorship reveal how narrowly such explosions
were averted. Nevertheless, Asia and Africa are to-day in acute ferment,
and we must not forget that this ferment is not primarily due to the war.
The war merely accelerated a movement already existent long before 1914.
Even if the Great War had been averted, the twentieth century must have
been a time of wide-spread racial readjustments in which the white man's
present position of political world-domination would have been sensibly
modified, especially in Asia. However, had the white race and white
civilization been spared the terrific material and moral losses involved
in the Great War and its still unliquidated aftermath, the process of
racial readjustment would have been far more gradual and would have been
fraught with far fewer cataclysmic possibilities. Had white strength
remained intact it would have acted as a powerful shock-absorber, taking
up and distributing the various colored impacts. As a result, the coming
modification of the world's racial equilibrium, though inevitable, would
have been so graduated that it would have seemed more an evolution than a
revolution. Such violent breaches as did occur might have been localized,
and anything like a general race-cataclysm would probably have been
impossible.
But it was not to be. The heart of the white world was divided against
itself, and on the fateful 1st of August, 1914, the white race, forgetting
ties of blood and culture, heedless of the growing pressure of the colored
world without, locked in a battle to the death. An ominous cycle opened
whose end no man can foresee. Armageddon engendered Versailles; earth's
worst war closed with an unconstructive peace which left old sores
unhealed and even dealt fresh wounds. The white world to-day lies
debilitated and uncured; the colored world views conditions which are a
standing incitement to rash dreams and violent action.
Such is the present status of the world's race-problem, expressed in
general terms. The analysis of the specific elements in that complex
problem will form the subject of the succeeding chapters.
CHAPTER II
YELLOW MAN'S LAND
Yellow Man's Land is the Far East. Here the group of kindred stocks
usually termed Mongolian have dwelt for unnumbered ages. Down to the most
recent times the yellows lived virtually a life apart. Sundered from the
rest of mankind by stupendous mountains, burning deserts, and the
illimitable ocean, the Far East constituted a world in itself, living its
own life and developing its own peculiar civilization. Only the wild
nomads of its northern marches--Huns, Mongols, Tartars, and the
like--succeeded in gaining direct contact with the brown and white worlds
to the West.
The ethnic focus of the yellow world has always been China. Since the dawn
of history this immense human ganglion has been the centre from which
civilization has radiated throughout the Far East. About this "Middle
Kingdom," as it sapiently styled itself, the other yellow folk were
disposed--Japanese and Koreans to the east; Siamese, Annamites, and
Cambodians to the south; and to the north the nomad Mongols and Manchus.
To all these peoples China was the august preceptor, sometimes chastising
their presumption, yet always instilling the principles of its ordered
civilization. However diverse may have been the individual developments
of the various Far Eastern peoples, they spring from a common Chinese
foundation. Despite modern Japan's meteoric rise to political mastery of
the Far East, it must not be forgotten that China remains not only the
cultural but also the territorial and racial centre of the yellow world.
Four-fifths of the yellow race is concentrated in China, there being
nearly 400,000,000 Chinese as against 60,000,000 Japanese, 16,000,000
Koreans, 26,000,000 Indo-Chinese, and perhaps 10,000,000 people of
non-Chinese stocks included within China's political frontiers.
The age-long seclusion of the yellow world, first decreed by nature, was
subsequently maintained by the voluntary decision of the yellow peoples
themselves. The great expansive movement of the white race which began
four centuries ago soon brought white men to the Far East, by sea in the
persons of the Portuguese navigators and by land with the Cossack
adventurers ranging through the empty spaces of Siberia. Yet after a brief
acquaintance with the white strangers the yellow world decided that it
wanted none of them, and they were rigidly excluded. This exclusion policy
was not a Chinese peculiarity; it was common to all the yellow peoples and
was adopted spontaneously at about the same time. In China, Japan, Korea,
and Indo-China, the same reaction produced the same results. The yellow
world instinctively felt the white man to be a destructive, dissolving
influence on its highly specialized line of evolution, which it wished to
maintain unaltered. For three centuries the yellow world succeeded in
maintaining its isolation, then, in the middle of the last century,
insistent white pressure broke down the barriers and forced the yellow
races into full contact with the outer world.
At the moment, the "opening" of the Far East was hailed by white men with
general approval, but of late years many white observers have regretted
this forcible dragging of reluctant races into the full stream of world
affairs. As an Australian writer, J. Liddell Kelly, remarks: "We have
erred grievously by prematurely forcing ourselves upon Asiatic races. The
instinct of the Asiatic in desiring isolation and separation from other
forms of civilization was much more correct than our craze for imposing
our forms of religion, morals, and industrialism upon them. It is not
race-hatred, nor even race-antagonism, that is at the root of this
attitude; it is an unerring intuition, which in years gone by has taught
the Asiatic that his evolution in the scale of civilization could best be
accomplished by his being allowed to develop on his own lines. Pernicious
European compulsion has led him to abandon that attitude. Let us not be
ashamed to confess that he was right and we were wrong."[7]
However, rightly or wrongly, the deed was done, and the yellow races,
forced into the world-arena, proceeded to adapt themselves to their new
political environment and to learn the correct methods of survival under
the strenuous conditions which there prevailed. In place of their
traditional equilibrated, self-sufficient order, the yellow peoples now
felt the ubiquitous impacts of the dynamic Western spirit, insistent upon
rapid material progress and forceful, expansive evolution. Japan was the
first yellow people to go methodically to the white man's school, and
Japan's rapid acquirement of the white man's technology soon showed itself
in dramatic demonstrations like her military triumphs over China in 1894,
and over Russia a decade later.
Japan's easy victory over huge China astounded the whole world. That these
"highly intelligent children," as one of the early British ministers to
Japan had characterized them, should have so rapidly acquired the
technique of Western methods was almost unbelievable. Indeed, the full
significance of the lesson was not immediately grasped, and the power of
New Japan was still underestimated. A good example of Europe's
underestimation of Japanese strength was the proposal a Dutch writer made
in 1896 to curb possible Japanese aggression on the Dutch Indies by taking
from Japan the island of Formosa which Japan had acquired from China as
one of the fruits of victory. "Holland," asserted this writer, "must take
possession of Formosa."[8] The grotesqueness of this dictum as it appears
to us in the light of subsequent history shows how the world has moved in
twenty-five years.
But even at that time Japan's expansionist tendencies were well
developed, and voices were warning against Japanese imperialism. In the
very month when our Hollander was advocating a Dutch seizure of Formosa,
an Australian wrote the following lines in a Melbourne newspaper
concerning his recent travels in Japan: "While in a car with several
Japanese officers, they were conversing about Australia, saying that it
was a fine, large country, with great forests and excellent soil for the
cultivation of rice and other products. The whites settled in Australia,
so thought these officers, are like the dog in the manger. Some one will
have to take a good part of Australia to develop it, for it is a pity to
see so fine a country lying waste. If any ill-feeling arose between the
two countries, it would be a wise thing to send some battleships to
Australia and annex part of it."[9]
Whatever may have been the world's misreading of the Chino-Japanese
conflict, the same cannot be said of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. The
echoes of that yellow triumph over one of the great white Powers
reverberated to the ends of the earth and started obscure trains of
consequences even to-day not yet fully disclosed. The war's reactions in
these remoter fields will be discussed in later chapters. Its effect upon
the Far East is our present concern. And the well-nigh unanimous opinion
of both natives and resident Europeans was that the war signified a
body-blow to white ascendancy. So profound an English student of the
Orient as Meredith Townsend wrote: "It may be taken as certain that the
victory of Japan will be profoundly felt by the majority of European
states. With the exception of Austria, all European countries have
implicated themselves in the great effort to conquer Asia, which has now
been going on for two centuries, but which, as this author thinks, must
now terminate.... The disposition, therefore, to edge out intrusive
Europeans from their Asiatic possessions is certain to exist even if it is
not manifested in Tokio, and it may be fostered by a movement of which, as
yet, but little has been said. No one who has ever studied the question
doubts that as there is a comity of Europe, so there is a comity of Asia,
a disposition to believe that Asia belongs of right to Asiatics, and that
any event which brings that right nearer to realization is to all Asiatics
a pleasurable one. Japanese victories will give new heart and energy to
all the Asiatic nations and tribes which now fret under European rule,
will inspire in them a new confidence in their own power to resist, and
will spread through them a strong impulse to avail themselves of Japanese
instruction. It will take, of course, many years to bring this new force
into play; but time matters nothing to Asiatics, and they all possess that
capacity for complete secrecy which the Japanese displayed."[10]
That Meredith Townsend was reading the Asiatic mind aright seems clear
from the pronouncements of Orientals themselves. For example, _Buddhism_,
of Rangoon, Burmah, a country of the Indo-Chinese borderland between the
yellow and brown worlds, expressed hopes for an Oriental alliance against
the whites. "It would, we think," said this paper, "be no great wonder if
a few years after the conclusion of this war saw the completion of a
defensive alliance between Japan, China, and not impossibly Siam--the
formulation of a new Monroe Doctrine for the Far East, guaranteeing the
integrity of existing states against further aggression from the West. The
West has justified--perhaps with some reason--every aggression on weaker
races by the doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest; on the ground that
it is best for future humanity that the unfit should be eliminated and
give place to the most able race. That doctrine applies equally well to
any possible struggle between Aryan and Mongolian--whichever survives,
should it ever come to a struggle between the two for world-mastery, will,
on their own doctrine, be the one most fit to do so, and if the survivor
be the Mongolian, then is the Mongolian no 'peril' to humanity, but the
better part of it."[11]
The decade which elapsed between the Russo-Japanese and European Wars saw
in the Far East another event of the first magnitude: the Chinese
Revolution of 1911. Toward the close of the nineteenth century the world
had been earnestly discussing the "break-up" of China. The huge empire,
with its 400,000,000 of people, one-fourth the entire human race, seemed
at that time plunged in so hopeless a lethargy as to be foredoomed to
speedy ruin. About the apparently moribund carcass the eagles of the earth
were already gathered, planning a "partition of China" analogous to the
recent partition of Africa. The partition of China, however, never came
off. The prodigious moral shock of the Japanese War roused China's elite
to the imminence of their country's peril. First attempts at reform were
blocked by the Dowager Empress, but her reactionary lurch ended in the
Boxer nightmare and the frightful Occidental chastisement of 1900. This
time the lesson was learned. China was at last shaken broad awake. The
Bourbon Manchu court, it is true, wavered, but popular pressure forced it
to keep the upward path. Every year after 1900 saw increasingly rapid
reform--reform, be it noted, not imposed upon the country from above but
forced upon the rulers from below. When the slow-footed Manchus showed
themselves congenitally incapable of keeping step with the quickening
national pace, the rising tide of national life overwhelmed them in the
Republican Revolution of 1911, and they were no more.
Even with the Manchu handicap, the rate of progress during those years was
such as to amaze the wisest foreign observers. "Could the sage, Confucius,
have returned a decade ago," wrote that "old China hand," W. R. Manning,
in 1910, "he would have felt almost as much at home as when he departed
twenty-five centuries before. Should he return a decade hence he will feel
almost as much out of place as Rip Van Winkle, if the recent rate of
progress continues."[12] Toward the close of 1909 a close student of
things Chinese, Harlan P. Beach, remarked: "Those who, like myself, can
compare the China of twenty-five years ago with the China of this year,
can hardly believe our senses."[13] It was on top of all this that there
came the revolution, a happening hailed by so sophisticated an observer as
Doctor Dillon as "the most momentous event in a thousand years."[14]
Whatever may have been the political blunders of the revolutionists (and
they were many), the revolution's moral results were stupendous. The
stream of Western innovation flowed at a vastly accelerated pace into
every Chinese province. The popular masses were for the first time
awakened to genuine interest in political, as distinguished from economic
or personal, questions. Lastly, the semi-religious feeling of family
kinship, which in the past had been almost the sole recognized bond of
Chinese race-solidarity, was powerfully supplemented by those
distinctively modern concepts, national self-consciousness and articulate
patriotism.
Here was the Far Eastern situation at the outbreak of the Great War--a
thoroughly modernized, powerful Japan, and a thoroughly aroused, but still
disorganized, China. The Great War automatically made Japan supreme in the
Far East by temporarily reducing all the European Powers to ciphers in
Oriental affairs. How Japan proceeded to buttress this supremacy by
getting a strangle-hold on China, every one knows. Japan's methods were
brutal and cynical, though not a whit more so than the methods employed by
white nations seeking to attain vital ends. And "vital" is precisely how
Japan regards her hold over China. An essentially poor country with a
teeming population, Japan feels that the exploitation of China's
incalculable natural resources, a privileged position in the Chinese
market, and guidance of Chinese national evolution in ways not inimical to
Japan, can alone assure her future.
Japan's attitude toward her huge neighbor is one of mingled superiority
and apprehension. She banks on China's traditional pacifism, yet she is
too shrewd not to realize the explosive possibilities latent in the modern
nationalist idea. As a Japanese publicist, Adachi Kinnosuke, remarks: "The
Twentieth Century Jenghiz Khan threatening the Sun-Flag with a Mongol
horde armed with Krupp guns may possibly strike the Western sense of
humor. But it is not altogether pleasing to contemplate a neighbor of
400,000,000 population with modern armament and soldiers trained on the
modern plan. The awakening of China means all this and a little more which
we of the present are not sure of. Japan cannot forget that between this
nightmare of armed China and herself there is only a very narrow sea."[15]
Certainly, "Young China" has already displayed much of that unpleasant
ebullience which usually accompanies nationalist awakenings. A French
observer, Jean Rodes, writes on this point: "One of the things that most
disquiet thinking men is that this new generation, completely neglecting
Chinese studies while knowing nothing of Western science, yet convinced
that it knows everything, will no longer possess any standard of values,
national culture, or foreign culture. We can only await with apprehension
the results of such ignorance united with unbounded pride as characterize
the Chinese youth of to-day."[16] And another French observer, Rene Pinon,
as far back as 1905, found the primary school children of Kiang-Su
province chanting the following lines: "I pray that the frontiers of my
country become hard as bronze; that it surpass Europe and America; that it
subjugate Japan; that its land and sea armies cover themselves with
resplendent glory; that over the whole earth float the Dragon Standard;
that the universal mastery of the empire extend and progress. May our
empire, like a sleeping tiger suddenly awakened, spring roaring into the
arena of combats."[17]
Japan's masterful policy in China is thus unquestionably hazardous.
