The instinctive comity of the white peoples is, as I have already said, perhaps the greatest constant of history. It is the psychological basis of white civilization. Cohesive instinct is as vital to race as gravitation is to matter. Without them, atomic disintegration would alike result. In speaking of race-instinct, I am not referring merely to the ethnic theories that have been elaborated at various times. Those theories were, after all, but attempts to explain intellectually the urge of that profound emotion known to sociologists as the “consciousness of kind.”
White race-consciousness has been of course perturbed by numberless internal frictions, which have at times produced partial inhibitions of unitary feeling. Nevertheless, when really faced by non-white opposition, white men have in the past instinctively tended to close their ranks against the common foe. One of the Great War’s most deplorable results has been an unprecedented weakening of white solidarity which, if not repaired, may produce the most disastrous consequences.
During the nineteenth century the sentiment of white solidarity was strong. The great explorers and empire-builders who spread white ascendancy to the ends of the earth felt that they were apostles of their race and civilization as well as of a particular country. Rivalries might be keen and colonial boundary questions acute; nevertheless, in their calmer moments, the white peoples felt that the expansion of one white nation buttressed the expansion of all.
Professor Pearson undoubtedly voiced the spirit of the day when he wrote (about 1890) that it would be well “if European statesmen could understand that the wars which carry desolation into civilized countries are allowing the lower races to recruit their numbers and strength. Two centuries hence it may be matter of serious concern to the world if Russia has been displaced by China on the Amoor, if France has not been able to colonize North Africa, or if England is not holding India. For civilized men there can be only one fatherland, and whatever extends the influence of those races that have taken their faith from Palestine, their laws of beauty from Greece, and their civil law from Rome, ought to be matter of rejoicing to Russian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Frenchman alike.”[118]
The progress of science also fortified white race-consciousness with its sanctions. The researches of European scholars identified the founders of our civilization with a race of tall, white-skinned barbarians, possessing regular features, brown or blond hair, and light eyes. This was, of course, what we now know as the Nordic type. At first the problem was ill understood, the tests applied being language and culture rather than physical characteristics. For these reasons the early “Caucasian” and “Aryan” hypotheses were self-contradictory and inadequate. Nevertheless, the basis was sound, and the effects on white popular psychology were excellent.
Particularly good were the effects upon the peoples predominantly of Nordic blood. Obviously typifying as they did the prehistoric creators of white civilization, Nordics everywhere were strengthened in consciousness of genetic worth, feeling of responsibility for world-progress, and urge toward fraternal collaboration. The supreme value of Nordic blood was clearly analyzed by the French thinker Count Arthur de Gobineau as early as 1854[119] (albeit Gobineau employed the misleading “Aryan” terminology), and his thesis was subsequently elaborated by many other writers, notably by Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians.
The results of all this were plainly apparent by the closing years of the nineteenth century. Quickened Nordic race-consciousness played an important part in stimulating Anglo-American fraternization, and induced acts like the Oxford Scholarship legacy of Cecil Rhodes. The trend of this movement, though cross-cut by nationalistic considerations, was clearly in the direction of a Nordic entente—a Pan-Nordic syndication of power for the safeguarding of the race-heritage and the harmonious evolution of the whole white world. It was a glorious aspiration, which, had it been realized, would have averted Armageddon.
Unfortunately the aspiration remained a dream. The ill-balanced tendencies of the late nineteenth century were against it, and they ultimately prevailed. The abnormal growth of national-imperialism, in particular, wrought fatal havoc. The exponents of imperialistic propagandas like Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism put forth literally boundless pretensions, planning the domination of the entire planet by their special brand of national-imperialism. Such men had scant regard for race-lines. All who stood outside their particular nationalistic group were vowed to the same subjection.
Indeed, the national-imperialists presently seized upon race teachings, and prostituted them to their own ends. A notable example of this is the extreme Pan-German propaganda of Houston Stewart Chamberlain[120] and his fellows. Chamberlain makes two cardinal assumptions: he conceives modern Germany as racially almost purely Nordic; and he regards all Nordics outside the German linguistic-cultural group as either unconscious or renegade Teutons who must at all costs be brought into the German fold. To any one who understands the scientific realities of race, the monstrous absurdity of these assumptions is instantly apparent. The fact is that modern Germany, far from being purely Nordic, is mainly Alpine in race. Nordic blood preponderates only in the northwest, and is merely veneered over the rest of Germany, especially in the upper classes. While the Germania of Roman days was unquestionably a Nordic land, it has been computed that of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire in 1914, only 9,000,000 were purely Nordic in character. This displacement of the German Nordics since classic times is chiefly due to Germany’s troubled history, especially to the horrible Thirty Years’ War which virtually annihilated the Nordics of south Germany. This racial displacement has wrought correspondingly profound changes in the character of the German people.
The truth of the matter is, of course, that the Pan-Germans were thinking in terms of nationality instead of race, and that they were using pseudo-racial arguments as camouflage for essentially political ends. The pity of it is that these arguments have had such disastrous repercussions in the genuine racial sphere. The late war has not only exploded Pan-Germanism, it has also discredited Nordic race-feeling, so unjustly confused by many persons with Pan-German nationalistic propaganda. Such persons should remember that the overwhelming majority of Nordics live outside of Germany, being mainly found in Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon countries, northern France, the Netherlands, and Baltic Russia. To let Teuton propaganda gull us into thinking of Germany as the Nordic fatherland is both a danger and an absurdity.