The rapidly growing appreciation of the importance of race during the last few years, the study of the influence of race on nationality as shown by the after-war disputes over boundaries, the increasing complexity of our own problems between the whites and blacks, between the Americans and Japs, and between the native Americans and the hyphenated aliens in our midst upon whom we have carelessly urged citizenship, and, above all, the recognition that the leaders of labor and their more zealous followers are almost all foreigners, have served to arouse Americans to a realization of the menace of the impending Migration of Peoples through unrestrained freedom of entry here. The days of the Civil War and the provincial sentimentalism which governed or misgoverned our public opinion are past, and this generation must completely repudiate the proud boast of our fathers that they acknowledged no distinction in “race, creed, or color,” or else the native American must turn the page of history and write:
“FINIS AMERICÆ”
THE PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE
PART I
RACE, LANGUAGE AND NATIONALITY
I
RACE AND DEMOCRACY
Failure to recognize the clear distinction between race and nationality and the still greater distinction between race and language and the easy assumption that the one is indicative of the other have been in the past serious impediments to an understanding of racial values. Historians and philologists have approached the subject from the viewpoint of linguistics and as a result we are to-day burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the Latin, the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, the Caucasian and, perhaps, most inconsistent of all, the Celtic race.
Man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe not in kind but only in degree of development and an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an extended knowledge of other mammals, especially the primates. Instead of such essential training, anthropologists often seek to qualify by research in linguistics, religion or marriage customs or in designs of pottery or blanket weaving, all of which relate to ethnology alone. As a result the influence of environment is often overestimated and overstated at the expense of heredity.
The question of race has been further complicated by the effort of old-fashioned theologians to cramp all mankind into the scant six thousand years of Hebrew chronology as expounded by Archbishop Ussher. Religious teachers have also maintained the proposition not only that man is something fundamentally distinct from other living creatures, but that there are no inherited differences in humanity that cannot be obliterated by education and environment.
It is, therefore, necessary at the outset for the reader to appreciate thoroughly that race, language and nationality are three separate and distinct things and that in Europe these three elements are found only occasionally persisting in combination, as in the Scandinavian nations.
To realize the transitory nature of political boundaries one has but to consider the changes which have occurred during the past century and as to language, here in America we hear daily the English language spoken by many men who possess not one drop of English blood and who, a few years since, knew not one word of Saxon speech.