Chinese national feeling is to-day genuinely aroused against Japan, and
resentment over Japanese encroachments is bitter and wide-spread.
Nevertheless, Japan feels that the game is worth the risk and believes
that both Chinese race-psychology and the general drift of world affairs
combine to favor her ultimate success. She knows that China has in the
past always acquiesced in foreign domination when resistance has proved
patently impossible. She also feels that her aspirations for white
expulsion from the Far East and for the winning of wider spheres for
racial expansion should appeal strongly to yellow peoples generally and to
the Chinese in particular. To turn China's nascent nationalism into purely
anti-white channels and to transmute Chinese patriotism into a wider
"Pan-Mongolism" would constitute a Japanese triumph of incalculable
splendor. It would increase her effective force manyfold and would open up
almost limitless vistas of power and glory.
Nor are the Chinese themselves blind to the advantages of Chino-Japanese
co-operation. They have an instinctive assurance in their own capacities,
they know how they have ultimately digested all their conquerors, and many
Chinese to-day think that from a Chino-Japanese partnership, no matter how
framed, the inscrutable "Sons of Han" would eventually get the lion's
share. Certainly no one has ever denied the Chinaman's extraordinary
economic efficiency. Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land
populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is
selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of
economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life
literally within a hand's breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed
to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a
working capacity which simply appalls his competitors. That urbane
Celestial, Doctor Wu-Ting-Fang, well says of his own people: "Experience
proves that the Chinese as all-round laborers can easily outdistance all
competitors. They are industrious, intelligent, and orderly. They can work
under conditions that would kill a man of less hardy race; in heat that
would kill a salamander, or in cold that would please a polar bear,
sustaining their energies through long hours of unremitting toil with only
a few bowls of rice."[18] This Chinese estimate is echoed by the most
competent foreign observers. The Australian thinker, Charles H. Pearson,
wrote of the Chinese a generation ago in his epoch-making book, "National
Life and Character": "Flexible as Jews, they can thrive on the mountain
plateaux of Thibet and under the sun of Singapore; more versatile even
than Jews, they are excellent laborers, and not without merit as soldiers
and sailors; while they have a capacity for trade which no other nation of
the East possesses. They do not need even the accident of a man of genius
to develop their magnificent future."[19] And Lafcadio Hearn says: "A
people of hundreds of millions disciplined for thousands of years to the
most untiring industry and the most self-denying thrift, under conditions
which would mean worse than death for our working masses--a people, in
short, quite content to strive to the uttermost in exchange for the simple
privilege of life."[20]
This economic superiority of the Chinaman shows not only with other races,
but with his yellow kindred as well. As regards the Japanese, John
Chinaman has proved it to the hilt. Wherever the two have met in economic
competition, John has won hands down. Even in Japanese colonies like Korea
and Formosa, the Japanese, with all the backing of their government behind
them, have been worsted. In fact, Japan itself, so bitter at white
refusals to receive her emigrants, has been obliged to enact drastic
exclusion laws to protect her working classes from the influx of "Chinese
cheap labor." It seems, therefore, a just calculation when Chinese
estimate that Japanese triumphs against white adversaries would inure
largely to China's benefit. After all, Chinese and Japanese are
fundamentally of the same race and culture. They may have their very
bitter family quarrels, but in the last analysis they understand each
other and may arrive at surprisingly sudden agreements. One thing is
certain: both these over-populated lands will feel increasingly the
imperious need of racial expansion. For all these reasons, then, the
present political tension between China and Japan cannot be reckoned as
permanent, and we would do well to envisage the possibility of close
Chinese co-operation in the ambitious programme of Japanese foreign
policy.
This Japanese programme looks first to the prevention of all further white
encroachment in the Far East by the establishment of a Far Eastern Monroe
Doctrine based on Japanese predominance and backed if possible by the
moral support of the other Far Eastern peoples. The next stage in Japanese
foreign policy seems to be the systematic elimination of all existing
white holdings in the Far East. Thus far practically all Japanese appear
to be in substantial agreement. Beyond this point lies a wide realm of
aspiration ranging from determination to secure complete racial equality
and freedom of immigration into white lands to imperialistic dreams of
wholesale conquests and "world-dominion." These last items do not
represent the united aspiration of the Japanese nation, but they are
cherished by powerful circles which, owing to Japan's oligarchical system
of government, possess an influence over governmental action quite
disproportionate to their numbers.
Although Japanese plans and aspirations have broadened notably since 1914,
their outlines were well defined a decade earlier. Immediately after her
victory over Russia, Japan set herself to strengthen her influence all
over eastern Asia. Special efforts were made to establish intimate
relations with the other Asiatic peoples. Asiatic students were invited to
attend Japanese universities and as a matter of fact did attend by the
thousand, while a whole series of societies was formed having for their
object the knitting of close cultural and economic ties between Japan and
specific regions like China, Siam, the Pacific, and even India. The
capstone was a "Pan-Asiatic Association," founded by Count Okuma. Some of
the facts regarding these societies, about which too little is known, make
interesting reading. For instance, there was the "Pacific Ocean Society"
("Taheijoka"), whose preamble reads in part: "For a century the Pacific
Ocean has been a battle-ground wherein the nations have struggled for
supremacy. To-day the prosperity or decadence of a nation depends on its
power in the Pacific: to possess the empire of the Pacific is to be the
Master of the World. As Japan finds itself at the centre of that Ocean,
whose waves bathe its shores, it must reflect carefully and have clear
views on Pacific questions."[21]
Equally interesting is the "Indo-Japanese Association," whose activities
appear somewhat peculiar in view of the political alliance between Japan
and the British Empire. One of the first articles of its constitution
(from Count Okuma's pen, by the way) reads: "All men were born equal. The
Asiatics have the same claim to be called men as the Europeans themselves.
It is therefore quite unreasonable that the latter should have any right
to predominate over the former."[22] No mention is made anywhere in the
document of India's political connection with England. In fact, Count
Okuma, in the autumn of 1907, had this to say regarding India: "Being
oppressed by the Europeans, the 300,000,000 people of India are looking
for Japanese protection. They have commenced to boycott European
merchandise. If, therefore, the Japanese let the chance slip by and do not
go to India, the Indians will be disappointed. From old times, India has
been a land of treasure. Alexander the Great obtained there treasure
sufficient to load a hundred camels, and Mahmoud and Attila also obtained
riches from India. Why should not the Japanese stretch out their hands
toward that country, now that the people are looking to the Japanese? The
Japanese ought to go to India, the South Ocean, and other parts of the
world."[23]
In 1910, Putnam Weale, a competent English student of Oriental affairs,
asserted: "It can no longer be doubted that a very deliberate policy is
certainly being quietly and cleverly pursued. Despite all denials, it is a
fact that Japan has already a great hold in the schools and in the
vernacular newspapers all over eastern Asia, and that the gospel of 'Asia
for the Asiatics' is being steadily preached not only by her schoolmasters
and her editors, but by her merchants and peddlers, and every other man
who travels."[24]
Exactly how much these Japanese propagandist efforts accomplished is
impossible to say. Certain it is, however, that during the years just
previous to the Great War the white colonies in the Far East were
afflicted with considerable native unrest. In French Indo-China, for
example, revolutionary movements during the year 1908 necessitated
reinforcing the French garrison by nearly 10,000 men, and though the
disturbances were sternly repressed, fresh conspiracies were discovered
in 1911 and 1913. Much sedition and some sharp fighting also took place in
the Dutch Indies, while in the Philippines the independence movement
continued to gain ground.
What the growing self-consciousness of the Far East portended for the
white man's ultimate status in those regions was indicated by an English
publicist, J. D. Whelpley, who wrote, shortly after the outbreak of the
European War: "With the aid of Western ideas the Far East is fast
attaining a solidarity impossible under purely Oriental methods. The smug
satisfaction expressed in the West at what is called the 'modernization'
of the East shows lack of wisdom or an ineffective grasp of the meaning of
comparatively recent events in Japan, China, eastern Siberia, and even in
the Philippines. In years past the solidarity of the Far East was largely
in point of view, while in other matters the powerful nations of the West
played the game according to their own rules. To-day the solidarity of
mental outlook still maintains, while in addition there is rapidly coming
about a solidarity of political and material interests which in time will
reduce Western participation in Far Eastern affairs to that of a
comparatively unimportant factor. It might truly be said that this point
is already reached, and that it only needs an application of the test to
prove to the world that the Far East would resent Western interference as
an intolerable impertinence."[25]
The scope of Japan's aspirations, together with differences of outlook
between various sections of Japanese public opinion as to the rate of
progress feasible for Japanese expansion, account for Japan's differing
attitudes toward the white Powers. Officially, the keystone of Japan's
foreign policy since the beginning of the present century has been the
alliance with England, first negotiated in 1902 and renewed with extensive
modifications in 1911. The 1902 alliance was universally popular in Japan.
It was directed specifically against Russia and represented the common
apprehensions of both the contracting parties. By 1911, however, the
situation had radically altered. Japan's aspirations in the Far East,
particularly as regards China, were arousing wide-spread uneasiness in
many quarters, and the English communities in the Far East generally
condemned the new alliance as a gross blunder of British diplomacy. In
Japan also there was considerable protest. The official organs, to be
sure, stressed the necessity of friendship with the Mistress of the Seas
for an island empire like Japan, but opposition circles pointed to
England's practical refusal to be drawn into a war with the United States
under any circumstances which constituted the outstanding feature of the
new treaty and declared that Japan was giving much and receiving nothing
in return.
The growing divergence between Japanese and English views regarding China
increased anti-English feeling, and in 1912 the semi-official _Japan
Magazine_ asserted roundly that the general feeling in Japan was that the
alliance was a detriment rather than a benefit, going on to forecast a
possible alignment with Russia and Germany, and remarking of the latter:
"Germany's healthy imperialism and scientific development would have a
wholesome effect upon our nation and progress, while the German habit of
perseverance and frugality is just what we need. German wealth and
industry are gradually creeping upward to that of Great Britain and
America, and the efficiency of the German army and navy is a model for the
world. Her lease of the territory of Kiaochow Bay brings her into contact
with us, and her ambition to exploit the coal-mines of Shantung lends her
a community of interest with us. It is not too much to say that German
interests in China are greater than those of any other European Power. If
the alliance with England should ever be abrogated, we might be very glad
to shake hands with Germany."[26]
The outbreak of the European War gave Japan a golden opportunity (of which
she was not slow to take advantage) to eliminate one of the white Powers
from the Far East. The German stronghold of Kiaochow was promptly reduced,
while Germany's possessions in the Pacific Ocean north of the equator, the
Caroline, Pelew, Marianne, and Marshall island-groups, were likewise
occupied by Japanese forces. Here Japan stopped and politely declined all
proposals to send armies to Europe or western Asia. Her sphere was the Far
East; her real objectives were the reduction of white influence there and
the riveting of her control over China. Japanese comment was perfectly
candid on these matters. As the semi-official _Japanese Colonial Journal_
put it in the autumn of 1914: "To protect Chinese territory Japan is ready
to fight no matter what nation. Not only will Japan try to erase the
ambitions of Russia and Germany; it will also do its best to prevent
England and the United States from touching the Chinese cake. The solution
of the Chinese problem is of great importance for Japan, and Great Britain
has little to do with it."[27]
Equally frank were Japanese warnings to the English ally not to oppose
Japan's progress in China. English criticism of the series of ultimatums
by which Japan forced reluctant China to do her bidding roused angry
admonitions like the following from the Tokio _Universe_ in April, 1915:
"Hostile English opinion seems to want to oppose Japanese demands in
China. The English forget that Japan has, by her alliance, rendered them
signal services against Russia in 1905 and in the present war by assuring
security in their colonies of the Pacific and the Far East. If Japan
allied herself with England, it was with the object of establishing
Japanese preponderance in China and against the encroachments of Russia.
To-day the English seem to be neglecting their obligations toward Japan by
not supporting her cause. Let England beware! Japan will tolerate no
wavering; she is quite ready to abandon the Anglo-Japanese alliance and
turn to Russia--a Power with whom she can agree perfectly regarding Far
Eastern interests. In the future, even, she is ready to draw closer to
Germany. The English colonies will then be in great peril."[28]
As to the imminence of a Russo-Japanese understanding, the journal just
quoted proved a true prophet, for a year later, in July, 1916, the
Japanese and Russian Governments signed a diplomatic instrument which
amounted practically to an alliance. By this document Russia recognized
Japan's paramountcy over the bulk of China, while Japan recognized
Russia's special interests in China's Western dependencies, Mongolia and
Turkestan. Japan had thus eliminated another of the white Powers from the
Far East, since Russia renounced those ambitions to dominate China proper
which had provoked the war of 1904.
Meanwhile the press campaign against England continued. A typical sample
is this editorial from the Tokio _Yamato_: "Great Britain never wished at
heart to become Japan's ally. She did not wish to enter into such intimate
relations with us, for she privately regarded us as an upstart nation
radically different from us in blood and religion. It was simply the force
of circumstances which compelled her to enter into an alliance with us. It
is the height of conceit on our part to think that England really cared
for our friendship, for she never did. It was the Russian menace to India
and Persia on the one hand, and the German ascendancy on the other, which
compelled her to clasp our hands."[29]
At the same time many good things were being said about Germany. At no
time during the war was any real hostility to the Germans apparent in
Japan. Germany was of course expelled from her Far Eastern footholds in
smart, workmanlike fashion, but the fighting before Kiaochow was conducted
without a trace of hatred, the German prisoners were treated as honored
captives, and German civilians in Japan suffered no molestation. Japanese
writers were very frank in stating that, once Germany resigned herself to
exclusion from the Far East and acquiesced in Japanese predominance in
China, no reason existed why Japan and Germany should not be good friends.
Unofficial diplomatic exchanges certainly took place between the two
governments during the war, and no rancor for the past appears to exist on
either side to-day.
The year 1917 brought three momentous modifications into the
world-situation: the entrance of the United States and China into the
Great War and the Russian Revolution. The first two were intensely
distasteful to Japan. The transformation of virtually unarmed America into
a first-class fighting power reacted portentously upon the Far East, while
China's adhesion to the Grand Alliance (bitterly opposed in Tokio) rescued
her from diplomatic isolation and gave her potential friends. The Russian
Revolution was also a source of perplexity to Tokio. In 1916, as we have
seen, Japan had arrived at a thorough understanding with the Czarist
regime. The new Russian Government was an unknown quantity, acting quite
differently from the old.
