European race

“ There are no pure races in Europe. Less than any other nation have the Germans a right to claim racial purity. [56] Anyone who seeks a true Teuton to-day had better go to Sweden, the Netherlands, or England.
4. If to the term race we attach a definite biological meaning, we can hardly say that there is any such thing as a European race.
Patriotism based on race is impossible, and in most cases it is utterly absurd. There is no such thing as ethnic homogeneity in any extant nation. The cohesion of contemporary nations does not come down to them as a heritage of which they can dispose at will. ”

“ But we have to recollect that a European race is dominant in the country, that it is in a large numerical minority, that it has resolved to preserve its ascendancy, and is acutely sensitive of any suggestion of social equality with an inferior race which must takes ages to attain the same degree of intelligence. ”

“ The chief failing of the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.
In the Argentine white blood of the various European races is pouring in so rapidly that a community preponderantly white, but of the Mediterranean race, may develop, but the type is suspiciously swarthy. ”

“ The European race (which includes the inhabitants of the United States and all descendants of Europeans in every part of the earth) is distinguished from the other by the regularity and symmetry of their features and by their complexion, which is white mingled with red; they have straight hair. In warm climates the European complexion takes a swarthy or brown color; but the original color, viz. white and red, always prevails in the complexion of the infants of this race in every climate. ”

“ The prevailing lack of true race consciousness is probably due to the fact that every important nation in Europe as at present organized, with the 60sole exception of the Iberian and Scandinavian states, possesses in large proportions representatives of at least two of the fundamental European subspecies of man and of all manner of crosses between them. In France to-day, as in Cæsar’s Gaul, the three races divide the nation in unequal proportions. ”

“ It is quite astonishing to find that the predominant race in Europe 25,000 years ago, or more, was not only much taller, but had an absolute cranial capacity in excess of the average of the present population. The low cranial average of existing populations in Europe can be best explained by the presence of large numbers of individuals of inferior mentality. These defectives have been carefully preserved by modern charity, whereas in the savage state of society the backward members were allowed to perish and the race was carried on by the vigorous and not by the weaklings. ”

“ In concluding this revision of the racial foundations upon which the history of Europe has been based it is scarcely necessary to point out that the actual results of the spectacular conquests and invasions 262of history have been far less permanent than those of the more insidious victories arising from the crossing of two diverse races and that in such mixtures the relative prepotency of the various human subspecies in Europe appears to be in inverse ratio to their social value. ”

“ Not that members of other races are not doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock which has come to this country is there displayed the unanimity of heart, mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe. ”

“ Whatever may be its intellectual, its literary, its artistic or its musical aptitudes, as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. ”

“ In some cases where these three European races have become mixed stature seems to be one of 30the first Nordic characters to vanish, but wherever in Europe we find great stature in a population otherwise lacking in Nordic characters we may suspect a Nordic crossing, as in the case of a large proportion of the inhabitants of Burgundy, of the Tyrol and of the Dalmatian Alps south to Albania. ”

“ RACIAL APTITUDES Such are the three races, the Alpine, the Mediterranean and the Nordic, which enter into the composition of European populations of to-day and in various combinations comprise the great bulk of white men all over the world. These races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters and are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation. ”

“ The unification of both Italy and Germany is as yet incomplete according to the views held by their more advanced patriots and the solution of the Balkan question is still in the future.
Men are keenly aware of their nationality and are very sensitive about their language, but only in a few cases, notably in Sweden and Germany, does any large section of the population possess anything analogous to true race consciousness, although the term “race” is everywhere misused to designate linguistic or political groups. ”

“ It is this consideration which, underlying the whole current of European politics, renders the present juncture of affairs so critical. The great question of the supremacy of race—the question whether the Teutonic or the Slavic race shall predominate, and direct in the affairs of Europe—rests apparently upon the events which are about to transpire. ”

“ Religious teachers have also maintained the proposition not only that man is something fundamentally distinct from other living creatures, but that there are no inherited differences in humanity that cannot be obliterated by education and environment.
It is, therefore, necessary at the outset for the reader to appreciate thoroughly that race, language and nationality are three separate and distinct things and that in Europe these three elements are found only occasionally persisting in combination, as in the Scandinavian nations. ”

“ The fact that these so-called "races" simply do not exist but are really historical differentiations, based on language and culture, which cut sublimely across genuine race-lines—all that is quite beside the point. Your European may apprehend this intellectually, but so long as it remains an intellectual novelty it will have no appreciable effect upon his conduct. In his heart of hearts he will still believe himself a Latin, a Teuton, an Anglo-Saxon, or a Slav. For his blood-race he will not stir; for his thought-race he will die. ”

“ The late Peloponnesian War in the world at large, like the Civil War in America, has shattered the prestige of the white race and it will take several generations and perhaps wars to recover its former control, if it ever does regain it. The danger is from within and not from without. Neither the black, nor the brown, nor the yellow, nor the red will conquer the white in battle. But if the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders. ”

