German Problems and Personalities

by Charles Sarolea

V.

The German race theory is propped up by a formidable array of so-called scientific proofs. All the auxiliary disciplines of biology, botany and zoology, physiology and anatomy, are enlisted in the service of anthropology and ethnology. The question as to whether a particular nation is a Kultur Volk or whether it is only a rabble of slaves depends entirely on whether the facies is square or oval, brachycephalic or oligocephalic. It depends entirely—to use the pedantic jargon of the anthropologist—on the “cephalic index” of the race.

The historical sciences are called in to support the conclusions of ethnology. It is especially philology which is the most efficient instrument demonstrating the existence and the superiority of a distinct race. Just as anatomy reveals to us the structure of the cranium, so philology reveals to us the structure of the mind. The philologist reveals the genealogies of words even as the anthropologist studies the genealogies of races.

In the burning controversies which for the last generation have divided the Tchech and Magyar and Croatian and Roumanian races of the Austrian Empire, it is the philologists who have acted as umpires. In Vienna philologists like von Jagic have all the authority and prestige of statesmen. Similarly, in the Balkan States, Serbians and Bulgarians, Roumanians and Greeks, find conclusive evidence of their respective rights in the dialects of the Macedonian populations. Such and such a province must be allotted to the Serbians, and not to the Bulgarians, because such and such a dialect has more affinity to the Serbian than to the Bulgarian language. Similarly, in the Latin elements of their dictionary, Roumanian patriots find convincing evidence of their Latin ancestry, and finally prove that they are the lineal descendants of the Dacian legions of Emperor Trajan.[21]

VI.

Those scientific arguments, biological and philological, may satisfy the biologists and the philologists; they certainly satisfy nobody else. All those pseudo-scientific facts belong to the realm of fiction. Serious thinkers have ceased to prattle about the application of biology to ethics since Huxley delivered his Romanes lecture on “Evolution and Ethics.” The encroachments of scientific materialism have failed as signally in the political sciences as they have failed in ethics.

It is futile to compare the processes which evolve races of man with the processes which evolve breeds of animals. It is true that in the lower stages of humanity the word “race” has a definite meaning. It may be contended that there is a wide gulf between the races at the extreme end of the human scale, a gulf which even the enthusiastic devotion of missionary effort does not seem able to bridge. There is such a thing as the “blackness” of the nigger and the “yellowness” of the Chinese and the Japanese, although the Japanese have proved themselves capable of assimilating Western civilization, and although the black race has produced the greatest poet of Russia, Pouchkine, and one of the greatest novelists of France, Alexandre Dumas. But it is an all-important fact that as civilization advances the word “race” entirely changes its meaning. Evolution entirely modifies its processes. Biological factors steadily decrease in importance. Moral and political and intellectual factors as steadily increase in importance.

Isolation and selection are the main conditions required to produce a definite breed of cattle. On the other hand, if we want to produce a highly civilized type, it is not isolation which is the main condition, but crossing and blending, mixture and intercourse. As we rise in the scale of humanity there are no fixed types. All types are equally plastic. There are no pure types. All types are equally mixed.

Even if we take the Jewish race, which seems to show extraordinary fixity and stability of type, there is not one dominant Jewish type; there are fully fifty different Jewish types. There is hardly any resemblance between the Jew of Tiflis and the Jew of Tangier, between democratic Ashkenazim and the aristocratic Sephardim. Race is not a cause, but an effect. It is not biology which explains politics, it is politics which dominate biology. It is not the physical which explains the moral, it is the moral which produces the physical. It is not the racial type which produces a racial belief and a racial community, it is the religion which produces the race. It is not the Hindu caste which produces the religion, it is religion which produces the caste. Similarly, it is the religious and political conditions which have kept the Jew apart, and which have preserved the characteristics of the race. Even so, religion and persecution have kept the characteristics of the Armenians or the Parsees and the Greek colonies in the Levant.