Madison Grant

“ In America the events of the last hundred years, especially the vast tide of immigration, have greatly impaired our purity of race and our unity of religion and even threatened our inheritance of English speech. If our English language is saved it will be due in no small degree to the growing world power of the language itself and of its literature, as well as to the world-wide ocean commerce of Great Britain and her overseas empire. ”

“ At this point we may remark that Wales, especially along the coasts, has a very large Nordic population. It is absurd to distinguish between England, Scotland, North Ireland, and Wales as is done in the census of the United States. We might just as well distinguish between North England and South England on the ground that the first is Anglian and Danish and the other Saxon and Jutish. The lowlands of Scotland are pure English territory and have been such for a thousand years. ”

“ A storm of protest will arise from the vociferous and influential foreign blocs and from the radicals and half-breeds claiming to be Americans, who will all rush to the defense of their kind. It is strange to find how sensitive we are to any foreign criticism of things American, but how prone we are to listen respectfully to local aliens, who are urging their own interests at the expense of the national welfare. ”

“ One is the determination of the white man to keep for himself his own countries, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and many of the smaller islands. With this determination Americans sympathize and sooner or later we may be called on to help protect the White race and the English language in these countries. It seems to be a part of our destiny. The other phase of white supremacy is the white man's effort to benefit the backward races and raise them to civilization by instilling his language, his religion, and his culture into Asiatics and Africans. ”

“ One of the strange results of the Civil War has been that while the victorious North sold its birthright of culture, religion, and racial purity for a mess of industrial pottage, the South, though defeated and impoverished, retained its racial inheritance unimpaired. ”

“ The most essential element in nationality is unity. This unity can be based on race, on language, on religion, on a long tradition held in common, or on several or all of these.
In the past century the United States has to some extent lost its unity of religion, of race, and of language. In the same period it has acquired a number of unassimilable elements brought in as cheap and docile labor to develop its industries or else allowed to enter through the false humanitarianism of the so-called Victorian Era. It had been forgotten that a cheap man makes a cheap job. ”

“ Probably no more destructive human being has ever appeared on the world stage than the American pioneer with his axe and his rifle.
In 1860, at the end of this period, we find the essential elements of national unity still unchanged, but we were about to engage in a fratricidal war, which was to destroy the best blood of the nation. We had admitted large numbers of Irish and German immigrants who impaired, in the case of the Irish, our religious system and introduced certain undesirable racial elements. ”

“ We must also sympathize with the Whites in Kenya Colony in their opposition to a filling of their country with cheap Hindu labor. As Americans we can understand the Negro and recognize his cheerful qualities, but we can have little sympathy with the Hindu whom we have expressly barred from our Pacific Coast. These Hindus, with the Chinese, have ruined the native races of many of the Polynesian Islands. They have been for ages in contact with the highest civilizations, but have failed to benefit by such contact, either physically, intellectually, or morally. ”

“ Taking the country over, the Whites who have married Indians have not been of a high class. But the total number of Indians in the United States is so small that their future is probably that of being absorbed in the White race through miscegenation, unless it be for a few tribes cultivating a racial purity of their own and, with favorable economic conditions, perpetuating themselves for a long time to come. ”

“ Doubtless one of the reasons why the study of genealogy and the pride of ancestry have flourished most conspicuously in New England is that so large a proportion of the old population traces its ancestry back to the same period and to the same group of people. Even as early as the Revolution, the great bulk of the settlers of New England represented families that had been four or five generations on American soil. ”

“ The question is often raised, whether the population of the United States would not be just as large today, if immigration had been permanently excluded in 1790. In other words, if no alien had arrived since the founding of the United States, would the descendants of the Colonial population have produced as many citizens as there are now here? This hypothesis, often known as Walker's Law, assumes that the fecundity of a group is cut down by the competition of immigrants, and that the latter do no more than fill the places which would otherwise have been filled by natural increase. ”

“ In more than half a century since then, the country has not begun to recover. Even now its population is less than a million. Immigrants from Europe have always avoided it. Paraguay is in a class by itself.
Peru's four or five million inhabitants are mostly pure Indians, while the remainder are nearly all hybrids. Chinese and Japanese as well as Negroes have contributed to the mongrelization of the mass, and not one in ten even claims to be white, which here, as elsewhere in Latin America, by no means guarantees anything more than a homœopathic dose of European blood. ”

