When the test of actual battle comes, it will, of course, be the native American who will do the fighting and suffer the losses. With him will stand the immigrants of Nordic blood, but there will be numbers of these foreigners in the large cities who will prove to be physically unfit for military duty.
As to what the future mixture will be it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. He will not intermarry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.
One thing is certain: in any such mixture, the surviving traits will be determined by competition between the lowest and most primitive elements and the specialized traits of Nordic man; his stature, his light colored eyes, his fair skin and light colored hair, his straight nose and his splendid fighting and moral qualities, will have little part in the resultant mixture.
The “survival of the fittest” means the survival of the type best adapted to existing conditions of environment, which to-day are the tenement and factory, as in Colonial times they were the clearing of forests, fighting Indians, farming the fields and sailing the Seven Seas. From the point of view of race it were better described as the “survival of the unfit.”
This review of the colonies of Europe would be discouraging were it not for the fact that thus far little attention has been paid to the suitability of a new country for the particular colonists who migrate there. The process of sending out colonists is as old as mankind itself and probably in the last analysis most of the chief races of the world, certainly most of the inhabitants of Europe, represent the descendants of successful colonists.
Success in colonization depends on the selection of new lands and climatic conditions in harmony with the immemorial requirements of the incoming race. The adjustment of each race to its own peculiar habitat is based on thousands of years of rigid selection which cannot be safely ignored. A certain isolation and freedom from competition with other races, for some centuries at least, is also important, so that the colonists may become habituated to their new surroundings.
The Americans have not been on the continent long enough to acquire this adjustment and consequently do not present as effective a resistance to competition with immigrants as did, let us say, the Italians when overrun by northern barbarians. As soon as a group of men migrate to new surroundings, climatic, social or industrial, a new form of selection arises and those not fitted to the new conditions die off at a greater rate than in their original home. This form of differential selection plays a large part in modern industrial centres and in large cities, where unsanitary conditions bear more heavily on the children of Nordics than on those of Alpines or Mediterraneans.
PART II
EUROPEAN RACES IN HISTORY
I
EOLITHIC MAN
Before considering the living populations of Europe we must give consideration to the extinct peoples that preceded them.