Russia's collapse into Bolshevist anarchy, however, presently opened up
new vistas. Not merely northern Manchuria, but also the huge expanse of
Siberia, an almost empty world of vast potential riches, lay temptingly
exposed. At once the powerful imperialist elements in Japanese political
life began clamoring for "forward" action. An opportunity for such action
was soon vouchsafed by the Allied determination to send a composite force
to Siberia to checkmate the machinations of the Russian Bolsheviki, now
hostile to the Allies and playing into the hands of Germany. The
imperialist party at Tokio took the bit in its teeth, and, in flagrant
disregard of the inter-Allied agreement, poured a great army into Siberia,
occupying the whole country as far west as Lake Baikal. This was in the
spring of 1918. The Allies, then in their supreme death-grapple with the
Germans, dared not even protest, but in the autumn, when the battle-tide
had turned in Europe, Japan was called to account, the United States
taking the lead in the matter. A furious debate ensued at Tokio between
the imperialist and moderate parties, the hotter jingoes urging defiance
of the United States even at the risk of war. Then, suddenly, came the
news that Germany was cracking, and the moderates had their way. The
Japanese armies in Siberia were reduced, albeit they still remained the
most powerful military factor in the situation.
Germany's sudden collapse and the unexpectedly quick ending of the war was
a blow to Japanese hopes and plans in more ways than one. Despite
official felicitations, the nation could hardly disguise its chagrin. For
Japan the war had been an unmixed benefit. It had automatically made her
mistress of the Far East and had amazingly enriched her economic life.
Every succeeding month of hostilities had seen the white world grow weaker
and had conversely increased Japanese power. Japan had counted on at least
one more year of war. Small wonder that the sudden passing of this halcyon
time provoked disappointment and regret.
The above outline of Japanese foreign policy reveals beneath all its
surface mutations a fundamental continuity. Whatever may be its ultimate
goals, Japanese foreign policy has one minimum objective: Japan as hegemon
of a Far East in which white influence shall have been reduced to a
vanishing quantity. That is the bald truth of the matter--and no white man
has any reason for getting indignant about it. Granted that Japanese aims
endanger white vested interests in the Far East. Granted that this
involves rivalry and perhaps war. That is no reason for striking a moral
attitude and inveighing against Japanese "wickedness," as many people are
to-day doing. These mighty racial tides flow from the most elemental of
vital urges: self-expansion and self-preservation. Both outward thrust of
expanding life and counter-thrust of threatened life are equally normal
phenomena. To condemn the former as "criminal" and the latter as "selfish"
is either silly or hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary
rancor what objective fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable
yet alleviated by mutual comprehension and respect. This is no mere plea
for "sportsmanship"; it is a very practical matter. There are critical
times ahead; times in which intense race-pressures will engender high
tensions and perhaps wars. If men will keep open minds and will eschew the
temptation to regard those opposing their desires to defend or possess
respectively as impious fiends, the struggles will lose half their
bitterness, and the wars (if wars there must be) will be shorn of half
their ferocity.
The unexpected ending of the European War was, as we have seen, a blow to
Japanese calculations. Nevertheless, the skill of her diplomats at the
ensuing Versailles Conference enabled Japan to harvest most of her war
gains. Japan's territorial acquisitions in China were definitely written
into the peace treaty, despite China's sullen veto, and Japan's
preponderance in Chinese affairs was tacitly acknowledged. Japan also took
advantage of the occasion to pose as the champion of the colored races by
urging the formal promulgation of "racial equality" as part of the peace
settlement, especially as regards immigration. Of course the Japanese
diplomats had no serious expectation of their demands being acceded to; in
fact, they might have been rather embarrassed if they had succeeded, in
view of Japan's own stringent laws against immigration and alien
landholding. Nevertheless, it was a politic move, useful for future
propagandist purposes, and it advertised Japan broadcast as the
standard-bearer of the colored cause.
The notable progress that Japan has made toward the mastery of the Far
East is written plainly upon the map, which strikingly portrays the
broadening territorial base of Japanese power effected in the past
twenty-five years. Japan now owns the whole island chain masking the
eastern sea frontage of Asia, from the tip of Kamchatka to the
Philippines, while her acquisition of Germany's Oceanican islands north of
the equator gives her important strategic outposts in mid-Pacific. Her
bridge-heads on the Asiatic continent are also strong and well located.
From the Korean peninsula (now an integral part of Japan) she firmly
grasps the vast Chinese dependency of Manchuria, while just south of
Manchuria across the narrow waters of the Pechili strait lies the rich
Chinese province of Shantung, become a Japanese sphere of influence as a
result of the late war. Thus Japan holds China's capital, Peking, as in
the jaws of a vice and can apply military pressure whenever she so
desires. In southern China lies another Japanese sphere of influence, the
province of Fukien opposite the Japanese island of Formosa. Lastly, all
over China runs a veritable network of Japanese concessions like the
recently acquired control of the great iron deposits near Hankow, far up
the Yangtse River in the heart of China.
Whether this Japanese _imperium_ over China maintains itself or not, one
thing seems certain: future white expansion in the Far East has become
impossible. Any such attempt would instantly weld together Japanese
imperialism and Chinese nationalism in a "sacred union" whose result would
probably be at the very least the prompt expulsion of the white man from
every foothold in eastern Asia.
That is what will probably come anyway as soon as Japan and China,
impelled by overcrowding and conscious of their united potentialities,
shall have arrived at a genuine understanding. Since population-pressure
seems to be the basic factor in the future course of Far Eastern affairs,
it would be well to survey possible outlets for surplus population within
the Far East itself, in order to determine how much of this race-expansion
can be satisfied at home, thereby diminishing, or at least postponing,
acute pressure upon the political and ethnic frontiers of the white world.
To begin with, the population of Japan (approximately 60,000,000) is
increasing at the rate of about 800,000 per year. China has no modern
vital statistics, but the annual increase of her 400,000,000 population,
at the Japanese rate, would be 6,000,000. Now the settled parts of both
Japan and China may be considered as fully populated so far as agriculture
is concerned, further extensive increases of population being dependent
upon the rise of machine industry. Both countries have, however, thinly
settled areas within their present political frontiers. Japan's northern
island of Hokkaido (Yezo) has a great amount of good agricultural land as
yet almost unoccupied, some of her other island possessions offer minor
outlets, while Korea and Manchuria afford extensive colonizing
possibilities albeit Chinese and Korean competition preclude a Japanese
colonization on the scale which the size and natural wealth of these
regions would at first sight seem to indicate. China has even more
extensive colonizable areas. Both Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan, though
largely desert, contain within their vast areas enough fertile land to
support many millions of Chinese peasants as soon as modern roads and
railways are built. The Chinese colonization of Manchuria is also
proceeding apace, and will continue despite anything Japan may do to keep
it down. Lastly, the cold but enormous plateau of Tibet offers
considerable possibilities.
Allowing for all this, however, it cannot be said that either China or
Japan possess within their present political frontiers territories likely
to absorb those prodigious accretions of population which seem destined to
occur within the next couple of generations. From the resultant congestion
two avenues of escape will naturally present themselves: settlement of
other portions of the Far East to-day under white political control, but
inhabited by colored populations; and pressure into accessible areas not
merely under white political control, but also containing white
populations. It is obvious that these are two radically distinct issues,
for while a white nation might not unalterably oppose Mongolian
immigration into its colored dependencies, it would almost certainly
fight to the limit rather than witness the racial swamping of lands
settled by its own flesh and blood.
Considering the former issue, then, it would appear that virtually all the
peninsulas and archipelagoes lying between China and Australia offer
attractive fields for yellow, particularly Chinese, race-expansion.
Ethnically they are all colored men's lands; politically they are all,
save Siam, under white control; Britain, France, Holland, and the United
States being the titular owners of these extensive territories. So far as
the native races are concerned, none of them seem to possess the vitality
and economic efficiency needed to maintain themselves against unrestricted
Chinese immigration. Whether in the British Straits Settlements and North
Borneo, French Indo-China, the Dutch Indies, the American Philippines, or
independent Siam, the Chinaman, so far as he has been allowed, has
displayed his practical superiority, and in places where, like the Straits
Settlements, he has been allowed a free hand, he has virtually supplanted
the native stock, reducing the latter to an impotent and vanishing
minority. The chief barriers to Chinese race-expansion in these regions
are legal hindrances or prohibitions of immigration, and of course such
barriers are in their essence artificial and liable to removal under any
shift of circumstances. Many observers predict that most of these lands
will ultimately become Chinese. Says Alleyne Ireland, a recognized
authority on these regions: "There is every reason to suppose that,
throughout the tropics, possibly excepting India, the Chinaman, even
though he should continue to emigrate in no greater force than hitherto,
will gradually supersede all the native races."[30] Certainly, if this be
true, China has here a vast outlet for her surplus population. It has been
estimated that the undeveloped portions of the Dutch Indies alone are
capable of supporting 100,000,000 people living on the frugal Chinese
plane. Their present population is 8,000,000 semi-savages.
China's possibilities of race-expansion in the colored regions of the Far
East are thus excellent. The same cannot be said, however, for Japan. The
Japanese, bred in a distinctively temperate, island environment, have not
the Chinese adaptability to climatic variation. The Japanese, like the
white man, does not thrive in tropic heat, nor does he possess the white
man's ability to resist sub-Arctic cold. Formosa is not in the real
tropics, yet Japanese colonists have not done well there. On the other
hand, even the far-from-Arctic winters of Hokkaido (part of the Japanese
archipelago) seem too chilly for the Japanese taste.
Japan thus does not have the same vital interest as China in the Asiatic
tropics. Undoubtedly they would for Japan be valuable colonies of
exploitation, just as they to-day are thus valuable for white nations. But
they could never furnish outlets for Japan's excess population, and even
commercially Japan would be exposed to increasing Chinese competition,
since the Chinaman excels the Japanese in trade as well as in migrant
colonization. Japanese lack of climatic adaptability is also the reason
why Japan's present military excursion in eastern Siberia, even if it
should develop into permanent occupation, would yield no adequate solution
of Japan's population problem. For the Chinaman, Siberia would do very
well. He would breed amazingly there and would fill up the whole country
in a remarkably short space of time. But the Japanese peasant, so averse
to the winters of Hokkaido, would find the sub-Arctic rigors of Siberia
intolerable.
Thus, for Japanese migration, neither the empty spaces of northern or
southern Asia will do. The natural outlets lie outside Asia in the United
States, Australasia, and the temperate parts of Latin America. But all
these outlets are rigorously barred by the white man, who has marked them
for his own race-heritage, and nothing but force will break those barriers
down.
There lies a danger, not merely to the peace of the Far East, but to the
peace of the world. Fired by a fervent patriotism; resolved to make their
country a leader among the nations; the Japanese writhe at the
constriction of their present race-bounds. Placed on the flank of the
Chinese giant whose portentous growth she can accurately forecast, Japan
sees herself condemned to ultimate renunciation of her grandiose ambitions
unless she can somehow broaden the racial as well as the political basis
of her power. In short: Japan must find lands where Japanese can breed by
the tens of millions if she is not to be automatically overshadowed in
course of time, even assuming that she does not suffocate or blow up from
congestion before that time arrives. This is the secret of her aggressive
foreign policy, her chronic imperialism, her extravagant dreams of
conquest and "world-dominion."
The longing to hack a path to greatness by the samurai sword lurks ever in
the back of Japanese minds. The library of Nippon's chauvinist literature
is large and increasing. A good example of the earlier productions is
Satori Kato's brochure entitled "Mastery of the Pacific," published in
1909. Herein the author announces confidently: "In the event of war Japan
could, as if aided by a magician's wand, overrun the Pacific with fleets
manned by men who have made Nelson their model and transported to the
armadas of the Far East the spirit that was victorious at Trafalgar.
Whether Japan avows it or not, her persistent aim is to gain the mastery
of the Pacific. Although peace seems to prevail over the world at present,
no one can tell how soon the nations may be engaged in war. It does not
need the English alliance to secure success for Japan. That alliance may
be dissolved at any moment, but Japan will suffer no defeat. Her victory
will be won by her men, not by armor-plates--things weak by
comparison."[31]
The late war has of course greatly stimulated these bellicose emotions.
Viewing their own increased power and the debilitation of the white world,
Japanese jingoes glimpse prospects of glorious fishing in troubled
waters. The "world-dominion" note is stressed more often than of yore. For
instance, in the summer of 1919 the Tokio _Hochi_, Count Okuma's organ,
prophesied exultantly: "That age in which the Anglo-Japanese alliance was
the pivot and American-Japanese co-operation an essential factor of
Japanese diplomacy is gone. In future we must not look eastward for
friendship but westward. Let the Bolsheviki of Russia be put down and the
more peaceful party established in power. In them Japan will find a strong
ally. By marching then westward to the Balkans, to Germany, to France, and
Italy, the greater part of the world may be brought under our sway. The
tyranny of the Anglo-Saxons at the Peace Conference is such that it has
angered both gods and men. Some may abjectly follow them in consideration
of their petty interests, but things will ultimately settle down as has
just been indicated."[32]
Still more striking are the following citations from a Japanese
imperialist pronouncement written in the autumn of 1916:
"Fifty millions of our race wherewith to conquer and possess the earth! It
is indeed a glorious problem!... To begin with, we now have China; China
is our steed! Far shall we ride upon her! Even as Rome rode Latium to
conquer Italy, and Italy to conquer the Mediterranean; even as Napoleon
rode Italy and the Rhenish States to conquer Germany, and Germany to
conquer Europe; even as England to-day rides her colonies and her
so-called 'allies' to conquer her robust rival, Germany--even so shall we
ride China. So becomes our 50,000,000 race 500,000,000 strong; so grow our
paltry hundreds of millions of gold into billions!
"How well have done our people! How well have our statesmen led them! No
mistakes! There must be none now. In 1895 we conquered China--Russia,
Germany, and France stole from us the booty. How has our strength grown
since then--and still it grows! In ten years we punished and retook our
own from Russia; in twenty years we squared and retook from Germany; with
France there is no need for haste. She has already realized why we
withheld the troops which alone might have driven the invader from her
soil! Her fingers are clutching more tightly around her Oriental booty;
yet she knows it is ours for the taking. But there is no need of haste:
the world condemns the paltry thief; only the glorious conqueror wins the
plaudits and approval of mankind.
"We are now well astride of our steed, China; but the steed has long
roamed wild and is run down: it needs grooming, more grain, more training.
