The superiority of subraces formed by the blending of allied stocks seems to fall principally under two heads: (1) a general vigour of constitution; (2) a greater variety and variability of innate mental qualities. The greater variability of qualities of a subrace renders that race more adaptable to changing conditions; for racial adaptability depends upon the occurrence of abundant spontaneous variations. A large variety of innate qualities renders a race capable of progressing rapidly in civilisation; it renders it more capable both of producing novel ideas and of appreciating and assimilating the ideas, discoveries, and institutions of other peoples; and such imitative assimilation from one people to another has been a main condition of the progress of culture.
It is, of course, well recognised that the great centres of development of culture have been the places where different peoples have come most freely into contact, notably the centre of the old world where Asia, Africa, and Europe meet together. This was the area in which the three great races of Europe came first into contact and mingled freely. Some authors attribute the fertilising influence upon culture wholly to the blending or contact of cultures; but there is good reason to believe that it is largely due also to race-blending.
We might compare in this respect the three great culture areas of the old world—Europe, India and China. The Chinese afford an instance of one relatively pure race occupying a very large area. In spite of its early start and great mental capacities, its culture has stagnated. The stock was perhaps too pure. India on the other hand seems to owe its peculiar history largely to the fact that its population in almost all parts has been made up from very widely different races—white, yellow and black; the heterogeneity has been too great for stability and continued progress. In Europe different branches and sub-branches of the white race, that is of stocks not too widely different in constitution, have undergone repeated crossing and recrossing.
It is worth while to point out that, if our generalisation is valid, it follows that race-blending has been an important factor in the progress of civilisation. And the generalisation has also an important bearing upon one of the most urgent problems confronting the statesmen of the world at the present time, and not only the statesmen but all the citizens of the civilised states, especially the citizens of the British Empire and of America. For it justifies abundantly the refusal of the white inhabitants of various countries to admit immigrants of the yellow or negro race to settle among them; and it justifies, and more than justifies, the objection to intermarriage with those other races which Englishmen have upheld wherever they have settled, and which most other peoples have not upheld[120].
In all the currents of heated discussion as to the rights and wrongs of the treatment of other races, this question of the kind of subrace which will result from intermarriage is generally left in the background; whereas its importance is far greater than that of all other considerations taken together. Some, like Sir S. Olivier[121], are content to approve race-blending on the ground that it improves the inferior race. But the racial qualities of the leading peoples of the world are too precious to be squandered in the process of improving in some uncertain degree the quality of the overwhelming mass of humanity of inferior stocks; the process would probably result in the total destruction of all that humanity has striven and suffered for in its nobler efforts.
It is an interesting question—When two races or subraces are crossed, do they ever produce a homogeneous and true subrace, exhibiting a true and stable blend of the qualities of the parental stocks? Or does the blend always remain imperfect, with many individuals in whom the qualities of one or other of the parental stocks predominate? The answer seems to be that a stable subrace may be formed in this way, though usually not until free intermarriage has gone on for many generations. According to the most recent doctrine of heredity, the Mendelian, every human being is a mosaic or patchwork of unit qualities, organs, or capacities, each of which is inherited wholly from one of the parents and not at all from the other. If this view is well founded, it follows that there can be no true blending of these unit qualities. But still the mosaic may be so finely grained and the unit qualities derived from the two parents so closely interwoven, that each individual may present an intimate mixture of the parental qualities, may represent for all practical purposes a blending of the two stocks.