It is because the modern Scandinavians are of the same stock, fashioned for long ages by the same physical environment, that they have continued to emigrate in large numbers to North America, where some of their ancestral race landed centuries before Columbus was born, and where, in the newly opened territories of Canada and the United States, they are generally recognised as being among the best of the settlers.
Demolins does not enter into the question—How did the institutions and mode of life of these or other peoples, determined by physical environment, bring about adaptation of racial qualities to the environment? He seems to assume in all cases use-inheritance. But if, as seems possible or even probable, this is a false assumption, we may still see clearly that, in the case of the Northmen at least, adaptation may well have been effected by selection. The conditions of life of these Northmen were such that in each generation the majority of men could become fathers of families only after carrying through successfully an enterprise in which a bold independence of spirit was the prime condition of success.
Those who were deficient in the spirit of independence must have shrunk from these wild expeditions in search of new homes to be won only by the sword, or must in the main have failed to attain the end; remaining at home, or returning there after failing in the enterprise to which they proved unequal, to finish their days as bachelor uncles at the paternal hearth. This process, carried on for many generations, would lead to the evolution of just those qualities which are characteristic of their descendants in all the many parts of the earth where they now rule. Not only must such social selection have been operative during the period of settlement of Scandinavia; but each great migration to a new area must have sifted out the most independent and enterprising spirits to be the founders and fathers of the new branch of the race[119]. Thus the descendants of the pilgrim fathers were the product of three such processes of severe selection; the migration from Scandinavia to Northern Germany; that from Germany to England; and that from England to America. No wonder that they proved themselves well able to cope with the hardships and dangers of a new continent inhabited by savages only less fiercely tempered than their own stock by many generations of warfare! When we thus find the same institutions and the same mental traits characterising, from the dawn of history to the present time, all the widely separated branches of one racial stock and of this stock alone, we realize how powerful over the destiny of nations is the influence of racial character formed in the long prehistoric ages; we see how futile it is to attempt to explain the mental traits of a people by the history of their political institutions during a few recent centuries; we understand that these institutions are the effects, not the causes, of those mental qualities and that, even among the peoples who have attained the highest degree of civilisation, racial qualities remain of supreme importance.
The Crossing of Races
Before passing on to the consideration of evolutionary changes during the historic period, a few words must be said about the crossing and blending of races. Such blending has been, no doubt, one of the principal causes of the great variety of human types at present existing on the earth. It has been going on for long ages in almost all regions; but especially in Europe and Africa. All existing stocks (with few exceptions) are the products of race-blending. No one of the existing European peoples is of unmixed stock; every one is the product of successive mixtures and blendings of allied stocks; and the mixing and blending still goes on; while in America (both north and south) the greatest experiments in race-blending that the world has yet seen are taking place before our eyes.
Authors differ widely as to the results of the crossing of human races and subraces. Some assert that the effect of crossing of races is always bad, that the cross-bred progeny is always inferior to the parent stocks. They make no allowance for unfavourable conditions, especially the lack of the strong moral traditions of old organised societies. Others maintain the opposite opinion. Both opinions are probably correct in a certain sense. I think the facts enable us to make with some confidence the following generalisation. The crossing of the most widely different stocks, stocks belonging to any two of the four main races of man, produces an inferior race; but the crossing of stocks belonging to the same principal race, and especially the crossing of closely allied stocks, generally produces a blended subrace superior to the mean of the two parental stocks, or at least not inferior.
This generalisation cannot yet be based on exact and firmly established data, unfortunately; but it is in harmony with old established popular beliefs, and with what we know of the crossing of animal breeds; and it is borne out by a general inspection of many examples. For instance, the blending of the white, negro, and American stocks, which has been going on in South America for some centuries, seems to have resulted in a subrace which up to the present time is inferior to the parent races; or at any rate to the white race. So the mulattoes of North America and the West Indies, although superior in some respects to the pure negroes, seem deficient in vitality and fertility, and the race does not maintain itself. The Eurasians of India are commonly said to be a comparatively feeble people. The blend of the Caucasian with the yellow race is also generally of a poor type. Examples abound in Java of people of mixed Javanese and Dutch blood; and they are for the most part feeble specimens of humanity. It is generally recognised that a recently blended stock may produce a few individuals of exceptional vigour and capacity and physical beauty. But setting these aside, the blended stock seems to be inferior in two respects: (1) a general lack of vigour, which expresses itself in lack of power of resistance to many diseases and in relative infertility; so that the blended stock can hardly maintain its numbers; (2) a lack of harmony of qualities, both mental and physical. It may be that such lack of harmony is the ground of the relative infertility of blended stocks. It expresses itself in the inharmonious combination of physical features, characteristic of the mongrel. The negro race has a beauty of its own, which is spoilt by blending.
As regards mental constitution, although we cannot directly observe and measure these disharmonies of composition, there seems good reason to believe that they exist. The soul of the cross-bred is, it would seem, apt to be the scene of perpetual conflict of inharmonious tendencies. This has been the theme of many stories, and, though no doubt many of them are overdrawn, there is no reason to doubt that they in the main depict actual experience or are founded on close observation.
It is on the moral, rather than the intellectual, side of the mind that the disharmony seems to make itself felt most strongly; and the moral detachment of the cross-bred from the moral traditions of both the parent stocks is possibly due in part to a certain lack of innate compatibility with those traditions, as well as to social ostracism; the cross-bred can assimilate neither tradition so easily and completely as the pure-bred stocks.
It is possible, though this is a still more speculative view, that the same is true of the intellectual constitution of the mind.