Further, our saddle and bridle are as yet mere makeshifts: would steed and
trappings stand the strain of war? And what would that strain be?
"As for America--that fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment,
but no cohesion, no brains of government; stood she alone we should not
need our China steed. Well did my friend speak the other day when he
called her people a race of thieves with the hearts of rabbits. America,
to any warrior race, is not as a foe, but as an immense melon, ripe for
the cutting. But there are other warrior races--England, Germany--would
they look on and let us slice and eat our fill? Would they?
"But, using China as our steed, should our first goal be the land? India?
Or the Pacific, the sea that must be our very own, even as the Atlantic is
now England's? The land is tempting and easy, but withal dangerous. Did we
begin there, the coarse white races would too soon awaken, and combine,
and forever immure us within our long since grown intolerable bounds. It
must, therefore, be the sea; but the sea means the Western Americas and
all the islands between; and with those must soon come Australia, India.
And then the battling for the balance of world-power, for the rest of
North America. Once that is ours, we own and control the whole--a dominion
worthy of our race!
"North America alone will support a billion people; that billion shall be
Japanese with their slaves. Not arid Asia, nor worn-out Europe (which,
with its peculiar and quaint relics and customs should in the interests of
history and culture, be in any case preserved), nor yet tropical Africa,
is fit for our people. But North America, that continent so succulently
green, fresh, and unsullied--except for the few chattering, mongrel
Yankees--should have been ours by right of discovery: it shall be ours by
the higher, nobler right of conquest."[33]
This apostle of Japanese world-dominion then goes on to discuss in detail
how his programme can best be attained. It should be remembered that at
the time he wrote America was still an unarmed nation, apparently ridden
by pacifism. Such imperialist extravagances as the above do not represent
the whole of Japan. But they do represent a powerful element in Japan,
against which the white world should be forewarned.
CHAPTER III
BROWN MAN'S LAND
Brown Man's Land is the Near and Middle East. The brown world stretches in
an immense belt clear across southern Asia and northern Africa, from the
Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans. The numbers of brown and yellow men are
not markedly unequal (450,000,000 browns as against 500,000,000 yellows),
but in most other respects the two worlds are sharply contrasted. In the
first place, while the yellow world is a fairly compact geographical
block, the brown world sprawls half-way round the globe, and is not only
much greater in size, but also infinitely more varied in natural features.
This geographical diversity is reflected both in its history and in the
character of its inhabitants. Unlike the secluded yellow world, the brown
world is nearly everywhere exposed to foreign influences and has undergone
an infinite series of evolutionary modifications. Racially it has been a
vast melting-pot, or series of melting-pots, wherein conquest and
migration have continually poured new heterogeneous elements, producing
the most diverse racial amalgamations. In fact, there is to-day no
generalized brown type-norm as there are generalized yellow or white
type-norms, but rather a series of types clearly distinguished from one
another. Some of these types, like the Persians and Ottoman Turks, are
largely white; others, like the southern Indians and Yemenite Arabs, are
largely black; while still others, like the Himalayan and Central Asian
peoples, have much yellow blood. Again, there is no generalized brown
culture like those possessed by yellows and whites. The great spiritual
bond is Islam, yet in India, the chief seat of brown population, Islam is
professed by only one-fifth of the inhabitants.
Nevertheless, there is a fundamental comity between the brown peoples.
This comity is subtle and intangible in character, yet it exists, and
under certain circumstances it is capable of momentous manifestations. Its
salient feature is the instinctive recognition by all Near and Middle
Eastern peoples that they are fellow Asiatics, however bitter may be their
internecine feuds. This instinctive Asiatic feeling has been noted by
historians for more than two thousand years, and it is just as true to-day
as in the past. Of course it comes out most strongly in face of the
non-Asiatic--which in practice has always meant the white man. The action
and reaction of the brown and white worlds has, indeed, been a constant
historic factor, the roles of hammer and anvil being continually reversed
through the ages. For the last four centuries the white world has, in the
main, been the dynamic factor. Certainly, during the last hundred years
the white world has displayed an unprecedentedly aggressive vigor, the
brown world playing an almost passive role.
Here again is seen a difference between browns and yellows. The yellow
world did not feel the full tide of white aggression till the middle of
the last century, while even then it never really lost its political
independence and soon reacted so powerfully that its political freedom has
to-day been substantially regained. The brown world, on the other hand,
felt the impact of the white tide much earlier and was politically
overwhelmed. The so-called "independence" of brown states has long been
due more to white rivalries than to their own inherent strength. One by
one they have been swallowed up by the white Powers. In 1914 only three
(Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan) survived, and the late war has sent them
the way of the rest. Turkey and Persia have lost their independence,
however they may still be painted on the map, while Afghanistan has been
compelled to recognize white supremacy as never before. Thus the cycle is
fulfilled, and white political mastery over the brown world is complete.
Political triumphs, however, of themselves guarantee nothing, and the
permanence of the present order of things in the brown world appears more
than doubtful when we glance beyond the map. The brown world, like the
yellow world, is to-day in acute reaction against white supremacy. In
fact, the brown reaction began a full century ago, and has been gathering
headway ever since, moved thereto both by its own inherent vitality and by
the external stimulus of white aggression. The great dynamic of this brown
reaction is the Mohammedan Revival. But before analyzing that movement it
would be well to glance at the human elements involved.
Four salient groupings stand out among the brown peoples: India, Iran,
"Arabistan," and "Turkestan." The last two words are used in a special
sense to denote ethnic and cultural aggregations for which no precise
terms have hitherto been coined. India is the population-centre of the
brown world. More than 300,000,000 souls live within its
borders--two-thirds of all the brown men on earth. India has not, however,
been the brown world's spiritual or cultural dynamic, those forces coming
chiefly from the brown lands to the westward. Iran (the Persian plateau)
is comparatively small in area and has less than 15,000,000 inhabitants,
but its influence upon the brown world has been out of all proportion to
its size and population. "Arabistan" denotes the group of peoples, Arab in
blood or Arabized in language and culture, who inhabit the Arabian
peninsula and its adjacent annexes, Syria and Mesopotamia, together with
the vast band of North Africa lying between the Mediterranean and the
Sahara Desert. The total number of these Arabic peoples is 40,000,000,
three-fourths of them living in North Africa. The term "Turkestan" covers
the group of kindred peoples, often called "Turanians," who stretch from
Constantinople to Central Asia, including the Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor,
the Tartars of South Russia and Transcaucasia, and the Central Asian
Turkomans. They number in all about 25,000,000. Such are the four
outstanding race-factors in the brown world. Let us now examine that
spiritual factor, Islam, from which the brown renaissance originally
proceeded, and on which most of its present manifestations are based.
Islam's warlike vigor has impressed men's minds ever since the far-off
days when its pristine fervor bore the Fiery Crescent from France to
China. But with the passing cycles this fervor waned, and a century ago
Islam seemed plunged in the stupor of senile decay. The life appeared to
have gone out of it, leaving naught but the dry husks of empty formalism
and soulless ritual. Yet at this darkest hour a voice came crying from out
the vast Arabian desert, the cradle of Islam, calling the Faithful to
better things. This puritan reformer was the famous Abd-el-Wahab, and his
followers, known as Wahabees, soon spread over the length and breadth of
the Mohammedan world, purging Islam of its sloth and rekindling the fervor
of olden days. Thus began the great Mohammedan Revival.
That revival, like all truly regenerative movements, had its political as
well as its spiritual side. One of the first things which struck the
reformers was the political weakness of the Moslem world and its
increasing subjection to the Christian West. It was during the early
decades of the nineteenth century that the revival spread through Islam.
But this was the very time when Europe, recovering from the losses of the
Napoleonic Wars, began its unparalleled aggressions upon the Moslem East.
The result in Islam was a fusing of religion and patriotism into a "sacred
union" for the combined spiritual regeneration and political emancipation
of the Moslem world.
Of course Europe's material and military superiority were then so great
that speedy success was recognized to be a vain hope. Nevertheless, with
true Oriental patience, the reformers were content to work for distant
goals, and the results of their labors, though hidden from most Europeans,
was soon discernible to a few keen-sighted white observers. Half a century
ago the learned Orientalist Palgrave wrote these prophetic lines: "Islam
is even now an enormous power, full of self-sustaining vitality, with a
surplus for aggression; and a struggle with its combined energies would be
deadly indeed.... The Mohammedan peoples of the East have awakened to the
manifold strength and skill of their Western Christian rivals; and this
awakening, at first productive of respect and fear, not unmixed with
admiration, now wears the type of antagonistic dislike, and even of
intelligent hate. No more zealous Moslems are to be found in all the ranks
of Islam than they who have sojourned longest in Europe and acquired the
most intimate knowledge of its sciences and ways.... Mohammedans are
keenly alive to the ever-shifting uncertainties and divisions that
distract the Christianity of to-day, and to the woful instability of
modern European institutions. From their own point of view, Moslems are as
men standing on a secure rock, and they contrast the quiet fixity of their
own position with the unsettled and insecure restlessness of all
else."[34]
This stability to which Palgrave alludes must not be confused with dead
rigidity. Too many of us still think of the Moslem East as hopelessly
petrified. But those Westerners best acquainted with the Islamic world
assert that nothing could be farther from the truth; emphasizing, on the
contrary, Islam's present plasticity and rapid assimilation of Western
ideas and methods. "The alleged rigidity of Islam is a European myth,"[35]
says Theodore Morison, late principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental
College at Aligarh, India; and another Orientalist, Marmaduke Pickthall,
writes: "There is nothing in Islam, any more than in Christianity, which
should halt progress. The fact is that Christianity found, some time ago,
a _modus vivendi_ with modern life, while Islam has not yet arrived
thither. But this process is even now being worked out."[36]
The way in which the Mohammedan world has availed itself of white
institutions such as the newspaper in forging its new solidarity is well
portrayed by Bernard Temple. "It all comes to this, then," he writes.
"World-politics, as viewed by Mohammedanism's political leaders, resolve
themselves into a struggle--not necessarily a bloody struggle, but still
an intense and vital struggle--for place and power between the three great
divisions of mankind. The Moslem mind is deeply stirred by the prospect.
Every Moslem country is in communication with every other Moslem country:
directly, by means of special emissaries, pilgrims, travellers, traders,
and postal exchanges; indirectly, by means of Mohammedan newspapers,
books, pamphlets, leaflets, and periodicals. I have met with Cairo
newspapers in Bagdad, Teheran, and Peshawar; Constantinople newspapers in
Basra and Bombay; Calcutta newspapers in Mohammerah, Kerbela, and Port
Said."[37]
These European judgments are confirmed by what Asiatics say themselves.
For example, a Syrian Christian, Ameen Rihani, thus characterizes the
present strength and vitality of the Moslem world: "A nation of
250,000,000 souls, more than one-half under Christian rule, struggling to
shake off its fetters; to consolidate its opposing forces; replenishing
itself in the south and in the east from the inexhaustible sources of the
life primitive; assimilating in the north, but not without discrimination,
the civilization of Europe; a nation with a glorious past, a living faith
and language, an inspired Book, an undying hope, might be divided against
itself by European diplomacy but can never be subjugated by European
arms.... What Islam is losing on the borders of Europe it is gaining in
Africa and Central Asia through its modern propaganda, which is conducted
according to Christian methods. And this is one of the grand results of
'civilization by benevolent assimilation.' Europe drills the Moslem to be
a soldier who will ultimately turn his weapons against her; and she sends
her missionaries to awaken in the ulema the proselytizing evil."[38]
Typical of Mohammedan literature on this subject are the following
excerpts from a book published at Cairo in 1907 by an Egyptian, Yahya
Siddyk, significantly entitled "The Awakening of the Islamic Peoples in
the Fourteenth Century of the Hegira."[39] The book is doubly interesting
because the author has a thorough Western education, holding a law degree
from the French university of Toulouse, and is a judge on the Egyptian
bench. Although writing as far back as 1907, Yahya Siddyk clearly foresaw
the imminence of the European War. "Behold," he writes, "these Great
Powers ruining themselves in terrifying armaments; measuring each other's
strength with defiant glances; menacing each other; contracting alliances
which continually break and which presage those terrible shocks which
overturn the world and cover it with ruins, fire, and blood! The future is
God's, and nothing is lasting save His Will!"
He considers the white world degenerate. "Does this mean," he asks, "that
Europe, our 'enlightened guide,' has already reached the summit of its
evolution? Has it already exhausted its vital force by two or three
centuries of hyper-exertion? In other words: is it already stricken with
senility, and will it see itself soon obliged to yield its civilizing role
to other peoples less degenerate, less neurasthenic; that is to say,
younger, more robust, more healthy, than itself? In my opinion, the
present marks Europe's apogee, and its immoderate colonial expansion
means, not strength, but weakness. Despite the aureole of so much
grandeur, power, and glory, Europe is to-day more divided and more fragile
than ever, and ill conceals its malaise, its sufferings, and its anguish.
Its destiny is inexorably working out!...
"The contact of Europe on the East has caused us both much good and much
evil: good, in the material and intellectual sense; evil, from the moral
and political point of view. Exhausted by long struggles, enervated by a
brilliant civilization, the Moslem peoples inevitably fell into a malaise,
but they are not stricken, they are not dead! These peoples, conquered by
the force of cannon, have not in the least lost their unity, even under
the oppressive regimes to which the Europeans have long subjected them....
I have said that the European contact has been salutary to us from both
the material and the intellectual point of view. What reforming Moslem
Princes wished to impose by force on their Moslem subjects is to-day
realized a hundredfold. So great has been our progress in the last
twenty-five years in science, letters, and art that we may well hope to be
in all these things the equals of Europeans in less than half a
century....
"A new era opens for us with the fourteenth century of the Hegira, and
this happy century will mark our renaissance and our great future! A new
breath animates the Mohammedan peoples of all races; all Moslems are
penetrated with the necessity of work and instruction! We all wish to
travel, do business, tempt fortune, brave dangers. There is in the East,
among the Mohammedans, a surprising activity, an animation, unknown
twenty-five years ago.... There is to-day a real public opinion throughout
the East."
The author concludes: "Let us hold firm, each for all, and let us hope,
hope, hope! We are fairly launched on the path of progress: let us profit
by it! It is Europe's very tyranny which has wrought our transformation!
