Daniel G. Brinton

“ Preservation, however, and not destruction, is the maxim of the ripest culture. The Tasmanian is extinct, the Polynesian disappearing, many an American tribe lives only in name, all gone down before the fierce flames of a civilization which did not lighten, but consumed them. Many another people is disappearing in the same way, in spite of the devoted efforts of earnest men and women to save them, to bring them into accord with the thought of the higher race, to teach them the boundless blessings of European enlightenment. ”

“ A few centuries ago a still more dreadful fear haunted the nations of Europe that some other Timurlane or Genghis Khan would lead his countless hordes of merciless Mongolians from the steppes of Siberia across the cultivated fields of the Danube to wipe out, as with a sponge, the glorious picture of renascent European culture. ”

“ A white man entails indelible degradation on his descendants who takes in marriage a woman of a darker race; and any relation other than that of marriage, no matter if it does lift the lower race, is unauthorized by any sound moral code. Still more to be deplored is the woman of the white race who unites herself with a man of a lower ethnic type. It cannot be too often repeated, too emphatically urged, that it is to the women alone of the highest race that we must look to preserve the purity of the type, and with it the claims of the race to be the highest. ”

“ Consider the history of the attempts to bring the American race into accord with the European. There were the noble endeavors of the Jesuits in Paraguay, the untiring zeal of the Franciscans in Yucatan, the admirable devotion of the Moravian brethren in the northern continent, and the long list of missionary societies in Protestant churches. These represent the most sustained, unselfish and enlightened efforts which have ever been made to civilize the Indians. ”

“ They have no holier duty, no more sacred mission, than that of transmitting in its integrity the heritage of ethnic endowment gained by the race through thousands of generations of struggle. That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man. ”

“ The psychical development of men and nations finds its chief explanation, less in the natural surroundings, the climate, soil, and water-currents, as is taught by some philosophers, than in their relations and connections with each other, their friendships, federations and enmities, their intercourse in commerce, love and war. Around these must center the chief studies of ethnographic science, for they contain and present the means for reaching its highest, almost its only aim—the comprehension of the social and intellectual progress of the species. ”

“ Subdivisions of Races.—The further subdivisions of ethnography follow to some extent the important doctrine of the “areas of characterization,” that is, they are geographical; but as the classification of men advances in minuteness, other considerations become paramount, notably, language and government. These elements allow us to subdivide a race into its branches; a branch into its stocks; a stock into its groups, and these again into tribes, peoples, or nations. ”

“ It seems to me, indeed, that any one who will patiently study the parallelisms of growth in the arts and sciences, in poetry and objects of utility, throughout the various races of men, cannot doubt of their psychical identity. Still more, if he will acquaint himself with the modern science of Folk-lore, and will note how the very same tales, customs, proverbs, superstitions, games, habits, and so on, recur spontaneously in tribes severed by thousands of leagues, he will not think it possible that creatures so wholly identical could have been produced by independent lines of evolution. ”

“ The Mohammedan who looks toward Mecca, the Christian who turns toward Rome, feels a like bond of sympathy with his fellow worshippers of every race and color, as did the Israelite who wended his way to Jerusalem, or the Nahuatl who travelled to the sacred city of Cholula. The pilgrimages, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical Councils of past ages, have collected nations together under the control of ideas stronger than any which practical life can offer. ”

“ The pre-historic past of the race is measured by archæologists by the rise and extension of new arts, not because of themselves, but because they are indicative of improved social conditions, greater aggregations of men, more potent actions in history. The fine arts, in crowning the useful arts with the iridescent glory of the ideal, impart to the handiwork of men that universality of motive which unites all into one brotherhood. ”

“ The same is true all over the Continent. The American Indian, as such, is destined to disappear before European civilization. If he retains his habits he will be exterminated; if he aims to preserve an unmixed descent, he will be crushed out by disease and competition; his only resource is to blend his race with the whites, and this infallibly means his disappearance from the scene. ”