“ In Roman times, following the La Tène Period, the main races of Europe occupied the relative positions which they had held during the whole Neolithic Period and which they hold to-day, with the exception that the Nordic subspecies was less extensively represented in western Europe than when, a few hundred years later, the so-called Teutonic tribes overran these countries; but on the other hand, the Nordics occupied large areas in eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland and Russia now mainly occupied by the Slavs of Alpine race. ”

“ The first task before us in Europe is, at any cost, to release our children from this nationalist obsession, to teach the mass of European people a [Pg 73] little truthful history in which each one will see the past and future of his own country in their proper proportions, and a little truthful ethnology in which each country will get over the delusion that its people are a distinct and individual race. The history teaching in the schools of Europe is at the very core of this business. ”

“ The living peoples of Europe consist of layer upon layer of diverse racial elements in varying xxiiproportions and historians and anthropologists, while studying these populations, have been concerned chiefly with the recent strata and have neglected the more ancient and submerged types. ”

“ Scientific investigation does not countenance the assumption that in any one part of Europe a people of pure descent or of a pure racial type is found, and careful inquiry has failed completely to reveal any inferiority of mixed European types. ”

“ The first of these is the notion that nationality has anything to do with race, in the anthropological sense. There is much to be said for the view that the European civilisations owe their development largely to the mingling of races which has occurred within the area; it is at least certain that no European nation, whatever the fervour of its citizens’ patriotism, is of anthropologically pure race. There is no British race, no French race, no German race, even though the word Germanic is sometimes applied to one of the strains which occurs in the German [197] Empire. ”

“ We shall therefore consider the Mediterranean, Alpine and Nordic races—to mention only those composed [5] of white men—and we shall find that they all blend in European nationalities.
Fig. 1—View of the “route d’Italie” or road to Italy at the extreme southeastern border of France and well inside the small area of Italian language lying within the French political boundary.
Take, as an example, the racial elements entering into the composition of French nationality. The dominating type, in northern France, belongs to the tall, narrow-headed Nordic race, with blue eyes and fair hair. ”

“ In Russia and in Poland the Nordic stature, blondness and long skull grow less and less pronounced as one proceeds south and east from the Gulf of Finland.
It would appear that in all those parts of Europe outside of its natural habitat, the Nordic blood is on the wane from England to Italy and that the ancient, acclimated and primitive populations of Alpine and Mediterranean race are subtly reasserting their long lost political power through a high breeding rate and democratic institutions. ”

“ To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling [94] with difficulties. ”

“ RACE AND DEMOCRACY Failure to recognize the clear distinction between race and nationality and the still greater distinction between race and language and the easy assumption that the one is indicative of the other have been in the past serious impediments to an understanding of racial values. Historians and philologists have approached the subject from the viewpoint of linguistics and as a result we are to-day burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the Latin, the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, the Caucasian and, perhaps, most inconsistent of all, the Celtic race. ”

“ The coloration of both hair and eyes was originally very dark and still tends strongly in that direction but many light colored eyes, especially gray, are now common among the Alpine populations of western Europe.
While the inhabitants of Europe betray as a whole their mixed origin, nevertheless, individuals of each of the three main subspecies are found in large numbers and in great purity, as well as sparse remnants of still more ancient races represented by small groups or by individuals and even by single characters. ”

“ And it would be well to remember, those singular innovations which are being brought in on the tide of European civilisation are being entrusted to natives who are endowed by nature with characteristics of a different race type to ours and which are irrevocably unchangeable at the line of their limitations. European education and European laws along certain well-chosen, sure-set lines can cultivate those characteristics of the native to a certain standard—but not one step further. ”

“ Invasions of new races have ordinarily arrived in successive waves, the earlier ones being quickly absorbed by the conquered, while the later arrivals usually maintain longer the purity of their type. Consequently the more recent elements are found in a less mixed state than the older and the more primitive strata of the population always contain physical traits derived from still more ancient predecessors.
Man has inhabited Europe in some form or other for hundreds of thousands of years and during all this lapse of time the population has been as dense as the food supply permitted. ”

“ With the foregoing as a simple and generalized description of the primitive races of mankind as we know them today, and with special emphasis on the three principal European variants of the "white" race, we shall proceed to consider the distribution and racial influence of the Nordics in western Europe. ”

“ The history of the last century in Europe has been the record of a long series of struggles to unite in one political unit all those speaking the same or closely allied dialects. With the exception of internal and social revolutions, every European war since the Napoleonic period has been caused by the effort to bring about the unification either of Italy or of Germany or by the desperate attempts of the Balkan States to struggle out of 57Turkish chaos into modern European nations on a basis of community of language. ”

“ As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing, generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for instance, in Western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the modern countries of Western Europe are descended from the states created by these northern invaders. ”