Passing of the Great Race — Racial Aptitudes

XI 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.

These moral and physical characters are not limited to one race but given traits do occur with more frequency in one race than in another.

Each race differs in the relative proportion of what we may term good and bad strains, just as nations do, or, for that matter, sections and classes of the same nation.

In considering skull characters we must remember that, while indicative of independent descent, the size and shape of the head are not closely related to brain power.

Aristotle was a Mediterranean if we may trust the authenticity of his busts and had a small, long skull, while Humboldt’s large and characteristically Nordic skull was equally dolichocephalic.

Socrates and Diogenes were apparently quite un-Greek and represent remnants of some early race, perhaps of Paleolithic man.

The history of their lives indicates that each was recognized by his fellow countrymen as in some degree alien, just as the Jews apparently regarded Christ as, in some indefinite way, non-Jewish.

Mental, spiritual and moral traits are closely associated with the physical distinctions among the different European races, although like somatological characters, these spiritual attributes have in many cases gone astray.

Enough remain, however, to show that certain races have special aptitudes for certain pursuits.

The Alpine race is always and everywhere a race of peasants, an agricultural and never a maritime race.

In fact they only extend to salt water at the head of the Adriatic and, like all purely agricultural communities throughout Europe, tend toward democracy, although they are submissive to authority both political and religious being usually Roman Catholics in western Europe.

This race is essentially of the soil and in towns the type is mediocre and bourgeois.

The coastal and seafaring populations of northern Europe are everywhere Nordic as far as the shores of Spain and among Europeans this race is pre-eminently fitted for maritime pursuits.

Enterprise at sea during the Middle Ages was in the hands of Mediterraneans just as it was originally developed by Cretans, Phœnicians and Carthaginians but after the Reformation the Nordics seized and occupied this field almost exclusively.

The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant and democratic character of the Alpines.

The Nordic race is domineering, individualistic, self-reliant and jealous of their personal freedom both in political and religious systems and as a result they are usually Protestants.

Chivalry and knighthood and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.

The social status of woman varies largely with race but here religion plays a part.

In the Roman Republic and in ancient Germany women were held in high esteem.

In the Nordic countries of to-day women’s rights have received much more recognition than among the southern nations with their traditions of Latin culture.

To this general statement modern Germany is a marked exception.

The contrast is great between the mental attitude toward woman of the ancient Teutons and that of the modern Germans.

The pure Nordic peoples are characterized by a greater stability and steadiness than are mixed peoples such as the Irish, the ancient Gauls and the Athenians among all of whom the lack of these qualities was balanced by a correspondingly greater versatility.

The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments.

In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned, although in literature and in scientific research and discovery the Nordics far excel it.

Before leaving this interesting subject of the correlation of spiritual and moral traits with physical characters we may note that these influences are so deeply rooted in everyday consciousness that the modern novelist or playwright does not fail to make his hero a tall, blond, honest and somewhat stupid youth and his villain a small, dark and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character.

So in Celtic legend as in the Græco-Roman and mediæval romances, prince and princess are always fair, a fact rather indicating that the mass of the people were brunet at the time when the legends were taking shape.

In fact, “fair” is a synonym for beauty.

Most ancient tapestries show a blond earl on horseback and a dark-haired churl holding the bridle.

The gods of Olympus were almost all described as blond, and it would be difficult to imagine a Greek artist painting a brunet Venus.

In church pictures all angels are blond, while the denizens of the lower regions revel in deep brunetness.

“Non Angli sed angeli,” remarked Pope Gregory when he first saw Saxon children exposed for sale in the Roman slave-mart.

In depicting the crucifixion no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour.

This is something more than a convention, as such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.

These and similar traditions clearly point to the relations of the one race to the other in classic, mediæval and modern times.

How far they may be modified by democratic institutions and the rule of the majority remains to be seen.

The wars of the past two thousand years in Europe have been almost exclusively wars between the various nations of this race or between rulers of Nordic blood.

From a race point of view the present European conflict is essentially a civil war and nearly all the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides are members of this race.

It is the same old tragedy of mutual butchery and mutual destruction between Nordics, just as the Nordic nobility of Renaissance Italy seems to have been possessed with a blood mania to murder one another.

It is the modern edition of the old Berserker blood rage and is class suicide on a gigantic scale.

At the beginning of the war it was difficult to say on which side there was the preponderance of Nordic blood.

Flanders and northern France are more Nordic than south Germany, while the backbone of the armies that England put into the field as well as of those of her colonies was almost purely Nordic and a large proportion of the Russian army was of the same race.

As heretofore stated, with America in the war, the greater part of the Nordics of the world are fighting against Germany.

Although the writer has limited carefully the use of the word “Teutonic” to that section of the Nordic race which originated in Scandinavia and which later spread over northern Europe, nevertheless this term is unfortunate because it is currently given a national and not a racial meaning and is used to denote the populations of the central empires.

This popular use includes millions who are un-Teutonic and excludes millions of pure Teutonic blood who are outside of the political borders of Austria and Germany and who are bitterly hostile to the very name itself.

The present inhabitants of the German Empire, to say nothing of Austria, are only to a limited extent descendants of the ancient Teutonic tribes, being very largely Alpines, especially in the east and south.

To abandon to the Germans and Austrians the exclusive right to the name Teuton or Teutonic would be to acquiesce in one of their most grandiose pretensions.