Passing of the Great Race — The Nordic Fatherland

IX THE NORDIC FATHERLAND

The area in Europe where the Nordic race developed and in which the Aryan languages originated probably included the forest region of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, together with the grasslands which stretched from the Ukraine eastward into the steppes south of the Ural.

From causes already mentioned this area was long isolated from the rest of the world and especially from Asia.

When the unity of the Aryan race and of the Aryan language was broken up at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, wave after wave of the early Nordics pushed westward along the sandy plains of the north and pressed against and through the Alpine populations of central Europe.

Usually these early Nordics, as indeed many of the later ones, constituted only a thin layer of ruling classes and there must have been many countries conquered by them in which we have no historic evidence of their existence, linguistic or otherwise.

This must have certainly been the case in those numerous instances where only the leaders were Nordics and the great mass of their followers slaves or serfs of inferior races.

The Nordics also swept down through Thrace into Greece and Asia Minor, while other large and important groups entered Asia partly through the Caucasus Mountains, but in greater strength they migrated around the northern and eastern sides of the Caspian-Aral Sea.

That portion of the Nordic race which continued to inhabit south Russia and grazed their flocks of sheep and herds of horses on the grasslands were the Scythians of the Greeks and from these nomad shepherds came the Cimmerians, Persians, Sacæ, Massagetæ and perhaps the leaders of the Kassites, Mitanni and other early Aryan-speaking Nordic invaders of Asia.

The descendants of these Nordics are scattered throughout Russia but are now submerged by the later Slavs.

Well marked characters of the Nordic race, which were established in Neolithic times if not earlier, enable us to distinguish it definitely wherever it appears in history and we know that all the blondness in the world is derived from this source.

As blondness is easily observed and recorded we are apt to lay too much emphasis on this single character.

The brown shades of hair are equally Nordic.

When the Nordics first enter the Mediterranean world their arrival is everywhere marked by a new and higher civilization.

In most cases the contact of the vigorous barbarians with the ancient civilizations created a sudden impulse of life and an outburst of culture as soon as the first destruction wrought by the conquest was repaired.

In addition to the long continued selection exercised by severe climatic conditions and the consequent elimination of ineffectives, both of which affects a race, there is another force at work which concerns the individual as well.

The energy developed in the north is not lost immediately when transferred to the softer conditions of existence in the Mediterranean and Indian countries.

This energy endures for several generations and only dies away slowly as the northern blood becomes diluted and the impulse to strive fades.

The contact of Hellene and Pelasgian caused the blossoming of the ancient civilization of Hellas, just as two thousand years later when the Nordic invaders of Italy had absorbed the science, art and literature of Rome, they produced that splendid century we call the Renaissance.

The chief men of the Cinque Cento and the preceding century were of Nordic blood, largely Gothic and Lombard, which is recognized easily by a close inspection of busts or portraits in northern Italy.

Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type, just as in classic times many of the chief men and of the upper classes were Nordic.

Similar expansions of civilization and organization of empire followed the incursion of the Nordic Persians into the land of the round skulled Medes and the introduction of Sanskrit into India by the Nordic Sacæ who conquered that peninsula.

These outbursts of progress due to the first contact and mixture of two contrasted races are, however, only transitory and pass with the last lingering trace of Nordic blood.

In India the blood of these Aryan-speaking invaders has been absorbed by the dark Hindu and in the final event only their synthetic speech survives.

The marvellous organization of the Roman state made use of the services of Nordic mercenaries and kept the Western Empire alive for three centuries after the ancient Roman stock had virtually ceased to exist.

The date when the population of the Empire had become predominantly of Mediterranean and Oriental blood, due to the introduction of slaves from the east and the wastage of Italian blood in war, coincides with the establishment of the Empire under Augustus and the last Republican patriots represent the final protest of the old patrician Nordic strain.

For the most part they refused to abdicate their right to rule in favor of manumitted slaves and imperial favorites and they fell in battle and sword in hand.

The Romans died out but the slaves survived and their descendants form the great majority of the south Italians of to-day.

In the last days of the Republic, Cæsar was the leader of the mob, the Plebs, which by that time had ceased to be of Roman blood.

Pompey’s party represented the remnants of the old native Roman aristocracy and was defeated at Pharsalia not by Cæsar’s plebeian clients but by his Nordic legionaries from Gaul.

Cassius and Brutus were the last successors of Pompey and their overthrow at Philippi was the final death blow to the Republican party; with them the native Roman families disappear almost entirely.

The decline of the Romans and for that matter of the native Italians began with the Punic Wars when in addition to the Romans who fell in battle a large portion of the country population of Italy was destroyed by Hannibal.

Native Romans suffered greatly in the Social and Servile Wars as well as in the civil conflicts between the factions of Sylla, who led the Patricians, and Marius who represented the Plebs.