“ Crossing the boundary from Brazil to Uruguay, one sees a new picture. Uruguay is almost entirely white. Indeed, this whole region of La Plata is one of the future dominant areas of the New World. It contains less Negro blood than does, relatively, the United States. Not only have Negroes been largely kept out, but the remnants of Indian tribes have become inconspicuous, as on the plains of the Mississippi Valley, where the Indians, mere nomads with a negligible culture, were driven back by the march of civilization. ”

“ The most striking induction arising through research into the prehistory of man is that racial characters and predispositions, governing racial reactions to certain old and new conditions of life, extend far back of the most ancient civilizations. For example, the characteristics which Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to his heroes and to his imaginary gods and goddesses were not the product of the civilization which existed in his time in Greece; they were the product of creative evolution long prior even to the beginnings of Greek culture and government. ”

“ On the contrary, the Mexican immigration to the United States, which is made up overwhelmingly of the poorer Indian element, has brought nothing but disadvantages. It has created, particularly in the Southwestern States, an exploited peasant class unconformable with the principles of American civilization. This population, neither physically nor mentally up to the prevailing standards, is producing a large contribution to the future American race, since every one of its numerous children born in the States becomes an American citizen by birth. ”

“ The foreign element in California is equally heterogeneous, though largely Nordic, so far as it is white at all. Canada has sent a quarter of a million, nearly all of English ancestry. Italy has contributed nearly a quarter of a million, who make an important part of the population in the northern half of the State. Unlike their fellow nationals in the Atlantic States, these California Italians are mostly from the northern part of that kingdom. Between North and South Italians there is not great sympathy—representatives of the two groups avoid intermarriage. ”

“ It possessed, to an unusual degree, unity in the various fields in which unity is most valuable to a nation—unity of race, unity of language, unity of culture, unity of religion, unity of institutions—and, more than anywhere else in the United States, its unity was attained through a long-continued, independent growth on American soil.
The French and Indian menace held back the rapidly multiplying population of New England for at least a generation. The agricultural areas were carrying more population than they could support, and they were waiting for a favorable opportunity to spread out. ”

“ Georgia fits into the same pattern, though it has attracted a few more of the "new immigration"—Slavs and Italians; and a few more Yankees, so that its population, on the whole, is somewhat more cosmopolitan.
Florida, on the other hand, has had an influx both of Northerners, who have almost changed the political complexion of the State; and of the foreign stock, largely Nordic, it is true, but with a West Indian element that is less assimilable. Of its million Whites, a sixth are of foreign stock, including almost every one of the nationalities found anywhere in the United States. ”

“ Unlike Canada on our north, the countries south of the Rio Grande have been relatively little influenced by Nordic culture, to say nothing of anything resembling a Nordic conquest. The outlying territories of Mexico which were annexed to the United States were nearly empty lands and present Mexican influences in the Southwest are matters of more recent date.
Latin America is one of the major divisions of the World, and from the present point of view should no more be discussed as a unit than could Europe or Asia. Its original population represents one of the great racial divisions of mankind. ”

“ The real foundation of the greatness of the Empire State was the New England colonization of northern and western New York, which created a territory that was, and has ever since remained, quite distinct in political complexion and economic and social interests from the Hudson River valley and the metropolis at its mouth. ”

“ Haiti is a purely Negro Republic, and offers a good illustration of what the Negro accomplishes if left to himself, even though given all the advantages of easy access to European civilization. The republic of Santo Domingo occupies the other part of the same island; its hybrid population has more Spanish and less Negro blood but it is not by any means civilized. ”

“ The proportion of these non-Nordic Europeans, from southern or central Europe, is three times as great as the European immigration from either northern or western Europe. If this immigration continues in like proportions, Manitoba, like the other prairie provinces, is in danger of being lost to the Nordics.
Saskatchewan has a larger American-born population than Manitoba, one resident in every eight having first seen the light of day under the American flag. But it has a still larger recent European immigration amounting to nearly 40 per cent of the total population of the province. ”