CHAPTER XI
THE FAMILY TREE
When came this Latin-American? Is he a mystery, a complex, or a racial conundrum defying analysis and baffling understanding? So many people have said. Others have reported a something impossible to name or describe about this man from the southlands—all of which is nonsense. There are few human mysteries when once we have the key. Any people may be understood if we know their racial origin, social history, and reaction-power. Such knowledge usually explains these so-called race peculiarities.
As North Americans we are ourselves the present product of social forces that have driven us for centuries past. With a northern European race origin we have been mixed in many molds and infused with many tinctures till we emerge a new blend of blood. This new and vigorous stock shows a reaction-power that has made much of educational, scientific, and material opportunities, but, after all, these traits themselves are largely the result of the social stimuli of the past five hundred years. Had our ancestors in the sixteenth century removed to Spain, we should all now be Spanish dons.
If we could know the social, religious, intellectual, domestic, industrial, and political environment of a people, we could account for ninety per cent of race characteristics. And this social history measures, not only potent forces and compelling sanctions, but itself in turn registers reactive power and character values.
SAN BLAS INDIAN CHIEF
The Latin-American has no cause to apologize nor explain when we inquire into his racial antecedents. Out of the remote ages of antiquity a branch of the human family moved westward, and on the Italian peninsula developed a civilization and founded a city that in time dominated the world. The lust of conquest and the intoxication of power debauched the rulers of Rome, but the rising Christian Church took over the scepter, and for fifteen hundred years Rome dominated the civilization of the world. Fundamentally, there was no difference between the blood of southern and western Europe, and but for the corrupt and demoralizing influence of the papacy and its trailing blight upon the human spirit Rome might still have been the dominant power of European civilization. The abuses that compelled the Reformation also vitiated the Latin spirit. The wakening life of the sixteenth century shifted the center westward but the blight of papal despotism kept the Latin races from their full share in the developments and democracy of the modern age. And now that the Teutonic peoples of the north have become the victims of the most deadly despotism that the world has yet produced, it is possible that the center and motive of progressive thought in continental Europe may again swing to the southern peoples.