[65] On such native differences between the leading races of Europe, cf., e. g., G. V. de Lapouge, Les Sélections Sociales; and l’Aryen; O. Ammon, Die Gesellschaftsordnung; G. Sergi, Arii e Italici.
[66] For instance, the Japanese and the Ainu, the Polynesians and the Melanesians, the Cinghalese and the Veddas. On the last named, cf. Seligmann, The Veddas.
[67] Cf. W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe; G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race; V. de Lapouge, L’Aryen; cf. also, J. Deniker, Les races européennes, and “Les six races composant la population de l’Europe,” Journal Anthropological Institute, vol. 34.
[68] The available evidence indicates that the dolicho-blond race of northern Europe probably originated in a mutation (from the Mediterranean as its parent stock?) during the early neolithic period, that is to say about at the beginning of the neolithic in western Europe. There is less secure ground for conjecture as to the date and circumstances under which any one of the other European races originated, but the date and place of their origin seems to lie outside of Europe and earlier than the European neolithic period. Unfortunately there has been little direct or succinct discussion of this matter among anthropologists hitherto.—Cf. “The Mutation Theory and the Blond Race,” Journal of Race Development, April, 1913.
[69] The Melanesians may be contrasted with the Baltic peoples in this respect, though the comparison is perhaps rather suggestive than convincing. The Melanesians are apparently endowed with a very respectable capacity for workmanship, as regards both insight and application, and with a relatively high sense of economic expediency. They are also possessed of an alert and enduring group solidarity. But they apparently lack that reasonable degree of “humanity” and congenital tolerance that has on the whole kept the peoples of the Baltic region from fatal extravagances of cruelty and sustained hatred between groups. Not that any excess of humanity has marked the course of culture in North Europe. But it seems at least admissible to say that mutual hatred, distrust and disparagement falls more readily into abeyance among these peoples than among the Melanesians; particularly when and in so far as the material interest of the several groups visibly suffers from a continued free run of extravagant animosity. The difference in point of native propensity may not be very marked, but such degree of it as there is has apparently thrown the balance in such a way that the Baltic peoples have, technologically, had the advantage of a wide and relatively easy contact and communication; whereas the Melanesians have during an equally protracted experience spent themselves largely on interstitial animosities—Cf. Codrington, The Melanesians; Seligmann, The Melanesians of British New Guinea.
[70] These considerations apparently apply with peculiar force to the blond race, in that the evidence of early times goes to argue that this stock never lived in isolation from other, rival stocks. It began presumably as a small minority in a community made up chiefly of a different racial type, its parent stock, and in an environment at large in which at least one rival stock was present in force from near the outset; so that race competition, that is to say competition in terms of births and deaths, was instant and unremitting. And this competition the given conditions enforced in terms of group subsistence.
[71] Cf., e. g., Sophus Müller, Vor Oldtid, “Stenalderen.”
[72] It has not commonly been noted, though it will scarcely be questioned, that fighting capacity and the propensity to fight have rarely, if ever, been successful in the struggle between races and peoples when brought into competition with a diligent growing of crops and children, if success be counted in terms of race survival.
[73] It is apparently an open question whether these spiritual traits are properly to be ascribed to the dolicho-blond as traits of that type taken by itself, rather than traits characteristic of the hybrid offspring of the blond stock crossed on one or other of the racial stocks associated with it in the populations of Europe. The evidence at large seems rather to bear out the view that any hybrid population is likely to be endowed with an exceptional degree of that restlessness and discontent that go to make up what is spoken of as a “spirit of enterprise” in the race.
[74] As, e. g., the inhabitants of many Polynesian islands at the time of their discovery. See, also, Codrington, The Melanesians.