It is our continued contact with Europe which favors our evolution and
inevitably hastens our revival! It is simply History repeating itself; the
Will of God fulfilling itself despite all opposition and all
resistance.... Europe's tutelage over Asiatics is becoming more and more
nominal--the gates of Asia are closing against the European! Surely we
glimpse before us a revolution without parallel in the world's annals. A
new age is at hand!"[40]
If this be indeed the present spirit of Islam it is a portentous fact, for
its numerical strength is very great. The total number of Mohammedans is
estimated at from 200,000,000 to 250,000,000, and they not only
predominate throughout the brown world with the exception of India, but
they also count 10,000,000 adherents in China and are gaining prodigiously
among the blacks of Africa.
The proselyting power of Islam is extraordinary, and its hold upon its
votaries is even more remarkable. Throughout history there has been no
single instance where a people, once become Moslem, has ever abandoned the
faith. Extirpated they may have been, like the Moors of Spain, but
extirpation is not apostasy. This extreme tenacity of Islam, this ability
to keep its hold, once it has got a footing, under all circumstances short
of downright extirpation, must be borne in mind when considering the
future of regions where Islam is to-day advancing.
And, save in eastern Europe, it is to-day advancing along all its
far-flung frontiers. Its most signal victories are being won among the
negro races of central Africa, and this phase will be discussed in the
next chapter, but elsewhere the same conditions, in lesser degree,
prevail. Every Moslem is a born missionary and instinctively propagates
his faith among his non-Moslem neighbors. The quality of this missionary
temper has been well analyzed by Meredith Townsend. "All the emotions
which impel a Christian to proselytize," he writes, "are in a Mussulman
strengthened by all the motives which impel a political leader and all the
motives which sway a recruiting sergeant, until proselytism has become a
passion, which, whenever success seems practicable, and especially success
on a large scale, develops in the quietest Mussulman a fury of ardor which
induces him to break down every obstacle, his own strongest prejudices
included, rather than stand for an instant in the neophyte's way. He
welcomes him as a son, and whatever his own lineage, and whether the
convert be negro, or Chinaman, or Indian, or even European, he will
without hesitation or scruple give him his own child in marriage, and
admit him fully, frankly, and finally into the most exclusive circle in
the world."[41]
Such is the vast and growing body of Islam, to-day seeking to weld its
forces into a higher unity for the combined objectives of spiritual
revival and political emancipation. This unitary movement is known as
"Pan-Islamism." Most Western observers seem to think that Pan-Islamism
centres in the "Caliphate," and European writers to-day hopefully discuss
whether the Caliphate's retention by the discredited Turkish Sultans, its
transferrence to the rulers of the new Arab Hedjaz Kingdom, or its total
suppression, will best clip Islam's wings.
This, however, is a very short-sighted and partial view. The Khalifa or
"Caliph" (to use the Europeanized form), the Prophet's representative on
earth, has played an important historic role, and the institution is still
venerated in Islam. But the Pan-Islamic leaders have long been working on
a much broader basis. Pan-Islamism's real driving power lies, not in the
Caliphate, but in institutions like the "Hajj" or pilgrimage to Mecca, the
propaganda of the "Habl-ul-Matin" or "Tie of True Believers," and the
great religious fraternities. The Meccan Hajj, where tens of thousands of
picked zealots gather every year from every quarter of the Moslem world,
is really an annual Pan-Islamic congress, where all the interests of the
faith are discussed at length, and where plans are elaborated for its
defense and propagation. Similarly ubiquitous is the Pan-Islamic
propaganda of the Habl-ul-Matin, which works tirelessly to compose
sectarian differences and traditional feuds. Lastly, the religious
brotherhoods cover the Islamic world with a network of far-flung
associations, quickening the zeal of their myriad members and
co-ordinating their energies for potential action.
The greatest of these brotherhoods (though there are others of importance)
is the famous Senussiyah, and its history well illustrates Islam's
evolution during the past hundred years. Its founder, Seyyid Mahommed ben
Senussi, was born in Algeria about the beginning of the nineteenth
century. He was of high Arab lineage, tracing his descent from Fatima, the
daughter of the Prophet. In early youth he went to Arabia and there came
under the influence of the Wahabee movement. In middle life he returned to
Africa, settling in the Sahara Desert, and there built up the fraternity
which bears his name. Before his death the order had spread to all parts
of the Mohammedan world, but it is in northern Africa that it has attained
its peculiar pre-eminence. The Senussi Order is divided into local
"Zawias" or lodges, all absolutely dependent upon the Grand Lodge, headed
by The Master, El Senussi. The Grand Mastership still remains in the
family, a grandson of the founder being the order's present head. The
Senussi stronghold is an oasis in the very heart of the Sahara. Only one
European eye has ever seen this mysterious spot. Surrounded by absolute
desert, with wells many leagues apart and the routes of approach known
only to experienced Senussi guides, every one of whom would suffer a
thousand deaths rather than betray him, El Senussi, The Master, sits
serenely apart, sending his orders throughout North Africa.
The Sahara itself is absolutely under Senussi control, while "Zawias"
abound in distant regions like Morocco, Lake Chad, and Somaliland. These
local Zawias are more than mere "lodges." Their spiritual and secular
heads, the "Mokaddem" or priest and the "Wekil" or civil governor, have
discretionary authority not merely over the Zawia members, but also over
the community at large--at least, so great is the awe inspired by the
Senussi throughout North Africa that a word from Wekil or Mokaddem is
always listened to and obeyed. Thus, beside the various European
authorities, British, French, or Italian as the case may be, there exists
an occult government with which the colonial authorities are careful not
to come into conflict.
On their part, the Senussi are equally careful to avoid a downright breach
with the European Powers. Their long-headed, cautious policy is truly
astonishing. For more than half a century the order has been a great
force, yet it has never risked the supreme adventure. In all the numerous
fanatic risings against Europeans which have occurred in various parts of
Africa, local Senussi have undoubtedly taken part, but the order has never
officially entered the lists.
These Fabian tactics as regards open warfare do not mean that the Senussi
are idle. Far from it. On the contrary, they are ceaselessly at work with
the spiritual arms of teaching, discipline, and conversion. The Senussi
programme is the welding, first of Moslem Africa, and later of the whole
Moslem world, into the revived "Imamat" of Islam's early days; into a
great theocracy, embracing all true believers--in other words,
Pan-Islamism. But they believe that the political liberation of Islam from
Christian domination must be preceded by a profound spiritual
regeneration, thereby engendering the moral forces necessary both for the
war of liberation and for the fruitful reconstruction which should follow
thereafter. This is the secret of the order's extraordinary
self-restraint. This is the reason why, year after year, and decade after
decade, the Senussi advance slowly, calmly, coldly, gathering great latent
power but avoiding the temptation to expend it one instant before the
proper time. Meanwhile they are covering Africa with their lodges and
schools, disciplining the people to the voice of their Mokaddems and
Wekils--and converting millions of pagan negroes to the faith of Islam.
And what is true of the Senussi holds equally for the other wise leaders
who guide the Pan-Islamic movement. They know both Europe's strength and
their own weakness. They know the peril of premature action. Feeling that
time is on their side, they are content to await the hour when internal
regeneration and external pressure shall have filled to overflowing the
cup of wrath. This is why Islam has offered only local resistance to the
unparalleled white aggressions of the last twenty years. This is the main
reason why there was no real "Holy War" in 1914. But the materials for a
Holy War have long been piling high, as a retrospective glance will show.
Europe's conquests of Africa and Central Asia toward the close of the last
century, and the subsequent Anglo-French agreement mutually appropriating
Egypt and Morocco, evoked murmurs of impotent fury from the Moslem world.
Under such circumstances the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 sent a feverish
tremor throughout Islam. The Japanese might be idolaters, but the
traditional Moslem loathing of idolaters as beings much lower than
Christians and Jews (recognized by Mohammed as "Peoples of The Book") was
quite effaced by the burning sense of subjugation to the Christian yoke.
Accordingly, the Japanese were hailed as heroes throughout Islam. Here we
see again that tendency toward an understanding between Asiatic and
African races and creeds (in other words, a "Pan-Colored" alliance against
white domination) which has been so patent in recent years. The way in
which Islamic peoples began looking to Japan is revealed by this editorial
in a Persian newspaper, written in the year 1906: "Desirous of becoming as
powerful as Japan and of safeguarding its national independence, Persia
should make common cause with it. An alliance becomes necessary. There
should be a Japanese ambassador at Teheran. Japanese instructors should be
chosen to reorganize the army. Commercial relations should also be
developed."[42] Indeed, some pious Moslems hoped to bring this heroic
people within the Islamic fold. Shortly after the Russo-Japanese War a
Chinese Mohammedan sheikh wrote: "If Japan thinks of becoming some day a
very great power and making Asia the dominator of the other continents, it
will be only by adopting the blessed religion of Islam."[43] And _Al
Mowwayad_, an Egyptian Nationalist journal, remarked: "England, with her
60,000,000 Indian Moslems, dreads this conversion. With a Mohammedan
Japan, Mussulman policy would change entirely."[44] As a matter of fact,
Mohammedan missionaries actually went to Japan, where they were smilingly
received. Of course the Japanese had not the faintest intention of turning
Moslems, but these spontaneous approaches from the brown world were quite
in line with their ambitious plans, which, as the reader will remember,
were just then taking concrete shape.
However, it soon became plain that Japan had no present intention of going
so far afield as Western Asia, and Islam presently had to mourn fresh
losses at Christian hands. In 1911 came Italy's barefaced raid on Turkey's
African dependency of Tripoli. So bitter was the anger in all Mohammedan
lands at this unprovoked aggression that many European observers became
seriously alarmed. "Why has Italy found 'defenseless' Tripoli such a
hornet's nest?" queried Gabriel Hanotaux, a former French minister of
foreign affairs. "It is because she has to do, not merely with Turkey, but
with Islam as well. Italy has set the ball rolling--so much the worse for
her--and for us all."[45] But the Tripoli expedition was only the
beginning of the Christian assault, for next year came the Balkan War,
which sheared away Turkey's European holdings to the walls of
Constantinople and left her crippled and discredited. At these disasters a
cry of wrathful anguish swept the world of Islam from end to end. Here is
how a leading Indian Moslem interpreted the Balkan conflict:
"The King of Greece orders a new crusade. From the London Chancelleries
rise calls to Christian fanaticism, and Saint Petersburg already speaks of
the planting of the cross on the dome of Sant' Sophia. To-day they speak
thus; to-morrow they will thus speak of Jerusalem and the Mosque of Omar.
Brothers! Be ye of one mind, that it is the duty of every true believer to
hasten beneath the Khalifa's banner and to sacrifice his life for the
safety of the faith."[46] And another Indian Moslem leader thus adjured
the British authorities: "I appeal to the present government to change its
anti-Turkish attitude before the fury of millions of Moslem fellow
subjects is kindled to a blaze and brings disaster."[47]
Still more significant were the appeals made by the Indian Moslems to
their Brahman fellow countrymen, the traditionally despised "Idolaters."
These appeals betokened a veritable revolution in outlook, as can be
gauged from the text of one of them, significantly entitled "The Message
of the East." "Spirit of the East," reads this noteworthy document, "arise
and repel the swelling flood of Western aggression! Children of Hindustan,
aid us with your wisdom, culture, and wealth; lend us your power, the
birthright and heritage of the Hindu! Let the Spirit Powers hidden in the
Himalayan mountain-peaks arise. Let prayers to the god of battles float
upward; prayers that right may triumph over might; and call to your myriad
gods to annihilate the armies of the foe!"[48] In China also the same
fraternizing spirit was visible. During the Republican Revolution the
Chinese Mohammedans, instead of holding jealously aloof, co-operated
whole-heartedly with their Buddhist and Confucian fellow citizens, and
Doctor Sun-Yat-Sen, the Republican leader, announced gratefully: "The
Chinese will never forget the assistance which their Moslem compatriots
have rendered in the interest of order and liberty."[49] The Great War
thus found Islam deeply stirred against European aggression, keenly
conscious of its own solidarity, and frankly reaching out for colored
allies in the projected struggle against white domination.
Under these circumstances it may at first sight appear strange that no
general Islamic explosion occurred when Turkey entered the lists at the
close of 1914 and the Sultan-Khalifa issued a formal summons to the Holy
War. Of course this summons was not the flat failure which Allied reports
led the West to believe at the time. As a matter of fact there was trouble
in practically every Mohammedan land under Allied control. To name only a
few of many instances: Egypt broke into a tumult smothered only by
overwhelming British reinforcements, Tripoli burst into a flame of
insurrection that drove the Italians headlong to the coast, Persia was
prevented from joining Turkey only by prompt Russian intervention, and the
Indian Northwest Frontier was the scene of fighting that required the
presence of a quarter of a million Anglo-Indian troops. The British
Government has officially admitted that during 1915 the Allies' Asiatic
and African possessions stood within a hand's breadth of a cataclysmic
insurrection.
That insurrection would certainly have taken place if Islam's leaders had
everywhere spoken the fateful word. But the word was not spoken. Instead,
influential Moslems outside of Turkey generally condemned the latter's
action and did all in their power to calm the passions of the fanatic
multitude. The attitude of these leaders does credit to their
discernment. They recognized that this was neither the time nor the
occasion for a decisive struggle with the West. They were not yet
materially prepared, and they had not perfected their understandings
either among themselves or with their prospective non-Moslem allies. Above
all, the moral urge was lacking. They knew that athwart the Khalifa's writ
was stencilled "Made in Germany." They knew that the "Young Turk" clique
which had engineered the coup was made up of Europeanized renegades, many
of them not even nominal Moslems, but atheistic Jews. Far-sighted Moslems
had no intention of pulling Germany's chestnuts out of the fire, nor did
they wish to further Prussian schemes of world-dominion which for
themselves would have meant a mere change of masters. Far better to let
the white world fight out its desperate feud, weaken itself, and reveal
fully its future intentions. Meanwhile Islam could bide its time, grow in
strength, and await the morrow.
The Versailles Peace Conference was just such a revelation of European
intentions as the Pan-Islamic leaders had been awaiting in order to
perfect their programmes and enlist the moral solidarity of their peoples.
At Versailles the European Powers showed unequivocally that they had no
intention of relaxing their hold upon the Near and Middle East. By a
number of secret treaties negotiated during the war the Ottoman Empire had
been virtually partitioned between the victorious Allies, and these secret
treaties formed the basis of the Versailles settlement. Furthermore,
Egypt had been declared a British protectorate at the very beginning of
the European struggle, while the Versailles Conference had scarcely
adjourned before England announced an "agreement" with Persia which made
that country another British protectorate, in fact, if not in name. The
upshot was, as already stated, that the Near and Middle East were
subjected to European political domination as never before.
