What is perhaps at the root of this horror of Asiatics felt by some Europeans is an instinctive feeling that the world is not large enough to contain or afford free play for the energies of both races; coupled perhaps with an ugly doubt whether, in spite of all the great material achievements of the West in recent years, the European type is after all the fittest to survive in the struggle for existence. Huxley long ago reminded us that the "survival of the fittest" does not necessarily imply the survival of the "best" or most highly developed. He points out, for instance, that if certain conceivable changes were to come about in atmospheric conditions, the law of the survival of the fittest might bring about the extinction of all living things except "lichens, diatoms, and such microscopic organisms as those which give red snow its colour."[416] They would be the sole survivors of the struggle for existence because they alone were adapted to the new environment. It may be that at some future period in the course of the struggle—though long before we have reached the lichen and diatom stage—certain conditions may prove hostile to the continued existence of the White races and favourable to that of the Yellow. Lafcadio Hearn, who in spite of his "de-occidentalisation" admitted the superiority of the Western races—without explaining what he meant by "superiority"—expressed the belief that in the "simple power of living" they are immensely inferior to those of the East. "The Occidental," he says, "cannot live except at a cost sufficient for the maintenance of twenty Oriental lives. In our very superiority lies the secret of our fatal weakness. Our physical machinery requires a fuel too costly to pay for the running of it in a perfectly conceivable future period of race-competition and pressure of population." He conjectures that some day the Western peoples may be crushed out of existence, their successors scarcely regretting their disappearance "anymore than we ourselves regret the extinction of the dinotherium or the ichthyosaurus." Why indeed should they? When we consider how seldom the memory even of our own dead ancestors touches our sympathies or prompts an affectionate thought it will not seem strange that in the days to come the victorious Yellow man may regard the extinct White man with no more emotion than the visitor to a museum now regards the wire-linked bones of a prehistoric monster. No creature that is doomed to failure in the struggle for existence need look to the conquerors for the least sign of pity or sympathy. The poor dodo has vanished from the scene of its joys and sorrows for ever, but that is not the reason why the nightingale's song is sometimes a sad one. No less cheerfully warbles the thrush because the great auk will flap his ineffectual wings no more. Even the crocodile refrains from shedding tears over the fossil remains of the Triassic stagonolepis.
It behoves us to remember that victory in the struggle for existence is not a victory once and for all. The doom of the conqueror in this fight is that he must never sheathe his sword. The prize goes always to him who deserves it, but no rest is allowed him when the battle is over. New challengers are ever pressing into the lists, and the challenged must go ever armed and with lance in rest.
The grim tragedy once enacted periodically at Aricia might be interpreted, not too fancifully, as a miniature representation of the more terrible struggle that is for ever in progress throughout the whole world of animate nature. The guardian of the Golden Bough—
"The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain"—
retained his position and his life only so long as they were not challenged by one more vigorous or more dexterous than himself.
The great nations of the West have won their material pre-eminence by overcoming weaker competitors, who in their turn had once been conquerors. They will keep their prizes so long as they deserve to keep them, and no longer. Exclusion laws and trades-unions and cunning appliances wrought by scientific and intellectual skill may stave off the day of disaster, but if the White races have no better support than such things as these, for them the day of doom will assuredly dawn.
Yet a struggle for predominance among great sections of the human race need not imply actual physical warfare. If the Yellow races are to be supreme, it will be partly because the White races have suicidally contributed to their own ruin. If White men become too intensely careful of the individual life, and too careless of the welfare of the race; if they allow luxury to sap their energies and weaken their moral fibre; if they insist too strongly on "rights" and show too slack a devotion to "duty"; if they regard the accumulation of wealth as the be-all and end-all of existence; if selfishness impels their young men to avoid matrimony, and their young women to shun the duties of maternity; if they give way to these and other social vices to which our age bears witness, they cannot reasonably expect to compete advantageously with people who have no craving for luxury, and scarcely know what it means; who look not to wealth as a means for individual aggrandisement; who are at all times willing to sink personal interests in the larger interests of family and clan; who are tireless and uncomplaining workers; among whom parenthood is a religious necessity, and artificial restrictions of the birth-rate are practically unknown; and whose women are free from political aspirations and willing to do their duty at the domestic fireside and in the nursery.
The Yellow Peril, then, is no mere myth: let so much be granted. Yet the recognition of its existence need not drive us to utter pessimism, so long as our faults are not irremediable, and our virtues not reduced to inactivity. The shaping of our fate lies, to some extent at least, in our own hands, and, after all, the outlook for the West is not entirely gloomy. The mere proximity of a peril does not make the brave man falter and tremble; on the contrary, it braces his nerves, and increases his alertness. If the East has qualities and virtues that make for great strength, it is no less clearly lacking in other qualities and virtues that still find a home in the West. The Yellow Peril, so far from driving us to a cowardly despair, may and should have the effect of raising our courage, ennobling our ideals, up rooting our selfishness and purifying Western society. It may enable us to see that in some respects our aims have been false ones, and that our views of the essentials of progress and of civilisation must be partially modified. The recognition of the existence of our own diseases may lead to the discovery of the means of cure. The East has begun in recent years to learn some valuable lessons from the West; is it not time that we returned the compliment? If we could but bring ourselves to do so, perhaps at no very distant period the Yellow Peril might turn out to be the White Salvation.