THE CONQUEST OF
A CONTINENT
OR
THE EXPANSION OF RACES IN AMERICA
BY
MADISON GRANT
PRESIDENT, NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY
TRUSTEE, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
PRESIDENT, BOONE AND CROCKETT CLUB
COUNCILLOR, AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
AUTHOR, "PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE"
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
PROF. HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK · LONDON
MCMXXXIII
Copyright, 1933, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons
To
MY BROTHER
DE FOREST GRANT
INTRODUCTION
The character of a country depends upon the racial character of the men and women who dominate it. I welcome this volume as the first attempt to give an authentic racial history of our country, based on the scientific interpretation of race as distinguished from language and from geographic distribution.
The most striking induction arising through research into the prehistory of man is that racial characters and predispositions, governing racial reactions to certain old and new conditions of life, extend far back of the most ancient civilizations. For example, the characteristics which Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to his heroes and to his imaginary gods and goddesses were not the product of the civilization which existed in his time in Greece; they were the product of creative evolution long prior even to the beginnings of Greek culture and government. This creative principle—the most mysterious of the recently discovered phenomena of evolution, to which I have devoted the researches of nearly half a century—is that racial preparation for various expressions of civilization—art, law, government, etc.—is long antecedent to these institutions.
Ripley missed this point in his superb researches into the racial constitution of the peoples of Europe. Grant partly based his Passing of the Great Race on Ripley's researches, but did not carry out the purely anatomical analysis to its logical end-point, namely, that moral, intellectual, and spiritual traits are just as distinctive and characteristic of different races as are head-form, hair and eye color, physical stature, and other data of anthropologists.
In the present volume, which I regard as an entirely original and essential contribution to the history of the United States of America, Grant goes much further and in tracing back the racial origins of the majority of our people he lays the foundation for an understanding of the peculiar characteristics of American civilization, which, all agree, is of a very new type, something the world has never before seen.
Grant supports Ripley in his distinction between three great European stocks—Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean. He gives very strong additional reasons for one of his own earlier inductions, namely, that the Aryan language was invented by primitive peoples of the Nordic race before its dispersal, in the third millennium B.C., from the Steppe country in the southeast of Russia. This superb and flexible language doubtless aided the Nordic race in its conquest of Europe, in its ever-westward journey across the Atlantic, in its Anglo-Saxon occupation of our continent, in its stamping of Anglo-Saxon institutions on American government and civilization. We all recognize that, like all other languages, Aryan is purely a linguistic and not a racial term, just as French is spoken equally by the Norman Nordics of the north of France, by the Alpines of the center, and by the Mediterraneans of the south.
My faith is unshaken in the ultimately beneficial recognition of racial values and in the stimulating and generous emulation aroused by racial consciousness. Let this stimulation be without prejudice to other racial values—which should be duly recognized and evaluated—values we Anglo-Saxons do not naturally possess. Moreover, I set great store by the great mass of documentary evidence assembled by Grant in the present volume. I think it explodes the bubble, of the opponents of racial values, that they are merely myths. The theme of the present work is that America was made by Protestants of Nordic origin and that their ideas about what makes true greatness should be perpetuated. That this is a precious heritage which we should not impair or dilute by permitting the entrance and dominance of alien values and peoples of alien minds and hearts.
Finally I would like to define clearly my own position on these very important racial questions which arouse so much heat, so much bad feeling, so much misrepresentation. I object strongly to the assumption that one race is "superior" or "inferior" to another, just as I object to the assumption that all races are alike or even equal. Such assumptions are wholly unwarranted by facts. Equality or inequality, superiority and inferiority, are all relative terms. For example, around the Equator the black races and certain of the colored and tinted races are "superior" to the white races and may be capable under certain conditions of creating great civilizations. In a torrid climate and under a burning sun witness the marvellous achievements of the Mediterranean race in Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, Cambodia, and India between 4000 B.C. and 1250 A.D. Or, coming nearer home to the cool mountain regions, witness the great achievements of the Alpine race in engineering, in mathematics, and in astronomy.
It follows that racial superiority and inferiority are partly matters of the intellectual and spiritual evolution which guides one race after another into periods of great ascent too often followed by sad and catastrophic decline. In this as in all other interminglings of science and sentiment, let us not extenuate nor write in malice, but always in broad-mindedness and a truly generous spirit.
It is with the greatest pleasure that I have written a few words endorsing this book as the first racial history of America, or, in fact, of any nation. I stand with the author not only in nailing his colors to the mast but in giving an entirely indisputable historic, patriotic, and governmental basis to the fact that in its origin and evolution our country is fundamentally Nordic.
Henry Fairfield Osborn.
August, 1933.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, the author desires to express his appreciation of the assistance of his research associate, Doctor Paul Popenoe, who collected authorities and statistics during an intensive study lasting over four years.
He also desires to express his appreciation for the sympathy and aid of Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, and of Charles Stewart Davison, Esq. The latter carefully revised the text and made many valuable suggestions.
The author owes a special debt of gratitude to Doctor Clarence G. Campbell for much assistance and to Doctor Harry H. Laughlin for many of the statistics and analyses used in this book. His thanks are due also to Captain John B. Trevor, whose masterly study of the early population has been a great help, as have the studies of Messrs. Howard F. Barker and Marcus L. Hansen. He also wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Mr. A.E. Hamilton.