Bloody proscriptions of the rival parties followed alternately the victory of one side and then of the other and under the tyranny of the Emperors of the first century also the old Roman stock was the greatest sufferer until it practically vanished from the scene.

Voluntary childlessness was the most potent cause of the decline under the Empire and when we read of the abject servility of bearers of proud names in the days of Nero and Caligula, we must remember that they could not rally to their standard followers among the Plebs.

They had only the choice of submission or suicide and many chose the latter alternative.

The abjectness of the Roman spirit under the Empire is thus to be explained by a change in race.

With the expanding dominion of Rome the native elements of vigor were drawn year after year into the legions and spent their active years in wars or in garrisons, while the slaves and those unfit for military duty stayed home and bred.

In the present great war while the native Americans are at the front fighting the aliens and immigrants are allowed to increase without check and the parallel is a close one.

Slaves began to be imported into Italy in numbers in the second century B.

C.

to work the large plantations—latifundia—of the wealthy Romans.

This importation of slaves and the ultimate extension of the Roman citizenship to their manumitted descendants and to inferior races throughout the growing Empire and the losses in internal and foreign wars, ruined the state.

In America we find another close parallel in the Civil War and the subsequent granting of citizenship to Negroes and to ever increasing numbers of immigrants of plebeian, servile or Oriental races, who throughout history have shown little capacity to create, organize or even to comprehend Republican institutions.

In Rome, when this change in blood was substantially complete, the state could no longer be operated under Republican forms of government and the Empire arose to take its place.

At the beginning the Empire was clothed in the garb of republicanism in deference to such Roman elements as still persisted in the Senate and among the Patricians but ultimately these external forms were discarded and the state became virtually a pure despotism.

The new population understood little and cared less for the institutions of the ancient Republic but they were jealous of their own rights of “Bread and the Circus”—“panem et circenses”—and there began to appear in place of the old Roman religion the mystic rites of Eastern countries so welcome to the plebeian and uneducated soul.

The Emperors to please the vulgar erected from time to time new shrines to strange gods utterly unknown to the Romans of the early Republic.

In America, also, strange temples, which would have been abhorrent to our Colonial ancestors, are multiplying and our streets and parks are turned over to monuments to foreign “patriots,” designed not to please the artistic sense of the passer-by but to gratify the national preference of some alien element in the electorate.

These comments on the change of race in Rome at the beginning of our era are not mere speculation.

An examination of many thousands of Roman columbaria or funeral urns and the names inscribed thereon show quite clearly that as early as the first century of our era eighty to ninety per cent of the urban population of the Roman Empire was of servile extraction and that about seven-eighths of this slave population was drawn from districts within the boundaries of the Empire and very largely from the countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean.

Few names are found which indicate that their bearers came from Gaul or the countries beyond the Alps.

These Nordic barbarians were of more use in the legions than as household servants.

At the beginning of the Christian era the entire Levant and countries adjoining it in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt had been so thoroughly hellenized that many of their inhabitants bore Greek names.

It was from these countries and from northern Africa that the slave population of Rome was drawn.

Their descendants were the most important element in the Roman melting pot and even to-day form the predominant element in the population of Italy south of the Apennines.

When the Nordic barbarians a few centuries later poured in, these Romanized Orientals disappeared temporarily from view under the rule of the vigorous northerners but they have steadily absorbed the latter until the Nordic elements in Italy now are to be found chiefly in the Lombard plains and the region of the Alps.

The Byzantine Empire from much the same causes as the Roman became in its turn gradually less and less European and more and more Oriental until it, too, withered and expired.

Regarded in the light of the facts the fall of Rome ceases to be a mystery.

The wonder is that the State lived on after the Romans were extinct and that the Eastern Empire survived so long with an ever fading Greek population.

In Rome and in Greece only the language of the dominant race survived.

So entirely had the blood of the Romans vanished in the last days of the Empire that sorry bands of barbarians wandered at will through the desolated provinces.

Cæsar and his legions would have made short work of these unorganized banditti but Cæsar’s legions were a memory, though one great enough to inspire in the intruders somewhat of awe and desire to imitate.

Against invaders, however, brains and brawn are more effective than tradition and culture, however noble these last may be.

Early ascetic Christianity played a large part in this decline of the Roman Empire as it was at the outset the religion of the slave, the meek and the lowly while Stoicism was the religion of the strong men of the time.

This bias in favor of the weaker elements greatly interfered with their elimination by natural processes and the fighting force of the Empire was gradually undermined.

Christianity was in sharp contrast to the worship of tribal deities which preceded it and it tended then as now to break down class and race distinctions.

The maintenance of such distinctions is absolutely essential to race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.

Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type.

The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter.

Races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.