“ The Birthplace of the Species.—Accepting the theories therefore of the evolutionists and the monogenists as the most plausible in the present state of science, it is quite proper to inquire where primeval man first appeared, and what were his social conditions and personal appearance.
To some it may seem premature to put such questions. They are needlessly timid. It is never too soon to propound any question in science; always too soon to declare that any has been finally and irrevocably answered. ”

“ At the dawn of history, all the clearly marked sub-species of man bore distinct relations in number and distribution to the great continental areas into which the habitable land of the globe is divided. Nearly the whole of Europe and its geographical appendix, North Africa, were in the possession of the white race; the true negro type was limited to Central and Southern Africa and its appended islands; the yellow or Mongolian type was scarcely found outside of Asia; and the American sub-species was absolutely confined to that continent. ”

“ Opposition means destruction. The Bechuana kraal which refuses to have a grand opera house and electric 289 lights, if the European sees fit to put them there, will be wiped out of existence. So will every tribe, every nation, every race, which sets forth to oppose the resistless flow of civilized progress. ”

“ Reflections such as these teach us how closely the study of ethnographic science is related to practical politics. Ethnography, indeed, is the necessary basis of correct history and sound statesmanship. It offers to history a foundation on natural law; it explains events by showing their dependence on the physical structure, the mental pecularities, and the geographic surroundings of the peoples engaged in them; it presents, in its present pictures of savage life, the condition of the highest nations in the earlier stages of their culture. ”

“ I shall begin my survey of the race and its distribution with the South Mediterranean branch, as that 115 which has been the more important of the two in history, controlling by far the greater territory, and developing the earlier and more potent civilizations. It has ever been, and still is, the leader in intellectual acumen, and the monuments of its achievements, both in the realms of thought and action, remain unrivalled in the world. ”

“ A tribe is a body of men collected under one government. They are presumably of the same race and dialect.
A nation, on the other hand, is a body of men under one government, frequently of different languages and races. Its members have no presumed relationship further than that they belong to the same species.
There are some other terms the precise meaning of which should be defined before we proceed, the more so as there is not that uniformity in their use among ethnographers which were desirable. ”

“ A large portion of the African continent is occupied by tribes of dark hue, but lacking some of the most prominent traits of the true negro. These are the “Negroids,” who are probably the products of a long and close fusion of the Negro with the Hamitic and Semitic types. Their color is not black, but a dark, reddish, coppery brown; the hair is crisp and frizzly, but not woolly; the nose is straight and better formed than that of the negro; the lips are thick, the skull long, and the peculiar odor of the negro is absent. ”

“ Is by far the most important group of peoples with whom we have to do in the area we are now studying. Many ethnologists, indeed, set it up as a distinct race, the “Malayan” or “Brown” race, and claim for it an importance not less than any of the darker varieties of the species. It bears, however, the marks of an origin too recent, and presents Asian analogies too clearly, for it to be regarded otherwise than as a branch of the Asian race, descended like it from some ancestral tribe in that great continent. ”

“ The leading race in all history has been the White Race. It is proper therefore that it should have our chief attention in the study of the distribution of 104 105 the species. By some writers it is called the Caucasian, by others the Japetic, and by others again the European race—all inaccurate terms, for the race never originated in the Caucasus, never descended from the mythical Japetus or Japheth, and when first it appeared on the horizon of history, its most extensive possessions and the seats of its highest culture were not in Europe, nor yet in Asia, but in Africa. ”

“ There is indeed an ideal, an artistic canon, which the sculptor or the painter seeks to body forth in his productions; and this seems in close conformity with an extensive average of the proportions of the highest peoples; but it is never found in individuals, and it is essentially unlike in man and woman, in youth and age, in the blonde and brunette.15 Nor is the ideal of the artist also that which is consonant with the greatest muscular development or highest powers of endurance. ”

