Passing of the Great Race — Race and Language

VI RACE AND LANGUAGE

When a country is invaded and conquered by a race speaking a foreign language, one of several things may happen: replacement of both population and language, as in the case of eastern England when conquered by the Saxons or adoption of the language of the victors by the natives, as happened in Roman Gaul, where the invaders imposed their Latin tongue throughout the land without substantially altering the race.

The Romans probably modified the race in Gaul by killing a much larger proportion of the Nordic fighting classes than of the more submissive Alpines and Mediterraneans.

This is confirmed by the fact that when the prolonged and brilliant resistance to Cæsar’s legions was finally broken, no serious attempt was ever again made to throw off the Roman yoke and a few centuries later the Teutonic invaders encountered no determined opposition from the inhabitants when they entered and occupied the land.

In England and Scotland later conquerors, Norsemen, Danes and Normans, failed to change radically the Saxon speech of the country and in Gaul the Teutonic tongues of the Franks, Burgundians and Northmen could not displace the language of Rome.

Autochthonous inhabitants frequently impose upon their invaders their own language and customs.

In Normandy the conquering Norse pirates accepted the language, religion and customs of the natives and in a century they vanish from history as Scandinavian heathen and appear as the foremost representatives of the speech and religion of Rome.

In Hindustan the blond Nordic invaders forced their Aryan language on the aborigines, but their blood was quickly and utterly absorbed in the darker strains of the original owners of the land.

A record of the desperate efforts of the conqueror classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes.

In our Southern States Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose and justification.

The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language, but there remains not one recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the Northwest.

The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler is entirely without basis in fact and the little swarthy native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long-forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship.

The dim and uncertain traces of Nordic blood in northern India only serve to emphasize the utter swamping of the white man in the burning South.

The power of racial resistance of a dense and thoroughly acclimated population to an incoming army is very great.

No ethnic conquest can be complete unless the natives are exterminated and the invaders bring their own women with them.

If the conquerors are obliged to depend upon the women of the vanquished to carry on the race, the intrusive blood strain of the invaders in a short time becomes diluted beyond recognition.

It sometimes happens that an infiltration of population takes place either in the guise of unwilling slaves or of willing immigrants, who fill up waste places and take to the lowly tasks which the lords of the land despise, thus gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their masters.

The former catastrophe happened in the declining days of the Roman Republic and the south Italians of to-day are very largely descendants of the nondescript slaves of all races, chiefly from the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, who were imported by the Romans under the Empire to work their vast estates.

The latter is occurring to-day in many parts of America, especially in New England.

The eastern half of Germany has a Slavic Alpine substratum which represents the descendants of the Wends, who first appear about the commencement of the Christian era and who by the sixth century had penetrated as far west as the Elbe, occupying the lands left vacant by the Teutonic tribes which had migrated southward.

These Wends in turn were Teutonized by a return wave of military conquest from the tenth century onward, and to-day their descendants are considered Germans in good standing.

Having adopted the German as their sole tongue they are now in religious, political and cultural sympathy with the pure Teutons;

in fact, they are quite unconscious of any racial distinction.

This historic fact underlies the ferocious controversy which has been raised over the ethnic origin of the Prussians, the issue being whether the populations in Brandenburg, Silesia, Posen, West Prussia, and other districts in eastern Germany, are Alpine Wends or true Nordics.

The truth is that the dominant half of the population is purely Teutonic and the remainder of the population are merely Teutonized Wends and Poles of Alpine affinities.

Of course, these territories must also retain some of their early Teutonic population and the blood of the Goth, Burgund, Vandal and Lombard, who at the commencement of the Christian era were located there, as well as of the later Saxon element, must enter largely into the composition of the Prussian of to-day.

Some anthropologists regard the Teutonized round heads of south Germany as a distinct subdivision of the Alpines because of the large percentage of blond hair and still larger percentage of light colored eyes.

The most important communities in continental Europe of pure German type are to be found in old Saxony, the country around Hanover, and this element prevails generally in the northwestern part of the German Empire among the Low German-speaking population, while the High German-speaking population is largely composed of Teutonized Alpines.

The coasts of the North Sea extending from Schleswig and Holstein into Holland are inhabited by a very pure Nordic type known as the Frisians.

They are the handsomest and in many respects the finest of the continental Nordics and are closely related to the English, as many of the Post-Roman invaders of England either came from Frisia or from adjoining districts.

All the states involved in the present world war have sent to the front their fighting Nordic element and the loss of life now going on in Europe will fall much more heavily on the blond giant than on the little brunet.

As in all wars since Roman times from a breeding point of view the little dark man is the final winner.

No one who saw one of our regiments march on its way to the Spanish War could fail to be impressed with the size and blondness of the men in the ranks as contrasted with the complacent citizen, who from his safe stand on the gutter curb gave his applause to the fighting man and then stayed behind to perpetuate his own brunet type.

In the present war one has merely to study the type of officer and of the man in the ranks to realize that, in spite of the draft net, the Nordic race is contributing an enormous majority of the fighting men, out of all proportion to their relative numbers in the nation at large.

This same Nordic element, everywhere the type of the sailor, the soldier, the adventurer and the pioneer, was ever the type to migrate to new countries, until the ease of transportation and the desire to escape military service in the last forty years reversed the immigrant tide.

In consequence of this change our immigrants now largely represent lowly refugees from “persecution,” and other social discards.

In most cases the blood of pioneers has been lost to their race.

They did not take their women with them.

They either died childless or left half-breeds behind them.

The virile blood of the Spanish conquistadores, who are now little more than a memory in Central and South America, died out from these causes.

This was also true in the early days of our Western frontiersmen, who individually were a far finer type than the settlers who followed them.

In fact, it is said that practically every one of the Forty-Niners in California was of Nordic type.