But there was another side to the shield. During the war years the Allied
statesmen had officially proclaimed times without number that the war was
being fought to establish a new world-order based on such principles as
the rights of small nations and the liberty of all peoples. These
pronouncements had been treasured and memorized throughout the East. When,
therefore, the East saw a peace settlement based, not upon these high
professions, but upon the imperialistic secret treaties, it was fired with
a moral indignation and sense of outraged justice never known before. A
tide of impassioned determination began rising which has already set the
entire East in tumultuous ferment, and which seems merely the premonitory
ground-swell of a greater storm. Many European students of Eastern affairs
are gravely alarmed at the prospect. Here, for example, is the judgment of
Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta, an Italian authority on Oriental and
Mohammedan questions. Speaking in the spring of 1919 on the war's effect
on the East, he said: "The convulsion has shaken Islamitic and Oriental
civilization to its foundations. The entire Oriental world, from China to
the Mediterranean, is in ferment. Everywhere the hidden fire of
anti-European hatred is burning. Riots in Morocco, risings in Algiers,
discontent in Tripoli, so-called Nationalist attempts in Egypt, Arabia,
and Lybia, are all different manifestations of the same deep sentiment,
and have as their object the rebellion of the Oriental world against
European civilization."[50]
The state of affairs in Egypt is a typical illustration of what has been
going on in the East ever since the close of the late war. Egypt was
occupied by England in 1882, and British rule has conferred immense
material benefits, raising the country from anarchic bankruptcy to ordered
prosperity. Yet British rule was never really popular, and as the years
passed a "Nationalist" movement steadily grew in strength, having for its
slogan the phrase "Egypt for the Egyptians," and demanding Britain's
complete evacuation of the country. This demand Great Britain refused even
to consider. Practically all Englishmen are agreed that Egypt with the
Suez Canal is the vital link between the eastern and western halves of the
British Empire, and they therefore consider the permanent occupation of
Egypt an absolute necessity. There is thus a clear deadlock between
British imperial and Egyptian national convictions.
Some years before the war Egypt became so unruly that England was obliged
to abandon all thoughts of conciliation and initiated a regime of frank
repression enforced by Lord Kitchener's heavy hand. The European War and
Turkey's adhesion to the Teutonic Powers caused fresh outbreaks in Egypt,
but these were quickly repressed and England took advantage of Ottoman
belligerency to abolish the fiction of Turkish overlordship and declare
Egypt a protectorate of the British Empire.
During the war Egypt, flooded with British troops, remained quiet, but the
end of the war gave the signal for an unparalleled outburst of Nationalist
activity. Basing their claims on such doctrines as the "rights of small
nations" and the "self-determination of peoples," the Nationalists
demanded immediate independence and attempted to get Egypt's case before
the Versailles Peace Conference. In defiance of English prohibitions, they
even held a popular plebiscite which upheld their claims. When the British
authorities answered this defiance by arresting Nationalist leaders, Egypt
flamed into rebellion from end to end. Everywhere it was the same story.
Railways and telegraph lines were systematically cut. Trains were stalled
and looted. Isolated British officers and soldiers were murdered. In Cairo
alone, thousands of houses were sacked by the mob. Soon the danger was
rendered more acute by the irruption out of the desert of swarms of
Bedouin Arabs bent on plunder. For a few days Egypt trembled on the verge
of anarchy, and the British Government admitted in Parliament that all
Egypt was in a state of insurrection.
The British authorities, however, met the crisis with vigor and
determination. The number of British troops in Egypt was very large,
trusty black regiments were hurried up from the Sudan, and the
well-disciplined Egyptian native police generally obeyed orders. The
result was that after several weeks of sharp fighting, lasting through the
spring of 1919, Egypt was again gotten under control. The outlook for the
future is, however, ominous in the extreme. Order is indeed restored, but
only the presence of massed British and Sudanese black troops guarantees
that order will be maintained. Even under the present regime of stern
martial law hardly a month passes without fresh rioting and heavy loss of
life. Egypt appears Nationalist to the core, its spokesmen swear they will
accept nothing short of independence, and in the long run Britain will
realize the truth of that pithy saying: "You can do everything with
bayonets except sit on them."
India is likewise in a state of profound unrest. The vast peninsula has
been controlled by England for almost two centuries, yet here again the
last two decades have witnessed a rapidly increasing movement against
British rule. This movement was at first confined to the upper-class
Hindus, the great Mohammedan element preserving its traditional loyalty to
the British "Raj," which it considered a protection against the
Brahmanistic Hindu majority. But, as already seen, the Pan-Islamic leaven
presently reached the Indian Moslems, European aggressions on Islam
stirred their resentment, and at length Moslem and Hindu adjourned their
ancient feud in their new solidarity against European tutelage.
The Great War provoked relatively little sedition in India. Groups of
Hindu extremists, to be sure, hatched terroristic plots and welcomed
German aid, but India as a whole backed England and helped win the war
with both money and men. At the same time, Indians gave notice that they
expected their loyalty to be rewarded, and at the close of the war various
memorials were drawn up calling for drastic modifications of the existing
governmental regime.
India is to-day governed by an English Civil Service whose fairness,
honesty, and general efficiency no informed person can seriously impugn.
But this no longer contents Indian aspirations. India desires not merely
good government but self-government. The ultimate goal of all Indian
reformers is emancipation from European tutelage, though they differ among
themselves as to how and when this emancipation is to be attained. The
most conservative would be content with self-government under British
guidance, the middle group asks for the full status of a Dominion of the
British Empire like Canada and Australia, while the radicals demand
complete independence. Even the most conservative of these demands would,
however, involve great changes of system and a diminution of British
control. Such demands arouse in England mistrust and apprehension.
Englishmen point out that India is not a nation but a congeries of
diverse peoples spiritually sundered by barriers of blood, language,
culture, and religion, and they conclude that, if England's control were
really relaxed, India would get out of hand and drift toward anarchy. As
for Indian independence, the average Englishman cannot abide the thought,
holding it fatal both for the British Empire and for India itself. The
result has been that England has failed to meet Indian demands, and this,
in turn, has roused an acute recrudescence of dissatisfaction and unrest.
The British Government has countered with coercive legislation like the
Rowlatt Acts and has sternly repressed rioting and terrorism. British
authority is still supreme in India. But it is an authority resting more
and more upon force. In fact, some Englishmen have long considered British
rule in India, despite its imposing appearance, a decidedly fragile
affair. Many years ago Meredith Townsend, who certainly knew India well,
wrote:
"The English think they will rule India for many centuries or forever. I
do not think so, holding rather the older belief that the empire which
came in a day will disappear in a night.... Above all this inconceivable
mass of humanity, governing all, protecting all, taxing all, rises what we
call here 'the Empire,' a corporation of less than 1,500 men, partly
chosen by examination, partly by co-optation, who are set to govern, and
who protect themselves in governing by finding pay for a minute white
garrison of 65,000 men, one-fifth of the Roman legions--though the masses
to be controlled are double the subjects of Rome. That corporation and
that garrison constitute the 'Indian Empire.' There is nothing else.
Banish those 1,500 men in black, defeat that slender garrison in red, and
the empire has ended, the structure disappears, and brown India emerges,
unchanged and unchangeable. To support the official world and its
garrison--both, recollect, smaller than those of Belgium--there is, except
Indian opinion, absolutely nothing. Not only is there no white race in
India, not only is there no white colony, but there is no white man who
purposes to remain.... There are no white servants, not even grooms, no
white policemen, no white postmen, no white anything. If the brown men
struck for a week, the 'Empire' would collapse like a house of cards, and
every ruling man would be a starving prisoner in his own house. He could
not move or feed himself or get water."[51]
These words aptly illustrate the truth stated at the beginning of this
book that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics but race, and
that the most imposing political phenomena, of themselves, mean nothing.
And that is just the fatal weakness underlying the white man's present
political domination over the brown world. Throughout that entire world
there is no settled white population save in the French colonies of
Algeria and Tunis along the Mediterranean seaboard, where whites form
perhaps one-sixth of the total. Elsewhere, from Morocco to the Dutch
Indies, there is in the racial sense, as Townsend well says, "no white
anything," and if white rule vanished to-morrow it would not leave a human
trace behind. White rule is therefore purely political, based on
prescription, prestige, and lack of effective opposition. These are indeed
fragile foundations. Let the brown world once make up its mind that the
white man _must_ go, and he _will_ go, for his position will have become
simply impossible. It is not solely a question of a "Holy War"; mere
passive resistance, if genuine and general, would shake white rule to its
foundations. And it is precisely the determination to get rid of white
rule which seems to be spreading like wild-fire over the brown world
to-day. The unrest which I have described in Egypt and India merely typify
what is going on in Morocco, Central Asia, the Dutch Indies, the
Philippines, and every other portion of the brown world whose inhabitants
are above the grade of savages.
Another factor favoring the prospects of brown emancipation is the lack of
sustained resistance which the white world would probably offer. For the
white world's interests in these regions, though great, are not
fundamental; that is to say, racial. However grievously they might suffer
politically and economically, racially the white peoples would lose almost
nothing. Here again we see the basic importance of race in human affairs.
Contrast, for example, England's attitude toward an insurgent India with
France's attitude toward an insurgent North Africa. England, with nothing
racial at stake, would hesitate before a reconquest of India involving
millions of soldiers and billions of treasure. France, on the other hand,
with nearly a million Europeans in her North African possessions, half of
these full-blooded Frenchmen, might risk her last franc and her last
_poilu_ rather than see these blood-brothers slaughtered and enslaved.
Assuming, then, what to-day seems probable, that white political control
over the brown world is destined to be sensibly curtailed if not generally
eliminated, what are the larger racial implications? Above all: will the
browns tend to impinge on white race-areas as the yellows show signs of
doing? Probably, no; at least, not to any great extent. In the first
place, the brown world has within its present confines plenty of room for
potential race-expansion. Outside India, Egypt, Java, and a few lesser
spots, there is scarcely a brown land where natural improvements such as
irrigation would not open up extensive settlement areas. Mesopotamia
alone, now almost uninhabited, might support a vast population, while
Persia could nourish several times its present inhabitants.
India, to be sure, is almost as congested as China, and the spectre of the
Indian coolie has lately alarmed white lands like Canada and South Africa
almost as much as the Chinese coolie has done. But an independent India
would fall under the same political blight as the rest of the brown
world--the blight of internecine dissensions and wars. The brown world's
present growing solidarity is not a positive but a negative phenomenon. It
is an alliance, against a common foe, of traditional enemies who, once the
bond was loosed in victory, would inevitably quarrel among themselves.
Turk would fly at Arab and Turkoman at Persian, as of yore, while India
would become a welter of contending Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and
heaven knows what, until perchance disciplined anew by the pressure of a
Yellow Peril. In Western Asia it is possible that the spiritual and
cultural bonds of Islam might temper these struggles, but Western Asia is
precisely that part of the brown world where population-pressure is
absent. India, the overpeopled brown land, would undergo such a cycle of
strife as would devour its human surplus and render distant aggressions
impossible.
A potential brown menace to white race-areas would, indeed, arise in case
of a brown-yellow alliance against the white peoples. But such an alliance
could occur only in the first stages of a pan-colored war of liberation
while the pressure of white world-predominance was still keenly felt and
before the divisive tendencies within the brown world had begun to take
effect.
Short of such an alliance (wherein the browns would abet the yellows'
aggressive, racial objectives in return for yellow support of their own
essentially defensive, political ends), the brown world's emancipation
from white domination would apparently not result in more than local
pressures on white race-areas. It would, however, affect another sphere of
white political control--black Africa. The emancipation of brown, Islamic
North Africa would inevitably send a sympathetic thrill through every
portion of the Dark Continent and would stir both Mohammedan and pagan
negroes against white rule. Islam is, in fact, the intimate link between
the brown and black worlds. But this subject, with its momentous
implications, will be discussed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER IV
BLACK MAN'S LAND
Black Man's Land is primarily Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Here
dwell the bulk of all the 150,000,000 black men on earth. The negro and
negroid population of Africa is estimated at about
120,000,000--four-fifths of the black race-total. Besides its African
nucleus the black race has two distant outposts: the one in Australasia,
the other in the Americas. The Eastern blacks are found mainly in the
archipelagoes lying between the Asiatic land-mass and Australia. They are
the Oriental survivors of the black belt which in very ancient times
stretched uninterruptedly from Africa across southern Asia to the Pacific
Ocean. The Asiatic blacks were overwhelmed by other races ages ago, and
only a few wild tribes like the "Negritos" of the Philippines and the
jungle-dwellers of Indo-China and southern India survive as genuine
negroid stocks. All the peoples of southern Asia, however, are darkened by
this ancient negroid strain. The peoples of south India are notably tinged
with black blood. As for the pure blacks of the Australasian
archipelagoes, they are so few in numbers (about 3,000,000) and so low in
type that they are of negligible importance. Quite otherwise are the
blacks of the Far West. In the western hemisphere there are some
25,000,000 persons of more or less mixed black blood, brought thither in
modern times as slaves by the white conquerors of the New World. Still,
whatever may be the destiny of these transplanted black folk, the black
man's chief significance, from the world aspect, must remain bound up with
the great nucleus of negro population in the African homeland.
Black Africa, as I have said, lies south of the Sahara Desert. Here the
negro has dwelt for unnumbered ages. The key-note of black history, like
yellow history, has been isolation. Cut off from the Mediterranean by the
desert which he had no means of crossing, and bounded elsewhere by oceans
which he had no skill in navigating, the black man vegetated in savage
obscurity, his habitat being well named the "Dark Continent."
Until the white tide began breaking on its sea-fronts four centuries ago,
the black world's only external stimuli had come from brown men landing on
its eastern coasts or ascending the valley of the Nile. As time passed,
both brown and white pressures became more intense, albeit the browns long
led in the process of penetration. Advancing from the east and trickling
across the desert from the north, Arab or Arabized adventurers conquered
black Africa to the equator; and this political subjugation had also a
racial side, for the conquerors sowed their blood freely and set a
brownish stamp on many regions. As for the whites, they long remained mere
birds of passage. Half a century ago they possessed little more than
trading-posts along the littorals, their only real settlement lying in the
extreme south.
