The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur and our present reliance on the influence of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values.
Bearing in mind the extreme antiquity of physical and spiritual characters and the persistency with which they outlive those elements of environment termed language, nationality and forms of government, we must consider the relation of these facts to the development of the race in America. We may be certain that the progress of evolution is in full operation to-day under those laws of nature which control it and that the only sure guide to the future lies in the study of the operation of these laws in the past.
We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.
APPENDIX
The maps shown facing pages [266], [268], [270], and [272] of this book attempt in broad and somewhat hypothetical lines to represent by means of color diagrams the original distribution and the subsequent expansion and migration of the three main European races, the Mediterranean, the Alpine and the Nordic, as outlined in this book.
The Maximum Expansion of the Alpines with Bronze Culture, 3000–1800 B. C.
The first map (Pl. I) shows the distribution of these races at the close of the Neolithic, as well as their later expansion. It also indicates the sites of earlier cultures. The distribution of megaliths in Asia Minor on the north coast of Africa and up the Atlantic seaboard through Spain, France and Britain to Scandinavia is set forth. These great stone monuments were seemingly the work of the Mediterranean race using, however, a culture of bronze acquired from the Alpines. The map also shows the sites throughout Russia of the kurgans, or ancient artificial mounds, distribution of which seems to correspond closely with the original habitat of the Nordics.
In southwestern France there is indicated the area where the Cro-Magnon race persisted longest and where traces of it are still to be found. The site is shown of the type station of the latest phase of the Paleolithic known as the Mas d’Azil—a great cavern in the eastern Pyrenees from which that period took its name of Azilian.
At the entrance of the Baltic Sea is also shown the type station of the Maglemose culture which flourished at the close of the Paleolithic and was probably the work of early Nordics.
In the centre of the district occupied by the Alpines is located Robenhausen, the most characteristic of the Neolithic lake dwelling stations and also the Terramara stations in which a culture transitional between the Neolithic and the bronze existed. In the Tyrol the site is indicated of the village of Hallstatt, which gave its name to the first iron culture.