The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

I omit from the list of perversities whatever is the subject of serious economic controversy. Such things as national tariffs, for instance. However arguable the question may be in England, even the free-trader usually appreciates in such a country as Australia the plea for a protective tariff. There is, at all events, a very serious controversy on the general issue, and it would not be expedient to include among plain reforms any scheme of universal free-trade or universal protection. It is enough to point out that certain obvious, stupid, and mischievous survivals of old conditions gravely hamper our international intercourse. The prestige of our civilisation, as well as a common-sense view of our interest, demand that we shall suppress them. More disputable reforms may be considered afterwards. Our usual method is, one fears, to discuss the more disputable reforms first.

It is difficult to conceive any plea being put forward on behalf of these irrational old customs, but a sufficiently ingenious and superficial apologist might claim that patriotism bids us maintain them. There is no doubt that the work of reform will have to proceed over the bodies of a number of the pettier patriots. No one can suppose that the task of unification will be accomplished without friction. German professors and Bulgarian politicians will protest against this pernicious cosmopolitan spirit, this horrible wish to denationalise us, this tampering with the sources of national energy. Ardent Irishmen and Welshmen will form very talkative associations for the defence of “the grand old tongue.” Rival languages will be put forward, and Esperanto will strain its hitherto respectable resources in denouncing Volapük or the new official speech. French and English and German savants will heatedly press the claims of ideal words in their respective languages to be taken over, and pamphleteers will discuss whether Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt did or did not contribute more suggestions than Professor Smith. A higher criticism of the new language will spread its pale growth like a parasitic fungus.

What is patriotism? In the sense in which the word is still widely, if not generally, understood, it stands for a sentiment that belongs essentially to a pre-rational age and cannot survive unchanged in a rational age. This does not mean that a rational age has no place for sentiments; it means that the sentiments must not affront reason. We cannot at once pride ourselves on being paragons of common-sense, yet slaves to a sentiment which common-sense must not examine too closely. Loyalty to that larger national family to which we belong: cordial and generous support of its interests: sacrifice, if need be, for its just ambitions: pride in its worthy achievements, even in its worthier superiorities—these are useful and intelligible sentiments, and it is not unreasonable to make a flag the visible symbol of these just interests and achievements. But a blind and undiscriminating devotion to flag or king, a glorification of our national family above others in the roystering fashion of the Middle Ages, a refusal to ask if the demands of our rulers are just or if the interests we are pressed to support are sound and equitable, an obstinate pride in a thing because it is British or German, whether it be wise or no—these are sentiments entirely at variance with the best spirit of our age. We may recognise that even the crude old patriotism has contributed much to the advance of civilisation. This gathering of men into rival national groups has forced the pace, and has at times developed noble qualities. But we must admit also that the same patriotism has inspired hundreds of unjust and stupid wars, and has maintained on their thrones kings and queens who ought to have been dismissed with ignominy.

The progress of civilisation does not entail the suppression, but the refinement, of sentiment, as is very plainly seen in the supposed implications of patriotism. When it is urged that these absurd national diversities of speech and coinage must be sustained on the ground of patriotism, we ask at once which sound element of patriotism could demand such an anachronism? It is, surely, only the spurious medieval sentiment that could dictate so utter an absurdity! Will the interests of England be endangered because we remove a very serious burden from its economic life and its educational activity? Shall we be less prosperous, less happy, less respected, for correcting an antiquated and foolish practice? These things, we may reflect, were not stupid at the time when they were developed. The resolute patriot may, if he wills, take pride in the relative ingenuity of the people who invented them. Each separate national system was the outcome of special conditions, and the slender commerce between the different communities at the time they were developed did not require a rigorous international standard. One bartered by the piece or the lump. But it is sheer folly to ignore the modern transformation of international life: to fancy that our unwillingness to exert ourselves, even for our own advantage, may be ascribed to some lofty virtue.

It need hardly be said that I am not cherishing a dream of spreading at once over the entire planet a uniformity of language and coins and standards. The leading civilised nations might, within a few years, adopt such a scheme; and a certain number of the smaller and less advanced nations, which aspire to membership of the civilised group, would probably accept the reform speedily enough. On the other hand, the permeation of the lower races with our ideas would be a slow and difficult process: a part of that general task of civilising the whole race which we have sooner or later to confront. This difficulty does not at all affect the advantage we should gain by adopting a scheme of unification within the family of civilised nations, and it cannot be pleaded as a reason for postponement. But all the reforms I have hitherto discussed will, when they have spread over the more highly organised countries, find a temporary check in this chaotic jumble of peoples on the fringe of civilisation, and it may be useful to discuss the principles which ought to inform our attitude toward them.