Then, suddenly, all was changed. In the closing decades of the nineteenth
century, Europe turned its gaze full upon the Dark Continent, and within a
generation Africa was partitioned between the European Powers. Negro and
Arab alike fell under European domination. Only minute Liberia and remote
Abyssinia retained a qualified independence. Furthermore, white settlement
also made distinct progress. The tropical bulk of Africa defied white
colonization, but the continent's northern and southern extremities were
climatically "white man's country." Accordingly, there are to-day nearly a
million whites settled along the Algerian and Tunisian seaboard, while in
South Africa, Dutch and British blood has built up a powerful commonwealth
containing fully one and one-half million white souls. In Africa, unlike
Asia, the European has taken root, and has thus gained at least local
tenures of a fundamental nature.
The crux of the African problem therefore resolves itself into the
question whether the white man, through consolidated racial holds north
and south, will be able to perpetuate his present political control over
the intermediate continental mass which climate debars him from
populating. This is a matter of great importance, for Africa is a land of
enormous potential wealth, the natural source of Europe's tropical raw
materials and foodstuffs. Whether Europe is to retain possession depends,
in the last analysis, on the character of the inhabitants. It is, then,
to the nature of the black man and his connection with the brown world
that we must direct our attention.
From the first glance we see that, in the negro, we are in the presence of
a being differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from
those human types which we discovered in our surveys of the brown and
yellow worlds. The black man is, indeed, sharply differentiated from the
other branches of mankind. His outstanding quality is superabundant animal
vitality. In this he easily surpasses all other races. To it he owes his
intense emotionalism. To it, again, is due his extreme fecundity, the
negro being the quickest of breeders. This abounding vitality shows in
many other ways, such as the negro's ability to survive harsh conditions
of slavery under which other races have soon succumbed. Lastly, in ethnic
crossings, the negro strikingly displays his prepotency, for black blood,
once entering a human stock, seems never really bred out again.
Negro fecundity is a prime factor in Africa's future. In the savage state
which until recently prevailed, black multiplication was kept down by a
wide variety of checks. Both natural and social causes combined to
maintain an extremely high death-rate. The negro's political ineptitude,
never rising above the tribal concept, kept black Africa a mosaic of
peoples, warring savagely among themselves and widely addicted to
cannibalism. Then, too, the native religions were usually sanguinary,
demanding a prodigality of human sacrifices. The killings ordained by
negro wizards and witch-doctors sometimes attained unbelievable
proportions. The combined result of all this was a wastage of life which
in other races would have spelled a declining population. Since the
establishment of white political control, however, these checks on black
fecundity are no longer operative. The white rulers fight filth and
disease, stop tribal wars, and stamp out superstitious abominations. In
consequence, population increases by leaps and bounds, the latent
possibilities being shown in the native reservations in South Africa,
where tribes have increased as much as tenfold in fifty or sixty years. It
is therefore practically certain that the African negroes will multiply
prodigiously in the next few decades.
Now, what will be the attitude of these augmenting black masses toward
white political dominion? To that momentous query no certain answer can be
made. One thing, however, seems clear: the black world's reaction to white
ascendancy will be markedly different from those of the brown and yellow
worlds, because of the profound dissimilarities between negroes and men of
other stocks. To begin with, the black peoples have no historic pasts.
Never having evolved civilizations of their own, they are practically
devoid of that accumulated mass of beliefs, thoughts, and experiences
which render Asiatics so, impenetrable and so hostile to white influences.
Although the white race displays sustained constructive power to an
unrivalled degree, particularly in its Nordic branches, the brown and
yellow peoples have contributed greatly to the civilization of the world
and have profoundly influenced human progress. The negro, on the contrary,
has contributed virtually nothing. Left to himself, he remained a savage,
and in the past his only quickening has been where brown men have imposed
their ideas and altered his blood. The originating powers of the European
and the Asiatic are not in him.
This lack of constructive originality, however, renders the negro
extremely susceptible to external influences. The Asiatic, conscious of
his past and his potentialities, is chary of foreign innovations and
refuses to recognize alien superiority. The negro, having no past,
welcomes novelty and tacitly admits that others are his masters. Both
brown and white men have been so accepted in Africa. The relatively faint
resistance offered by the naturally brave blacks to white and brown
conquest, the ready reception of Christianity and Islam, and the
extraordinary personal ascendancy acquired by individual Arabs and
Europeans, all indicate a willingness to accept foreign tutelage which in
the Asiatic is wholly absent.
The Arab and the European are, in fact, rivals for the mastership of black
Africa. The Arab had a long start, but the European suddenly overtook him
and brought not only the blacks but the African Arabs themselves under his
sway. It remains to be seen whether the Arab, allying himself with the
blacks, can oust his white rival. That some such move will be attempted,
in view of the brown world's renaissance in general and the extraordinary
activity of the Arab peoples in particular, seems a foregone conclusion.
How the matter will work out depends on three things: (1) the brown man's
inherent strength in Africa; (2) the possibilities of black disaffection
against white tutelage; (3) the white man's strength and power of
resistance.
The seat of brown power in Africa is of course the great belt of territory
north of the Sahara. From Egypt to Morocco the inhabitants are Arabized in
culture and Mohammedan in faith, while Arab blood has percolated ever
since the Moslem conquest twelve centuries ago. In the eastern half of
this zone Arabization has been complete, and Egypt, Tripoli, and the Sudan
can be considered as unalterably wedded to the brown Islamic world. The
zone's western half, however, is in different case. The majority of its
inhabitants are Berbers, an ancient stock generally considered white, with
close affinities to the Latin peoples across the Mediterranean. As usual,
blood tells. The Berbers have been under Arab tutelage for over a thousand
years, yet their whole manner of life remains distinct, they have largely
kept their language, and there has been comparatively little
intermarriage. Pure-blooded Arabs abound, but they are still, in a way,
foreigners. To-day the entire region is under white, French, rule.
Algeria, in particular, has been politically French for almost a hundred
years. Europeans have come in and number nearly a million souls. The Arab
element shows itself sullen and refractory, but the Berbers display much
less aversion to French rule, which, as usual, is considerate of native
susceptibilities. The French colonial authorities are alive to the
Berber's ethnic affinities and tactfully seek to stimulate his dormant
white consciousness. In Algeria intermarriage between Europeans and
Berbers has actually begun. Of course the process is merely in its first
stages. Still, the blood is there, the leaven is working, and in time
Northwest Africa may return to the white world, where it was in Roman days
and where it racially belongs. In the anti-European disturbances now
taking place in Algeria and Tunis it is safe to say that the Arab element
is making most of the trouble.
It is Northeast Africa, then, which is the real nucleus of Arabism. Here
Arabism and Islam rule unchecked, and in the preceding chapter we saw how
the Senussi Order was marshalling the fierce nomads of the desert. These
tribesmen are relatively few in numbers, but more splendid fighting
material does not exist in the wide world. Furthermore, the Arab-negroid
peoples which have developed along the southern edge of the desert so
blend the martial qualities of both strains that they frequently display
an almost demoniacal fighting-power. It is Pan-Islamism's hope to use
these Arab or Arabized fanatics as an officers' corps for the black
millions whom it is converting to the faith.
Concerning Islam's steady progress in black Africa there can be no shadow
of a doubt. Every candid European observer tells the same story.
"Mohammedanism," says Sir Charles Elliott, "can still give the natives a
motive for animosity against Europeans and a unity of which they are
otherwise incapable."[52] Twenty years ago another English observer, T. R.
Threlfall, wrote: "Mohammedanism is making marvellous progress in the
interior of Africa. It is crushing paganism out. Against it the Christian
propaganda is a myth.... The rapid spread of militant Mohammedanism among
the savage tribes to the north of the equator is a serious factor in the
fight for racial supremacy in Africa. With very few exceptions the colored
races of Africa are pre-eminently fighters. To them the law of the
stronger is supreme; they have been conquered, and in turn they conquered.
To them the fierce, warlike spirit inherent in Mohammedanism is infinitely
more attractive than is the gentle, peace-loving, high moral standard of
Christianity: hence, the rapid headway the former is making in central
Africa, and the certainty that it will soon spread to the south of the
Zambezi."[53]
The way in which Islam is marching southward is dramatically shown by a
recent incident. A few years ago the British authorities suddenly
discovered that Mohammedanism was pervading Nyassaland. An investigation
brought out the fact that it was the work of Zanzibar Arabs. They began
their propaganda about 1900. Ten years later almost every village in
southern Nyassaland had its Moslem teacher and its mosque-hut. Although
the movement was frankly anti-European, the British authorities did not
dare to check it for fear of repercussions elsewhere. Another interesting
fact, probably not unconnected, is that Nyassaland has lately been the
theatre of an anti-white "Christian" propaganda--the so-called "Ethiopian
Church," of which I shall presently speak.
Islam has thus two avenues of approach to the African negro--his natural
preference for a militant faith and his resentment at white tutelage. It
is the disinclination of the more martial African peoples for a pacific
creed which perhaps accounts for Christianity's slow progress among the
very warlike tribes of South Africa, such as the Zulus and the Matabele.
Islam is as yet unknown south of the Zambezi, but white men universally
dread the possibility of its appearance, fearing its effect upon the
natives. Of course Christianity has made distinct progress in the Dark
Continent. The natives of the South African Union are predominantly
Christianized. In east-central Africa Christianity has also gained many
converts, particularly in Uganda, while on the West African Guinea coast
Christian missions have long been established and have generally succeeded
in keeping Islam away from the seaboard. Certainly, all white men, whether
professing Christians or not, should welcome the success of missionary
efforts in Africa. The degrading fetishism and demonology which sum up the
native pagan cults cannot stand, and all negroes will some day be either
Christians or Moslems. In so far as he is Christianized, the negro's
savage instincts will be restrained and he will be disposed to acquiesce
in white tutelage. In so far as he is Islamized, the negro's warlike
propensities will be inflamed, and he will be used as the tool of Arab
Pan-Islamism seeking to drive the white man from Africa and make the
continent its very own.
As to specific anti-white sentiments among negroes untouched by Moslem
propaganda, such sentiments undoubtedly exist in many quarters. The
strongest manifestations are in South Africa, where interracial relations
are bad and becoming worse, but there is much diffused, half-articulate
dislike of white men throughout central Africa as well. Devoid though the
African savage is of either national or cultural consciousness, he could
not be expected to welcome a tutelage which imposed many irksome
restrictions upon him. Furthermore, the African negro does seem to possess
a certain rudimentary sense of race-solidarity. The existence of both
these sentiments is proved by the way in which the news of white military
reverses have at once been known and rejoiced in all over black Africa;
spread, it would seem, by those mysterious methods of communication
employed by negroes everywhere and called in our Southern States
"grape-vine telegraph." The Russo-Japanese War, for example, produced all
over the Dark Continent intensely exciting effects.
This generalized anti-white feeling has, during the past decade, taken
tangible form in South Africa. The white population of the Union, though
numbering 1,500,000, is surrounded by a black population four times as
great and increasing more rapidly, while in many sections the whites are
outnumbered ten to one. The result is a state of affairs exactly
paralleling conditions in our own South, the South African whites feeling
obliged to protect their ascendancy by elaborate legal regulations and
social taboos. The negroes have been rapidly growing more restive under
these discriminations, and unpleasant episodes like race-riots, rapings,
and lynchings are increasing in South Africa from year to year.
One of the most significant, not to say ominous, signs of the times is the
"Ethiopian Church" movement. The movement began about fifteen years ago,
some of its founders being Afro-American Methodist preachers--a fact which
throws a curious light on possible American negro reflexes upon their
ancestral homeland. The movement spread rapidly, many native mission
congregations cutting loose from white ecclesiastical control and joining
the negro organization. It also soon displayed frankly anti-white
tendencies, and the government became seriously alarmed at its unsettling
influence upon the native mind. It was suspected of having had a hand in
the Zulu rising which broke out in Natal in 1907 and which was put down
only after many whites and thousands of natives had lost their lives.
Shortly afterward the authorities outlawed the Ethiopian Church and
forbade Afro-American preachers to enter South Africa, but the movement,
though legally suppressed, lived surreptitiously on and appeared in new
quarters.
In 1915 a peculiarly fanatical form of Ethiopianism broke out in
Nyassaland. Its leader was a certain John Chilembwe, an Ethiopian preacher
who had been educated in the United States. His propaganda was bitterly
anti-white, asserting that Africa belonged to the black man, that the
white man was an intruder, and that he ought to be killed off until he
grew discouraged and abandoned the country. Chilembwe plotted a rising all
over Nyassaland, the killing of the white men, and the carrying off of the
white women. In January, 1915, the rising took place. Some plantations
were sacked and several whites killed, their heads being carried to
Chilembwe's "church," where a thanksgiving service for victory was held.
The whites, however, acted with great vigor, the poorly armed insurgents
were quickly scattered, and John Chilembwe himself was soon hunted down
and killed. In itself, the incident was of slight importance, but, taken
in connection with much else, it does not augur well for the future.[54]
An interesting indication of the growing sense of negro race-solidarity
was the "Pan-African Congress" held at Paris early in 1919. Here delegates
from black communities throughout the world gathered to discuss matters of
common interest. Most of the delegates were from Africa and the Americas,
but one delegate from New Guinea was also present, thus representing the
Australasian branch of the black race. The Congress was not largely
attended and was of a somewhat provisional character, but arrangements for
the holding of subsequent congresses were made.
Here, then, is the African problem's present status: To begin with, we
have a rapidly growing black population, increasingly restive under white
tutelage and continually excited by Pan-Islamic propaganda with the
further complication of another anti-white propaganda spread by negro
radicals from America.
The African situation is thus somewhat analogous to conditions in Asia.
But the analogy must not be pressed too far. In Asia white hegemony rests
solely on political bases, while the Asiatics themselves, browns and
yellows alike, display constructive power and possess civilizations built
up by their own efforts from the remote past. The Asiatics are to-day once
more displaying their innate capacity by not merely adopting, but
adapting, white ideas and methods. We behold an Asiatic _renaissance_,
whose genuineness is best attested by the fact that there have been
similar movements in past times.
None of this applies to Africa. The black race has never shown real
constructive power. It has never built up a native civilization. Such
progress as certain negro groups have made has been due to external
pressure and has never long outlived that pressure's removal, for the
negro, when left to himself, as in Haiti and Liberia, rapidly reverts to
his ancestral ways. The negro is a facile, even eager, imitator; but
there he stops. He adopts; but he does not adapt, assimilate, and give
forth creatively again.
