Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

There can be no doubt but that any white mixed race is lower in the scale of intelligence than the pure white race. A white man entails indelible degradation on his descendants who takes in marriage a woman of a darker race; and any relation other than that of marriage, no matter if it does lift the lower race, is unauthorized by any sound moral code. Still more to be deplored is the woman of the white race who unites herself with a man of a lower ethnic type. It cannot be too often repeated, too emphatically urged, that it is to the women alone of the highest race that we must look to preserve the purity of the type, and with it the claims of the race to be the highest. They have no holier duty, no more sacred mission, than that of transmitting in its integrity the heritage of ethnic endowment gained by the race through thousands of generations of struggle. That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man.

The two problems we have now discussed seem to present a dilemma. The pure races do not flourish out of their physiological surroundings; and yet some of them are not adequate for the work required by modern culture. What resource have we? The answer is, in the union of the lower races among themselves, especially the Mongolian and the African. Thus we may expect a blending capable of resisting the heat of the tropics, and intelligent enough to carry out the directions of that race which will ever and everywhere maintain its supremacy so long as it maintains its ethnic purity—the Eurafrican.

Let us now turn to

The Problem of Civilization.

It is one which has arisen within the last two or three centuries, and is now so urgent that it will have an instant reply. With increased means of locomotion and augmented love of progress, civilization is now transported, with all its complex forces, to every nation and every tribe, no matter where or of what race, and the question is put point blank, Will you accept this precious gift, or will you have it forced upon you, with such results as may happen? Japan has welcomed the message, inscrutable China hesitates, Persia wavers, the miserable Australians refuse, the savages turn their back—all in vain; the message is importunate, will take no denial, must be accepted. Opposition means destruction. The Bechuana kraal which refuses to have a grand opera house and electric lights, if the European sees fit to put them there, will be wiped out of existence. So will every tribe, every nation, every race, which sets forth to oppose the resistless flow of civilized progress.

Preservation, however, and not destruction, is the maxim of the ripest culture. The Tasmanian is extinct, the Polynesian disappearing, many an American tribe lives only in name, all gone down before the fierce flames of a civilization which did not lighten, but consumed them. Many another people is disappearing in the same way, in spite of the devoted efforts of earnest men and women to save them, to bring them into accord with the thought of the higher race, to teach them the boundless blessings of European enlightenment.

What is the history of these efforts? Failure, and yet again failure. Consider the history of the attempts to bring the American race into accord with the European. There were the noble endeavors of the Jesuits in Paraguay, the untiring zeal of the Franciscans in Yucatan, the admirable devotion of the Moravian brethren in the northern continent, and the long list of missionary societies in Protestant churches. These represent the most sustained, unselfish and enlightened efforts which have ever been made to civilize the Indians. They are of the same nature and on the same plan as those which have been and still are directed toward other savage peoples, the Polynesians and Africans for example.

Have they been successful? Can an instance be adduced where they have achieved a full and permanent introduction of a savage tribe to the real benefits of our civilization?

I cannot answer for the history of missions throughout the world, but I can and do for my special field, America, and I say, not a single instance of success can be named. The Jesuits and the Moravians succeeded, indeed, in reclaiming the natives from their wild life; they transformed them from warring savages into peaceful planters; from drunken, cruel and superstitious, they made them sober, kind and religious. This was a noble, an admirable result. But were their converts any the more able to accept the civilization of Europe? Not a whit. David Zeisberger’s last sermon was a wail that his sixty years’ of missionary work had failed to accomplish this result. Ten years after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, their extensive “reductions,” which at one time included thirty or forty thousand Christianized natives, were a heap of ruins, and the converts dispersed to the four winds—and this after nearly two centuries of training!

Should we conclude from these sad histories that it is impossible to bring the existing savage nations into accord with our own culture? This is not my conclusion. Rather I infer that we have not tried the proper measures. We have relied almost exclusively on missionary religious work, forgetting that our religion is only one part of our civilization, and, so far as it is dogmatic and ceremonial, much the least part. We have been singularly inconsequent. We send our own children six days to a secular school, and only on the seventh to a Sunday-school; but the poor Indian we send to Sunday-school all seven days, and then expect him to have an education like our own! Our missionaries hold up to the savage pictures of Christian brotherhood, of unselfish motive, of universal charity, which he soon finds have no existence in Christian communities or modern civilization. If he is an honest convert, he is absolutely disqualified from contact with civilized peoples! The Jesuits and the Moravians, both practical orders, knew this well, and therefore not only prevented their acolytes learning European tongues, but used every means at their command to banish all relations between the two races in those under their control.