ETHNOLOGICAL PRETENTIONS

97

Within each nation, again, there was ready to hand, to serve any party or even individual interests, ethnological differences, if not actually discernible in the present, at least clearly recognisable in past history. In the British Empire, among the numerous ethnological elements, which together compose the true nationality, the antagonism between Saxon and Celt has been used for the most definite political ends and issues. In the Continental nations this confused and utterly unfounded principle of disintegration is even more pronounced and mischievous.

66

All these ethnological pretensions and passions— and this is one of the distinctive features of the more modern conflict of races -are based upon the achievements and results of modern ethnological study, the youngest and least accurate of modern sciences. In federation with the revived study of philology, comparative religion and anthropology, the ethnological politician and agitator found a fertile field, especially for internal disintegration and antagonism, in the inner life of modern States (in most cases neither consciously nor unconsciously quite free from considerations of material interests and greeds), in the antagonism between Aryanism and Semitism. But, again guided by the development of ethnological study, this supremely active subdivision, upon which powerful political parties were founded in several continental countries, has again been superseded in theory and abandoned as a scientific basis and justification; though the anti-Semitic parties have not dissolved and continue their passionate activity.

H

The principles of racial subdivision for Europe to-day are the Nordic, Mediterranean and Alpine. Militant activity now chiefly centres round the proposition that the Nordic is the superior race · and should as a race not only survive, but dominate all others.

From the interesting, and comparatively innocent, essay of Count Gobineau, with many minor lucubrations, we come to the grotesquely pretentious, superficial and tragically mischievous work of Mr. Houston Chamberlain, the fatal influence of which I have indicated elsewhere (see Aristodemocracy, p. 53). Its influence on the inception of the present war, as regards the development of the present political mentality of Germany, can hardly be exaggerated. A correspondent and friend, commenting on this opinion of mine, has humorously suggested that, should (as we trust) the war end in the utter overthrow of German militarism, the defeated Germans will maintain that the real responsibility of this world-tragedy is to be ascribed to the fact that they were misled by the writings of an Englishman whom they will, in their legal phraseology, describe as the Intellectueller Urheber. Our own days have witnessed the production of a work by an American would-be ethnographer and historian, supported in an introduction by a well-established and distinguished zoologist and biologist, which is the most amateurish as well as pretentious piece of scientific over-generalisation, incomplete induction and dogmatic application of scientific principles to practical politics and life, which I have met

UNSOUND GENERALISATION

99

with in the whole range of my own reading.1 Starting with the proposition that somatic (bodily or physical) characteristics and distinctions in the human race correspond with unvarying interaction to intellectual and moral characteristics-even to fitness for political organisation, general activities and occupations in civilised life, intellectual achievements and social amenities—he endeavours to show that the Nordic race, compared to all others, possesses all the qualities that make for civilisation and moral and intellectual development to the highest degree. He maintains that the wars of the past and the present war have tended to disintegrate this race and to lead to its submersion by the lower races, and his expressed hope and emphatic injunction is that, by the action of modern society and of the individual, it should be preserved and its dominance assured. The definition of the Nordic race by means of somatic attributes is limited to the combination of the dolicho-cephalic shape of the head (though he denies the definite distinctive racial claim to this cranological attribute), the possession of light eyes, fair or red hair (including profusion of hair on head and body), straight nose and a tall muscular body. On such grounds of ethnological distinction he proceeds to write the "political and social history of Europe," nay, of the world, in a few pages. This war has confirmed us in deploring the work of many historians of note, whose patient research into the documents of the past and whose

1 The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant. Chas. Scribner, N.Y., 1916.

H2

critical sincerity and acumen have been vitiated by their personal and political bias and by “patriotic passion," all made still more disastrously effective in filtering through the history schoolbooks, where young "patriots are brought up to hate and to despise their actual or potential national enemies. But if history is to be written in the spirit of Mr. Grant's ethnological generalisation, and if the American people are to be trained to keep separate and pure the tall, light or redhaired, long-headed, blue-eyed and straight-nosed inhabitants from contamination with the rest, instead of concentrating the efforts of their citizens on the maintenance of the spirit of their constitution and the realisation of the highest ideals of mankind (this object by itself absorbing all the energies left them after having earned an honest livelihood), it will be a sad day for the people of the United States and for the development of the American nation and its position in civilised humanity.

THE ASCENDING SCALE OF CORPORATE DUTIES

ALL these forms of minor corporate organisations within the State will have to be tested by their original purposes and ideals, while these purposes and ideals will again have to be tested by their moral relationship to wider bodies, ending with the State, humanity, civilisation and the ultimate ideals of human life.

The duties of every citizen as a moral social being will have to be co-ordinated in an ascending scale, the principle of which I have attempted to develop and emphasise in my book Aristodemocracy. Patriotism itself and the minor forms of corporate duty, activity and loyalty, will have to find their just and appropriate places in this ascending scale, the minor or lower duty being subordinated and tested in the rightness of its efficiency by the higher duties and the higher ideals. From the moral and directly social point of view the several virtues pertaining to this will rise by degrees above absolute selfishness. There can thus be no doubt that he who performs his duties to his family has in so far advanced on a higher moral plane than the individual entirely wrapt up and concentrated in his own life and effort, upon the inconsiderate and