When we cross the line which separates the United States from Canada we find a national mechanism at work which converts immigrants of alien nationalities into loyal Canadians. In Canada, however, our attention is arrested by an example which illustrates the persistence and the strength of the force which perpetuates a national spirit. The ancestors of the French Canadians began to settle in the province of Quebec early in the seventeenth century, 150 years before the Canadian national mill was set agoing by Englishmen. The French settlers never passed through that mill. They came, for the greater part, from the north-west of France, and although speaking a different tongue, adopting a different religion, and following different customs, they were yet in point of race not essentially different from the English founders of Canada. Yet the descendants of these early French settlers, now numbering well over a million and a half, and although forming but a small island in the midst of an English-speaking ocean for more than a century and a half, have maintained their sense of separateness—their national frontiers—intact. There is no question here of a racial frontier as yet, but were this national isolation of French Canadians to become permanent, then in course of time a racial differentiation would be produced within their territory.
When we turn our faces westward and cross the Rocky Mountains we find the minds of the white inhabitants, along the whole stretch of the Pacific coast, occupied with a racial problem. They have erected a racial barrier to keep out the native peoples of Asia. The native of India is excluded just as strictly as the Chinaman or Japanese. They are not excluded because of their speech or of their civilization, but because the people of the United States and of Canada are conscious of a certain feeling of difference—call it race prejudice, race antipathy, or what you will. It is a conscious or subconscious state of feeling which rebels against racial fusion.
Racial Problems of Spanish America
When we pass from the United States to Mexico we cross the boundary line which separates the two most immense experiments in human breeding the world has ever seen. North of this experimental Rubicon, as we have just seen, the basal stock, which is north-west European or Nordic in origin, has been ruled by a sense of race-caste and has consequently maintained its racial characters. But south of our Rubicon the result of racial contact has been absolutely different. The south-west European or Iberian stock broke down the natural barrier which Nature had set up between them and the natives of Mexico and South America and solved their racial antagonisms by the fusion of blood. The results of these two experiments, carried out on such an immense scale, we can see to-day. The northern experiment, which is now three centuries old, has given the world two of her most virile peoples destined to hold their place whether humanity becomes planted out on a vast, peaceful, and uniform cabbage-patch or still remains, as now, broken up into national and racial factions. These northern peoples are as effective, so far at least as concerns their chances of survival, as the original Nordic stock. The southern experiment, which began four centuries ago, has given the world a jangling series of small peoples, not any one of which is equal, either in body or in mind, to the pioneer Iberian stock. From the anthropologist's point of view the northern experiment is the successful one.
We have been glancing at the national and racial problems of the American continent and we ought now to pass on to note the form in which they are presented to us by Australasia. Before passing on, however, there is one very important aspect of the southern or Iberian experiment which we must consider now because it throws light on the path along which I want to lead you. Why did the racial barrier between Iberian and Indian break down? Was it because the Iberian did not possess—was not influenced by—a sense of race-caste such as we have seen to dominate the Nordic colonist? I believe that race-caste or race-prejudice is and has been a more potent force in the Nordic than in the Iberian stock. The Iberian people are near neighbours of the African races; in physique they are differentiated from the African stocks in a somewhat less degree than the Nordic stocks which represent the utmost point in the physical specialization of all European peoples. If the Iberian pioneer carried with him to America a lesser degree of race-caste, the process of hybridization would begin the more easily. The great north and south experiments differed, however, in another important circumstance. The Nordic encountered a scattered, nomadic, proud race; the Iberian a settled people living in dense communities. The Iberian was thus exposed to conditions in which a racial barrier was harder to maintain.
Struggle between Race and Sex Impulses
But neither of these two circumstances—a lesser developed sense of race-caste in the Iberian, nor the massing of the southern Indians in settled communities—explain the disappearance of a racial frontier. The true explanation lies in the fact that Nature has grafted in the human mind instinctive impulses which are far stronger than those designated as race-prejudice. Nature has spent her most painstaking efforts in establishing within the human organization a mechanism to ensure, above all other ends, that the individual shall continue. The instinct to propagate is the strongest of the instinctive impulses with which mankind has been fitted. It dominates and conquers the race instinct on all occasions save one. Sex impulse is the battery which breaks down race-barriers. Race instinct becomes the master of sexual impulse only when a pure stock has established itself as a complete and growing community in a new country. Sexual impulses are the endowments of individual men and women; they dominate and are manifested by individuals, whereas race antipathies are manifestations not of the individual, but of the mass. Race instinct comes into play only when men, women, and children of the same stock are organized into communities. Until such a community is organized sex instinct traffics freely across racial barriers; once organized, race instinct conquers or restrains hybridization. It is a right understanding of the conditions under which human instincts work that gives us the true key to the hybridization of Spaniard and American Indian. The Iberian pioneers exposed themselves to racial contact in Mexico and Peru under conditions which were bound to give their sex impulses a victory over their race instinct. No Mayflower reached the Spanish coasts of America; only bands of adventurers, who established no independent home-like settlements to form the cradles of race-feeling. The sex instinct was left dominant, and by this force the racial barriers south of the Mexican rubicon were broken down. North of this Rubicon the American continent was colonized; south of it, there was not a colonization but a plantation. From an anthropologist's point of view, as we shall note later, colonization and plantation are totally different processes.
Race Problems in Australia and New Zealand
When we cross the Pacific to Australia we see the same racial and national factors at work as in Saxon America. It has taken only a little over a century for a British or Nordic stock, now numbering five millions, to establish itself as occupant and owner of a great continent. The Australians have had to face both national and racial problems. The continent was colonized from separate centres, and there was a tendency on the part of each colony to isolate itself from its neighbours and grow up into a separate state or nationality. These separate states or incipient nationalities were united at the commencement of the present century by the craft of statesmanship which made the shores of the new continent the frontiers of a national commonwealth. The British communities in Australia bred and exhibited the usual Saxon sense of race discrimination; almost from the first they drew a racial frontier between themselves and the native blacks, and so strictly has this frontier been maintained that there is no trace of the vanishing aboriginal blood in the veins of the new nationality. The 50,000 survivors of the original owners of the continent now present a philanthropic rather than a racial problem. But it is otherwise as regards the millions of native peoples occupying the countries which flank the Indian and China seas. Seas are the highways along which modern peoples spread and invade accessible lands. Hence round their shores the Australians have erected a racial barrier, admitting the entrance of peoples of European descent but excluding all others.
The student of racial and national problems cannot afford to pass New Zealand by. In these two islands English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh immigrants have, in the course of the last eighty years, built up a new nation, now numbering well over a million souls. Here and there in the islands there has been a tendency for the immigrants to group themselves according to their inherited nationality, but such separate groupings tend to disappear as the new national spirit becomes dominant. Herein we see exhibited a law with which herdsmen are familiar. A herd of cattle which has occupied a field for some time will resist the intrusion of a second or strange herd; but turn both herds together into a strange pasture and mutual antipathies cease almost at once. The arrival in a new land of immigrants from diverse countries breaks down the national barriers within which they were born and bred. A national spirit breeds true only on its native soil; when transplanted to a new land it becomes plastic and mouldable. A new country dissolves ancient nationalities; no country illustrates this truth more emphatically than New Zealand.