CHAPTER VII
THE BEGINNING OF THE EBB
The Russo-Japanese War is one of those landmarks in human history whose significance increases with the lapse of time. That war was momentous, not only for what it did, but even more for what it revealed. The legend of white invincibility was shattered, the veil of prestige that draped white civilization was torn aside, and the white world’s manifold ills were laid bare for candid examination.
Of course previous blindness to the trend of things had not been universal. The white world had had its Cassandras, while keen-sighted Asiatics had discerned symptoms of white weakness. Nevertheless, so imposing was the white world’s aspect and so unbroken its triumphant progress that these seers had been a small and discredited minority. The mass of mankind, white and non-white alike, remained oblivious to signs of change.
This, after all, was but natural. Not only had the white advance been continuous, but its tempo had been ever increasing. The nineteenth century, in particular, witnessed an unprecedented outburst of white activity. We have already surveyed white territorial gains, both as to area of settlement and sphere of political control. But along many other lines white expansion was equally remarkable. White race-increase—the basis of all else—was truly phenomenal. In the year 1500 the white race (then confined to Europe) could not have numbered more than 70,000,000. In 1800 the population of Europe was 150,000,000, while the whites living outside Europe numbered over 10,000,000. The white race had thus a trifle more than doubled its numbers in three centuries. But in the year 1900 the population of Europe was nearly 450,000,000, while the extra-European whites numbered fully 100,000,000. Thus the whites had increased threefold in the European homeland, while in the new areas of settlement outside Europe they had increased tenfold. The total number of whites at the end of the nineteenth century was thus nearly 550,000,000—a gain in numbers of almost 400,000,000, or over 400 per cent. This spelled an increase six times as great as that of the preceding three centuries.
White race-growth is most strikingly exemplified by the increase of its most expansive and successful branch—the Anglo-Saxons. In 1480, as already seen, the population of England proper was not much over 2,000,000. Of course this figure was abnormally low even for mediæval times, it being due to the terrible vital losses of the Wars of the Roses, then drawing to a close. A century later, under Elizabeth, the population of England had risen to 4,000,000. In 1900 the population of England was 31,000,000, and in 1910 it was 35,000,000, the population of the British Isles at the latter date being 45,500,000. But in the intervening centuries British blood had migrated to the ends of the earth, so that the total number of Anglo-Saxons in the world to-day cannot be much less than 100,000,000. This figure includes Scotch and Scotch-Irish strains (which are of course identical with English in the Anglo-Saxon sense), and adopts the current estimate that some 50,000,000 of people in the United States are predominantly of Anglo-Saxon origin. Thus, in four centuries, the Anglo-Saxons multiplied between forty and fifty fold.
The prodigious increase of the white race during the nineteenth century was due not only to territorial expansion but even more to those astounding triumphs of science and invention which gave the race unprecedented mastery over the resources of nature. This material advance is usually known as the “industrial revolution.” The industrial revolution began in the later decades of the eighteenth century, but it matured during the first half of the nineteenth century, when it swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things.
This transformation was, indeed, absolutely unprecedented in the world’s history. Hitherto man’s material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses’s lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature’s hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of previous generations.
When I say “Man,” I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the white man. It was the white man’s brain which had conceived all this, and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine industry with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favored a prodigious increase in population, particularly in Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and exchange. The amount of wealth amassed by the white world in general and by Europe in particular since the beginning of the nineteenth century is simply incalculable. Some faint conception of it can be gathered from the growth of world-trade. In the year 1818 the entire volume of international commerce was valued at only $2,000,000,000. In other words, after countless millenniums of human life upon our globe, man had been able to produce only that relatively modest volume of world-exchange. In 1850 the volume of world-trade had grown to $4,000,000,000. In 1900 it had increased to $20,000,000,000, and in 1913 it swelled to the inconceivable total of $40,000,000,000—a twentyfold increase in a short hundred years.