VI
RACE AND LANGUAGE
When a country is invaded and conquered by a race speaking a foreign language, one of several things may happen: replacement of both population and language, as in the case of eastern England when conquered by the Saxons or adoption of the language of the victors by the natives, as happened in Roman Gaul, where the invaders imposed their Latin tongue throughout the land without substantially altering the race.
The Romans probably modified the race in Gaul by killing a much larger proportion of the Nordic fighting classes than of the more submissive Alpines and Mediterraneans. This is confirmed by the fact that when the prolonged and brilliant resistance to Cæsar’s legions was finally broken, no serious attempt was ever again made to throw off the Roman yoke and a few centuries later the Teutonic invaders encountered no determined opposition from the inhabitants when they entered and occupied the land.
In England and Scotland later conquerors, Norsemen, Danes and Normans, failed to change radically the Saxon speech of the country and in Gaul the Teutonic tongues of the Franks, Burgundians and Northmen could not displace the language of Rome.
Autochthonous inhabitants frequently impose upon their invaders their own language and customs. In Normandy the conquering Norse pirates accepted the language, religion and customs of the natives and in a century they vanish from history as Scandinavian heathen and appear as the foremost representatives of the speech and religion of Rome.
In Hindustan the blond Nordic invaders forced their Aryan language on the aborigines, but their blood was quickly and utterly absorbed in the darker strains of the original owners of the land. A record of the desperate efforts of the conqueror classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes. In our Southern States Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose and justification.
The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language, but there remains not one recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the Northwest. The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler is entirely without basis in fact and the little swarthy native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long-forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship. The dim and uncertain traces of Nordic blood in northern India only serve to emphasize the utter swamping of the white man in the burning South.
The power of racial resistance of a dense and thoroughly acclimated population to an incoming army is very great. No ethnic conquest can be complete unless the natives are exterminated and the invaders bring their own women with them. If the conquerors are obliged to depend upon the women of the vanquished to carry on the race, the intrusive blood strain of the invaders in a short time becomes diluted beyond recognition.
It sometimes happens that an infiltration of population takes place either in the guise of unwilling slaves or of willing immigrants, who fill up waste places and take to the lowly tasks which the lords of the land despise, thus gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their masters.
The former catastrophe happened in the declining days of the Roman Republic and the south Italians of to-day are very largely descendants of the nondescript slaves of all races, chiefly from the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, who were imported by the Romans under the Empire to work their vast estates. The latter is occurring to-day in many parts of America, especially in New England.