The whole of history testifies to this truth. As the Englishman Meredith
Townsend says: "None of the black races, whether negro or Australian, have
shown within the historic time the capacity to develop civilization. They
have never passed the boundaries of their own habitats as conquerors, and
never exercised the smallest influence over peoples not black. They have
never founded a stone city, have never built a ship, have never produced a
literature, have never suggested a creed.... There seems to be no reason
for this except race. It is said that the negro has been buried in the
most 'massive' of the four continents, and has been, so to speak, lost to
humanity; but he was always on the Nile, the immediate road to the
Mediterranean, and in West and East Africa he was on the sea. Africa is
probably more fertile, and almost certainly richer than Asia, and is
pierced by rivers as mighty, and some of them at least as navigable. What
could a singularly healthy race, armed with a constitution which resists
the sun and defies malaria, wish for better than to be seated on the Nile,
or the Congo, or the Niger, in numbers amply sufficient to execute any
needed work, from the cutting of forests and the making of roads up to the
building of cities? How was the negro more secluded than the Peruvian; or
why was he 'shut up' worse than the Tartar of Samarcand, who one day shook
himself, gave up all tribal feuds, and, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the
Baltic and southward to the Nerbudda, mastered the world?... The negro
went by himself far beyond the Australian savage. He learned the use of
fire, the fact that sown grain will grow, the value of shelter, the use of
the bow and the canoe, and the good of clothes; but there to all
appearances he stopped, unable, until stimulated by another race like the
Arab, to advance another step."[55]
Unless, then, every lesson of history is to be disregarded, we must
conclude that black Africa is unable to stand alone. The black man's
numbers may increase prodigiously and acquire alien veneers, but the black
man's nature will not change. Black unrest may grow and cause much
trouble. Nevertheless, the white man must stand fast in Africa. No black
"renaissance" impends, and Africa, if abandoned by the whites, would
merely fall beneath the onset of the browns. And that would be a great
calamity. As stated in the preceding chapter, the brown peoples, of
themselves, do not directly menace white race-areas, while Pan-Islamism is
at present an essentially defensive movement. But Islam is militant by
nature, and the Arab is a restless and warlike breed. Pan-Islamism once
possessed of the Dark Continent and fired by militant zealots, might forge
black Africa into a sword of wrath, the executor of sinister adventures.
Fortunately the white man has every reason for keeping a firm hold on
Africa. Not only are its central tropics prime sources of raw materials
and foodstuffs which white direction can alone develop, but to north and
south the white man has struck deep roots into the soil. Both extremities
of the continent are "white man's country," where strong white peoples
should ultimately arise. Two of the chief white Powers, Britain and
France, are pledged to the hilt in this racial task and will spare no
effort to safeguard the heritage of their pioneering children. Brown
influence in Africa is strong, but it is supreme only in the northeast and
its line of communication with the Asiatic homeland runs over the narrow
neck of Suez. Should stern necessity arise, the white world could hold
Suez against Asiatic assault and crush brown resistance in Africa.
In short, the real danger to white control of Africa lies, not in brown
attack or black revolt, but in possible white weakness through chronic
discord within the white world itself. And that subject must be reserved
for later chapters.
CHAPTER V
RED MAN'S LAND
Red Man's Land is the Americas between the Rio Grande and the tropic of
Capricorn. Here dwells the "Amerindian" race. At the time of Columbus the
whole western hemisphere was theirs, but the white man has extirpated or
absorbed them to north and south, so that to-day the United States and
Canada in North America and the southern portions of South America are
genuine "white man's country." In the intermediate zone above mentioned,
however, the Amerindian has survived and forms the majority of the
population, albeit considerably mixed with white and to a lesser degree
with negro blood. The total number of "Indians," including both
full-bloods and mixed types, is about 40,000,000--more than two-thirds of
the whole population. In addition, there are several million negroes and
mulattoes, mostly in Brazil. The white population of the intermediate
zone, even if we include "near-whites," does not average more than 10 per
cent, though it varies greatly with different regions. The reader should
remember that neither the West India Islands nor the southern portion of
the South American continent are included in this generalization. In the
West Indies the Amerindian has completely died out and has been replaced
by the negro, while southern South America, especially Argentina and
Uruguay, are genuine white man's country in which there is little Indian
and no negro blood. Despite these exceptions, however, the fact remains
that, taken as a whole, "Latin America," the vast land-block from the Rio
Grande to Cape Horn, is racially not "Latin" but Amerindian or negroid,
with a thin Spanish or Portuguese veneer. In other words, though commonly
considered part of the white world, most of Latin America is ethnically
colored man's land, which has been growing more colored for the past
hundred years.
Latin America's evolution was predetermined by the Spanish Conquest. That
very word "conquest" tells the story. The United States was _settled_ by
colonists planning homes and bringing their women. It was thus a genuine
migration, and resulted in a full transplanting of white stock to new
soil. The Indians encountered were wild nomads, fierce of temper and few
in number. After sharp conflicts they were extirpated, leaving virtually
no ethnic traces behind. The colonization of Latin America was the exact
antithesis. The Spanish _Conquistadores_ were bold warriors descending
upon vast regions inhabited by relatively dense populations, some of
which, as in Mexico and Peru, had attained a certain degree of
civilization. The Spaniards, invincible in their shining armor, paralyzed
with terror these people still dwelling in the age of bronze and polished
stone. With ridiculous ease mere handfuls of whites overthrew empires and
lorded it like gods over servile and adoring multitudes. Cortez marched
on Mexico with less than 600 followers, while Pizarro had but 310
companions when he started his conquest of Peru. Of course the fabulous
treasures amassed in these exploits drew swarms of bold adventurers from
Spain. Nevertheless, their numbers were always infinitesimal compared with
the vastness of the quarry, while the proportion of women immigrants
continued to lag far behind that of the men. The breeding of pure whites
in Latin America was thus both scanty and slow.
On the other hand, the breeding of mixed-bloods began at once and attained
notable proportions. Having slaughtered the Indian males or brigaded them
in slave-gangs, the Conquistadores took the Indian women to themselves.
The humblest man-at-arms had several female attendants, while the leaders
became veritable pashas with great harems of concubines. The result was a
prodigious output of half-breed children, known as "mestizos" or "cholos."
And soon a new ethnic complication was added. The Indians having developed
a melancholy trick of dying off under slavery, the Spaniards imported
African negroes to fill the servile ranks, and since they took negresses
as well as Indian women for concubines, other
half-breeds--mulattoes--appeared. Here and there Indians and negroes mated
on their own account, the offspring being known as "zambos." In time these
various hybrids bred among themselves, producing the most extraordinary
ethnic combinations. As Garcia-Calderon well puts it: "Grotesque
generations with every shade of complexion and every conformation of
skull were born in America--a crucible continually agitated by unheard-of
fusions of races.... But there was little Latin blood to be found in the
homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated
America."[56]
To be sure, this mongrel population long remained politically negligible.
The Spaniards regarded themselves as a master-caste, and excluded all save
pure whites from civic rights and social privileges. In fact, the
European-born Spaniards refused to recognize even their colonial-born
kinsmen as their equals, and "Creoles"[57] could not aspire to the higher
distinctions or offices. This attitude was largely inspired by the desire
to maintain a lucrative monopoly. Yet the European's sense of superiority
had some valid grounds. There can be no doubt that the Creole whites, as a
class, showed increasing signs of degeneracy. Climate was a prime cause in
the hotter regions, but there were many plateau areas, as in Colombia,
Mexico, and Peru, which though geographically in the tropics had a
temperate climate from their elevation.
Even more than by climate the Creole was injured by contact with the
colored races. Pampered and corrupted from birth by obsequious slaves, the
Creole usually led an idle and vapid existence, disdaining work as
servile and debarred from higher callings by his European-born superiors.
As time passed, the degeneracy due to climate and custom was intensified
by degeneracy of blood. Despite legal enactment and social taboo, colored
strains percolated insidiously into the creole stock. The leading
families, by elaborate precautions, might succeed in keeping their
escutcheons clean, but humbler circles darkened significantly despite
fervid protestations of "pure-white" blood. Still, so long as Spain kept
her hold on Latin America, the process of miscegenation, socially
considered, was a slow one. The whole social system was based on the idea
of white superiority, and the colors were carefully graded. "In America,"
wrote Humboldt toward the close of Spanish rule, "the more or less white
skin determines the position which a man holds in society."[58]
The revolution against Spain had momentous consequences for the racial
future of Latin America. In the beginning, to be sure, it was a white
civil war--a revolt of the Creoles against European oppression and
discrimination. The heroes of the revolution--Bolivar, Miranda, San
Martin, and the rest--were aristocrats of pure-white blood. But the
revolution presently developed new features. To begin with, the struggle
was very long. Commencing in 1809, it lasted almost twenty years. The
whites were decimated by fratricidal fury, and when the Spanish cause was
finally lost, multitudes of loyalists mainly of the superior social
classes left the country. Meanwhile, the half-castes, who had rallied
wholesale to the revolutionary banner, were demanding their reward. The
Creoles wished to close the revolutionary cycle and establish a new
society based, like the old, upon white supremacy, with themselves
substituted for the Spaniards. Bolivar planned a limited monarchy and a
white electoral oligarchy. But this was far from suiting the half-castes.
For them the revolution had just begun. Raising the cry of "democracy,"
then become fashionable through the North American and French revolutions,
they proclaimed the doctrine of "equality" regardless of skin.
Disillusioned and full of foreboding, Bolivar, the master-spirit of the
revolution, disappeared from the scene, and his lieutenants, like the
generals of Alexander, quarrelled among themselves, split Latin America
into jarring fragments, and waged a long series of internecine wars. The
flood-gates of anarchy were opened, the result being a steady weakening of
the whites and a corresponding rise of the half-castes in the political
and social scale. Everywhere ambitious soldiers led the mongrel mob
against the white aristocracy, breaking its power and making themselves
dictators. These "caudillos" were apostles of equality and miscegenation.
Says Garcia-Calderon: "Tyrants found democracies; they lean on the support
of the people, the half-breeds and negroes, against the oligarchies; they
dominate the colonial nobility, favor the crossing of races, and free the
slaves."[59]
The consequences of all this were lamentable in the extreme. Latin
America's level of civilization fell far below that of colonial days.
Spanish rule, though narrow and tyrannical, had maintained peace and
social stability. Now all was a hideous chaos wherein frenzied castes and
colors grappled to the death. Ignorant mestizos and brutal negroes
trampled the fine flowers of culture under foot, while as by a malignant
inverse selection the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished.
These deplorable conditions prevailed in Latin America until well past the
middle of the nineteenth century. Of course, here as elsewhere, anarchy
engendered tyranny, and strong caudillos sometimes perpetuated their
dictatorship for decades, as in Paraguay under Doctor Francia and in
Mexico under Porfirio Diaz. However, these were mere interludes, of no
constructive import. Always the aging lion lost his grip, the lurking
hyenas of anarchy downed him at last, and the land sank once more into
revolutionary chaos. Some parts of Latin America did, indeed, definitely
emerge into the light of stable progress. But those favored regions owed
their deliverance, not to dictatorship, but to race. One of two factors
always operated: either (1) an efficient white oligarchy; or (2)
Aryanization through wholesale European immigration.
Stabilization through oligarchy is best illustrated by Chile. Chilean
history differs widely from that of the rest of Latin America. A land of
cool climate, no gold, and warlike Araucanian Indians, Chile attracted
the pioneering settler rather than the swashbuckling seeker of
treasure-trove. Now the pioneering types in Spain come mainly from those
northern provinces which have retained considerable Nordic blood. The
Chilean colonists were thus largely blond Asturians or austere, reasonable
Basques, seeking homes and bringing their women. Of course there was
crossing with the natives, but the fierce Araucanian aborigines clung to
their wild freedom and kept up an interminable frontier warfare in which
the occasions for race-mixture were relatively few. The country was thus
settled by a resident squirearchy of an almost English type. This ruling
gentry jealously guarded its racial integrity. In fact, it possessed not
merely a white but a Nordic race-consciousness. The Chilean gentry called
themselves sons of the Visigoths, scions of Euric and Pelayo, who had
found in remote Araucania a chance to slake their racial thirst for
fighting and freedom.
In Chile, as elsewhere, the revolution provoked a cycle of disorder. But
the cycle was short, and was more a political struggle between white
factions than a social welter of caste and race. Furthermore, Chile was
receiving fresh accessions of Nordic blood. Many English, Scotch, and
Irish gentleman-adventurers, taking part in the War of Independence,
settled down in a land so reminiscent of their own. Germans also came in
considerable numbers, settling especially in the colder south. Thus the
Chilean upper classes, always pure white, became steadily more Nordic in
ethnic character. The political and social results were unmistakable.
Chile rapidly evolved a stable society, essentially oligarchic and
consciously patterned on aristocratic England. Efficient, practical, and
extremely patriotic, the Chilean oligarchs made their country at once the
most stable and the most dynamic factor in Latin America.
The distinctly "Northern" character of Chile and the Chileans strike
foreign observers. Here, for example, are the impressions of a recent
visitor, the North American sociologist, Professor E. A. Ross. Landing at
the port of Valparaiso, he is "struck by signs of English influence. On
the commercial streets every third man suggests the Briton, while a large
proportion of the business people look as if they have their daily tub.
The cleanliness of the streets, the freshness of the parks and squares,
the dressing of the shop-windows, and the style of the mounted police
remind one of England."[60] As to the Nordic affinities of the upper
classes: "One sees it in stature, eye color, and ruddy complexion....
Among the pupils of Santiago College there are as many blonds as
brunets."[61] Even among the peon or "roto" class, despite considerable
Indian crossing, Professor Ross noted the strong Nordic strain, for he met
Chilean peasants "whose stature, broad shoulders, big faces, and tawny
mustaches proclaimed them as genuine Norsemen as the Icelanders in our
Red River Valley."[62]
Chile is thus the prime example of social stability and progress attained
through white oligarchic rule. Other, though less successful, instances
are to be noted in Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Peru and Colombia,
though geographically within the tropics, have extensive temperate
plateaux. Here numerous whites settled during the colonial period, forming
an upper caste over a large Indian population. Unlike Chile, few Nordics
came to leaven society with those qualities of constructive genius and
racial self-respect which are the special birthright of Nordic man. Unlike
Chile again, not only were there dense Indian masses, but there was also
an appreciable negro element. Lastly, the number of mixed-bloods was very
large. It is thus not surprising that for both Peru and Colombia the
revolution ushered in a period of turmoil from which
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