“ The basis of ethics in all undeveloped conditions is not general but special; it relates to the tribe and the family, and is in direct conflict with the philosopher Kant’s famous “categorical imperative,” which makes the basis the welfare of the whole species. Hence, in primitive culture and survivals there is a dual system of morals, the one of kindness, love, help and peace, applicable to the members of our own clan, tribe or community; the other of robbery, hatred, enmity and murder, to be practiced against all the rest of the world ”

“ Many of the so-called Spanish creoles are really of mixed blood. In Peru and Mexico it is hard to find a family without the strain of another race in its pedigree. In Cuba, where there has been the least exposure to this result, owing to the prompt extinction of the natives, the descendants of the early European immigrants are enfeebled and infertile. While in Mexico, in Guatemala, and in Yucatan, the men of prominent energy are either of mixed blood or, like the late Governor Barrios, are of the once conquered, the pure American race. ”

“ The result of these gregarious instincts is the formation of the social organization, the bond under which first the primitive horde and later the members of the developed commonwealth consented to live. From first to last, wherever found, communities of men are bound together by ties of consanguinity and affection rather than mere self-interest. Those writers who pretend that society once existed without the idea of kinship, with promiscuity in the sexual relation, and without some recognized controlling power, have failed to produce such an example from actual life. ”

“ In physical appearance individuals of reasonably pure descent present good specimens of the Asian type, the skull brachycephalic, the face round, the nose flat at the root, the eye small and black, the hair straight and coarse, the color yellowish. They are divided into many tribes, most of whom were until recently addicted to a wandering pastoral life, and though on the lower levels of culture and without coherent social bonds, they have at times loomed up as the most powerful and pretentious figures in the history of the world. ”

“ Our missionaries hold up to the savage pictures of Christian brotherhood, of unselfish motive, of universal charity, which he soon finds have no existence in Christian communities or modern civilization. If he is an honest convert, he is absolutely disqualified from contact with civilized peoples! ”

“ I am convinced that the importance of these facts has never been properly appreciated by students of the origin of species, and of the origin of men in particular.
This, or any hypothesis of evolution, renders the supposition quite needless that the various races had distinct ancestral origins. Any evolutionist who accepts the view that man is but a differentiation from some anthropoid ape, is straining at a gnat after swallowing the camel, if he hesitates to believe that the comparatively slight differences between the races may not have originated from like influences. ”

“ The facts, indeed, are easily liable to misinterpretation. Take the white race, for instance. It has for centuries possessed flourishing colonies not only in the southern temperate zone, which would not surprise 279 us, but under the torrid suns of India, Mexico and Brazil, in Java and the Isle of France, in the West and East Indies, not to speak of the Hamitic tribes, who thousands of years ago established themselves on the borders of the Sudan (see above, p. 116) . Long before that, the Indo-Aryans had crossed the Hindu Kush and extended their sway over the Dravidian peoples of Hindostan. ”

“ Like other mixed peoples, the Japanese vary so much in height, form of skull, hue and bodily proportion, that it is impracticable to set up any fixed type for them, further than to say that their general Asiatic aspect is usually unmistakable to the trained eye.144 In mental qualities they are gifted, being intelligent, artistic, brave, kind, and honorable, fully alive to the benefits of a high civilization, and able to accept with profit all that the western world has to offer.145 They are monogamists, and the position of woman has always been respected among them. ”

“ I would impress upon you this fact, that since the intermingling of two races does not produce a third race, it is not likely that any of the existing races arose from a fusion of two others. The result of observation shows that after two or three generations the tendency in mixed breeds is to recur to one or the other of the original stocks, not to establish a different variety. ”

“ Agriculture is practised on a limited scale. Their temperament is turbulent and warlike, and many of them are cannibals. Their social organization is military, but slavery is unusual. Singular to say, they do not know the bow and arrow, their weapons being the war-club and a lance called an assegai. Their religion is a fetichism, and polygamy is universal. On the whole, they are on a higher level of culture than the Negroes of the Sudan. All the Bantu tribes are mono-glottic, that is, they speak dialects traceable to one original stem. ”