Our generation looks out upon these backward branches of the race, not only with a finer sentiment and a stricter regard for principle than any previous generation did, but with a very much clearer knowledge of their meaning. We may, of course, be faithless to our principles in cases: we may casuistically wrap a piece of frank buccaneering of the old type in hypocritical humanitarian phrases. The general attitude is, however, more enlightened, as these pieces of hypocrisy themselves show. We may or may not hold the doctrine of universal brotherhood; at least we understand the true relation of these more backward races to ourselves, and we are in a much better position to determine our right and our duties. We have advanced considerably since, little more than half a century ago, a stern moralist like Carlyle could defend black-slavery and denounce as “a gospel of dirt” the scientific revelation which threw light and hope on inferior types of manhood.

The chief difference is that we now see the true relation of the lower races to the higher. It is false to say, as Carlyle did, that some races were created with higher gifts than others, and were therefore divinely appointed as the master-races. The notion is as absurd as the old and profitable legend of the laying of a primitive curse on Ham and his black descendants. Difference of geographical conditions is the chief clue to the unequal development of the various branches of the race. I have in various works developed this theme and will not linger over it here. You have at the start the same human material and capacities in all the scattered groups. But some have been for ages isolated from the stimulating contact of races with a different or a higher culture, and this is the essential condition of advance. Others have, by sheer chance, been so situated that they enjoyed this stimulation in an extraordinary degree. On this principle we can understand the birth of civilisation in that fermenting mass of peoples which settled between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf ages ago, and the direction of the advancing stream of culture, partly eastward to India and China, but mainly in the more favourable north-western direction.

It is, therefore, no difference of aboriginal outfit, but a difference in the chances of migration and situation, which accounts for the cultural diversity of races. Yet we must not at once infer that any lower race can, on this account, be drawn from its isolation and lifted to the higher level. There is reason to believe that a race loses its educability if it remains unprogressive for too long a period. The physiological reason may be that the skull closes firmly, at a relatively early age, over the brain in a people in which expansion of brain after puberty has not been encouraged. Take the three “lower races” of Australasia. The Tasmanian was one of the oldest and least cultured branches of the human family, and he died out within a century after contact with the whites. The Maori of New Zealand is the most recent and most advanced of the three aboriginal races. With the Polynesian, he is closely related to the European or Caucasic race, and is certainly educable. The Australian black comes between the two in culture and in the period of his isolation. Australian scientific men who have made the most sympathetic efforts to uplift the black tell me that they have failed, and the race seems to be doomed.

These scientific principles have discredited the old legendary notions about the lower races, but we must not as yet make dogmas of them. Nothing but candid and careful experience will show which races are educable and which ineducable. It is very probable that such peoples as the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the Aetas of the Philippines, the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and some of the Central African groups, will prove ineducable. Other races which have been considered “savage” are already proving educable, either as a body or in large numbers of instances. Many peoples have not been tested at all. We are only just at the fringe of this vast and interesting problem.

In regard to the races which, after humane and thorough experiment, prove entirely ineducable, the solution does not offer much difficulty. Once their primitive habits are disturbed, and they begin to live on a pension allotted them by the European nations which have seized their territory, they gradually die out. A very good case may be established by those writers who hold that races which cling incurably to barbarism ought to be painlessly extirpated, or prevented from multiplying. Such races as the Australian blacks are quite familiar with a process of sterilisation which does not interfere with their enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the life led by these domesticated but ineducable savages is hardly worth preserving at all. However, as they are disappearing, one need not press that point. The claim of sane humanitarians, that we have no right to interfere with their conditions and seize their territory, is quite unsound. The human family has a right to see large fertile regions of the earth developed. Who regrets to-day that the Amerinds were pensioned in order to find room for Canada and the United States and Brazil and Argentina? Who does not see the advantage of peopling Australia with a fine and advancing civilisation of (eventually) twenty or thirty million progressive whites instead of a few hundred thousand miserable aboriginals?