Every mixed race, when uniform and settled, has been able to play the part of a primary race in fresh crossings. Mankind, in its present state, has thus been formed, certainly for the greatest part, by the successive crossing of a number of races at present undetermined.
The most ancient races which we know, the quaternary races, are still represented in our own days, either by populations generally small in number, or by isolated individuals, in whom atavism reproduces the characters of our remote ancestors. This is a fact which will be proved further on.
CHAPTER XXIV.
INFLUENCE OF CROSSING UPON MIXED HUMAN RACES.
I. Has the crossing of human races been, or will it be, advantageous or detrimental to the species considered as a whole? The followers of Morton in America, and of MM. de Gobineau and Perrier in France, have stated that human crossing had, or would have in the future, disastrous consequences. Has this opinion any foundation? Let us study the facts.
M. Gobineau appeals to history, and goes back to the earliest ages of mankind. According to him, three fundamental races, the black, the yellow, and the white, were formed originally. The yellow race occupied the whole of America; the negro race all the southern parts of the old continent as far as the Caspian Sea; the white race was localised in Central Asia. The two former, degraded from an intellectual and moral as well as from a physical point of view, and unable to elevate themselves unaided above the savage state, only existed as tribes. The third was the only one which united bodily beauty with a warlike spirit, to the faculty of initiative, of organization and progress, which gives rise to societies and to civilization. The day came when the yellow race burst upon Asia, and, avoiding the central region occupied by the whites, went to people the western regions of the old world. Then, this wave, continuing its course, submerged the white race, which, in its turn, began to emigrate; and by the mixture of its blood with that of the inferior races, produced all the peoples who have succeeded each other upon the earth. At the beginning of this new era, the white blood, being more pure and more abundant, produced superior civilizations. Becoming rarer at each new emigration, it lost its influence, and civilization diminished in every respect. The last effort of this renovating race was the Germanic invasion which destroyed the Roman world. It is now exhausted. The white blood, vitiated by the mixture, has everywhere lost its first efficacy. Mankind for this very reason is in a full decline. The fusion will soon be complete. Every individual will have in his veins one-third of white blood and two-thirds of coloured blood, and we shall then inevitably return to barbarism. Finally, the repeated crossings will have rendered the human species barren; it will then die out and disappear.
Such is, in a few words, the theory of M. de Gobineau. Let us accept it with all its hypotheses, including that of the migration from America to Asia, which is contrary to all our knowledge upon this point. Does it follow that the author is consistent? In order to be so, he ought to point out the privileged race, founding by itself one at least of those great societies, one of those civilizations, as M. de Gobineau calls them, recorded by history. Now the author is unable to point out a single example, and is obliged to admit that the exclusively white civilization has existed in Central Asia without leaving any other trace than the tumuli which have for a long time been attributed to Scythians, Tchoudes, etc. But everyone knows the state of the whites, when they left their Asiatic centre. In India they were the Aryans, still a half-pastoral race; in Europe, the barbarians who destroyed the Roman world. Had either of them a civilization equal to that of the Egyptians or the Greeks?
M. de Gobineau enumerates ten civilizations, namely, Assyrian, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Italian, German, Alleghanian, Mexican, and Peruvian. All, according to him, were produced in consequence of the mixture of whites with coloured races. But admitting that such has been the case, is it not evident that this mixture has everywhere given rise to an immense progress. The ruins of Nineveh Thebes, Athens, Rome, and even those of Palanqué, certainly point to populations of a different civilization to that of the people who raised the tumuli in Central Asia.
In order to draw their logical consequences from the facts which he admits or supposes, M. de Gobineau should regard the formation of half-breeds as the most powerful element of progress. As we have seen he adopts the opposite opinion. He considers that all these civilizations, which were splendid in the case of the Assyrians and Egyptians, have been dwindling away and diminishing, and what remains in our own days, only deserves our scorn.