The philosopher Hobbes taught that the natural condition of man in society is one of perpetual warfare with his neighbors. This grim theory is sadly attested by a study of savage life. The wretched Fuegians, the miserable Australians, with really nothing worth living for, let alone dying for, fall to cutting each other’s throats the moment that tribe encounters tribe. So it has been in all ages, so it has been in all stages of culture. The warrior, the hero, is the one who wins the hearts of women by his fame, and the devotion of men by his prowess. Civilization helps not at all. In no century of the world’s history have such destructive battles been fought as in the nineteenth; at no former period have the powers of the earth collected such gigantic armies and navies as to-day.
This love of combat at once separates and unites nations. To destroy the common foe, the bonds of national or tribal unity are drawn the tighter; and the aversion to the enemy tends to the preservation of the ethnic type.
In spite of the countless miseries which follow in its train, war has probably been the highest stimulus to racial progress. It is the most potent excitant known of all the faculties. The intense instinct of self-preservation will prompt to an intellectual energy which nothing else can awake. The grandest works of imagination, the immortal outbursts of the poets, from Homer to Whitman, have been under the stimulus of the war-cry ringing in their ears.
The world-conquerors and the holy wars, Alexander and Napoleon, the Crusades and the Mohammedan invasions, have been landmarks in history, a destruction of the effete, an introduction of the new and the viable. Guizot’s bold statement that in the decisive battles of the world it has been, not the strongest battalions, but the truest idea which has conquered, may be a profound ethnologic truth. Certain it is that in weighing the psychical elements of man’s nature and their influence on the past history of the species, we must assign to his combative instincts a most prominent place as stimulants, and we must recognize, amid all the miseries which they have brought upon him, the part they have played in his development. That they have always resulted in promoting the “survival of the fittest,” it is hard to believe, and there is much to make us doubt; but that a great deal of the unfit has thus been destroyed, we may reasonably accept.
What has been true always, is true to-day. It is force, might, which forever exercises “the right of eminent domain;” and this principle is as necessary as it is indestructible. Proudhon was logical, when, in his treatise on War and Peace, he placed war and the duty of waging war at the basis of all society, and defended it as the necessary condition of civilization, inasmuch as it alone is the highest form of judicial action, the last appeal of the oppressed. Never, we may be sure, will the human species be ready or willing to forego this, the greatest of all their privileges.
LECTURE III.
THE BEGINNINGS AND SUBDIVISIONS OF RACES.
Contents.—The origin of Man. Theories of monogenism and polygenism; of evolution; heterogenesis. Identities point to one origin. Birthplace of the species. The oldest human relics. Remains of the highest apes. Question of climate. Negative arguments. Darwin’s belief that the species originated in Africa confirmed; but with modifications. Quaternary geography of Europe and Africa. Northern Africa united with Southern Europe. Former shore lines. The Sahara Sea. The quaternary continents of “Eurafrica,” and “Austafrica.” Relics of man in them. Man in pre-glacial times. The Glacial Age. Effect on man. Scheme of geologic time during the Age of Man. His development into races. Approximate date of this. Localities where it occurred. The “areas of characterization.” Relations of continents to races. Theory of Linnaeus; of modern ethnography. Classification of races. General ethnographic scheme. Sub-divisions of races; branches; stocks; groups; peoples; tribes; nations. Other terms; ethnos and ethnic; culture; civilization. Stadia of culture.
In the rapid survey contained in the previous lectures you have seen in how many points the races differ. No wonder that the question has often been seriously mooted by scientific men, Could they all have been derived from one common ancestral stock? This is the old debate about “the unity of the human race,” still surviving under the more learned terms of monogenism or polygenism.
As to that other question, whether man came into being as such by a gradual development, evolution, or transformation, from some lower mammal, this may be regarded as the only hypothesis now known to science, and must, therefore, be accepted, at least provisionally, until some better is proposed. It is the only theory consistent with man’s place in the zoölogical world, and is borne out by numerous anatomical analogies, which have been referred to in my first lecture.