46. Summary
It would seem that the subject of race problems, that is, the natural endowment of human races, can be summarized as follows:
The essential difficulty of these problems lies in the fact that the performance of groups is the product of two sets of factors, biological and cultural, both of which are variable and not always readily separable.
Progress in solution of the problems will be made gradually, and will be hastened by recognition of how few positive determinations have been made.
Most of the alleged existing evidence on race endowment is likely to be worthless.
The remainder probably has some value, but to what degree, and what it demonstrates, cannot yet be asserted.
The most definite determinations promise to eventuate from experiment. If fully controlled experiments in breeding and rearing human beings could be carried out, the problems would soon begin to solve. Experiments on animals would prove practically nothing because animals are cultureless—uninfluenced by social environment of their own making.
Progress will be aided by increasing shift of attention from the crude consideration of comparative lump rating of the races, that is, their gross superiority or inferiority, to a consideration of such specific qualitative differences as they may prove to show. The question of finding the race in which the greatest number of qualitative excellences are concentrated is subsequent and of much less scientific importance.
Scientific inquiries into race are for the present best kept apart from so-called actual race problems. These problems inevitably involve feeling, usually of considerable strength, which tends to vitiate objective approach. On the other hand, the practical problems will no doubt continue to be met practically, that is, morally and emotionally. Whether the Japanese should be forbidden to hold land and the Negro be legally disfranchised are problems of economics and of group ethics, which probably will for a long time be disposed of emotionally as at present, irrespective of the possible findings of science upon the innate endowment of Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid strains.
CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE
[47.] Linguistic relationship: the speech family.—[48.] Criteria of relationship.—[49.] Sound equivalences and phonetic laws.—[50.] The principal speech families.—[51.] Classification of languages by types.—[52.] Permanence of language and race.—[53.] The biological and historical nature of language.—[54.] Problems of the relation of language and culture.—[55.] Period of the origin of language.—[56.] Culture, speech, and nationality.—[57.] Relative worth of languages.—[58.] Size of vocabulary.—[59.] Quality of speech sounds.—[60.] Diffusion and parallelism in language and culture.—[61.] Convergent languages.—[62.] Unconscious factors in language and culture.—[63.] Linguistic and cultural standards.—[64.] Rapidity of linguistic change.