Colonel William Wood, of Quebec, has been of great assistance in the data given regarding the origin of the French "Habitants" in Canada.
The writer is also obligated to Professor E. Prokosch, of Yale University, for his assistance on several critical points.
The American Geographical Society and Mr. Ray R. Platt were instrumental in providing the maps used in this volume and the author takes this opportunity to express his thanks to them both.
CONTENTS
MAPS
[Ireland]
[Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland]
[Ulster Scot and New England Origins]
[Puritan Emigration from England, 1620-1640]
[Territorial Growth of the United States]
[The Thirteen Colonies]
[Roman Catholics, 1930]
[Congregational Churches]
[Negro Population, 1930]
[Negro Population: Increase and Decrease, 1920-1930]
[Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland]
[Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies]
[Distribution of Mexicans by States]
[South America]
FOREWORD
American public sentiment regarding the admission of aliens has undergone recently a profound change. At the end of the nineteenth century a fatuous humanitarianism prevailed and immigrants of all kinds were welcomed to "The Refuge of the Oppressed," regardless of whether they were needed in our industrial development or whether they tended to debase our racial unity.
The "Myth of the Melting Pot" was, at that time, deemed by the unthinking to be a part of our national creed.
This general attitude was availed of and encouraged by the steamship companies, which felt the need of the supply of live freight. The leading industrialists and railroad builders were equally opposed to any check on the free entry of cheap labor. Restrictionists were active, but in number they were relatively few, until the World War aroused the public to the danger of mass migration from the countries of devastated and impoverished Europe.
As a result of the problems raised by the World War, a stringent immigration law was passed in 1924 and is now in force. This law[1] has for its basic principle a provision that the total number of persons allowed to enter the United States from countries to which quotas have been assigned shall be so apportioned as to constitute a cross section of the then existent white population of the United States. This is the so-called National Origins provision.
A controversy immediately arose over this new basis, as it was to the interest of every national and religious group of aliens now here to exaggerate the importance and size of its contribution to the population of our country, especially in Colonial times. This was particularly true of immigrants from those nations, such as Germany and Ireland, the quotas of which were greatly reduced under the new law. The purpose of this opposition was to warp public opinion in regard to the merits of various national groups and to exaggerate the non-Anglo-Saxon elements in the old Colonial population.
This book is an effort to make an estimate of the various elements, national and racial, existing in the present population of the United States and to trace their arrival and subsequent spread.
In the days of our fathers the white population of the United States was practically homogeneous. Racially it was preponderantly English and Nordic. At the end of the Colonial period we had a population about 90 per cent Nordic and over 80 per cent British in origin. In spite of the intrusion of two foreign elements of importance, both nevertheless chiefly Nordic, our population and our institutions remained overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon down to the time of the Civil War. Since that time there has been an ever-increasing tendency to change the nature of this once "American" people into a mosaic of national, racial, and religious groups. The question to what extent this transformation has gone deserves careful study.
The draft lists for the American army in the large cities during the World War showed an amazing collection of foreign names. These lists are most dramatic indications of the substantial modifications of the original Anglo-Saxon character of the population which have occurred. A vivid illustration is found in a war poster issued by an enthusiastic clerk of foreign extraction in the Treasury Department during one of the appeals for Liberty Loans. A Howard Chandler Christy girl of pure Nordic type was shown pointing with pride to a list of names, saying "Americans All." The list was:
DuBois
Smith
O'Brien
Ceika
Haucke
Pappandrikopulous
Andrassi
Villotto
Levy
Turovich
Kowalski
Chriczanevicz
Knutson
Gonzales
Apparently the one native American, so far as he figures at all, is hidden under the sobriquet of Smith, and there is possibly the implied suggestion that the beautiful lady was herself the product of this remarkable mélange.
Similar foreign names are beginning to appear and sometimes predominate in the list of college graduates, successful athletes, and minor politicians. In the words of the late President Theodore Roosevelt, we are becoming a polyglot boarding house.
The modification of the religious complexion of the nation also is very striking. In Colonial times Americans were almost unanimously Protestants. Now the claim is made that one in seven is a Catholic and one in thirty a Jew. To what extent this change is due to immigration and to what extent to the differential birth rate should be carefully considered.
In dealing with racial admixture, we should be certain that we are not considering merely nationality, religion, or language. In popular thought there is such a racial entity as the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, or the Italian. These, however, are not racial, but national terms. In a few cases of still unmixed peoples, like those of Sweden and Norway, nationality, language, religion, and race coincide. But in Germany, for instance, the Germans along the North Sea and the Baltic coasts are Protestant Nordics, while those of Bavaria, of Austria, and of other parts of the south are Catholic Alpines. Italy north of the Apennines is largely Alpine, slightly mixed with Nordic, while Naples and Sicily in the South are purely Mediterranean by race. In France, where there is a mixed Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine population, a single language and an ancient tradition have created an intense unity of national feeling, and in recent decades there has been a marked transfer of political control from the Nordic to the Alpine element, as evidenced by the names and features of the present political leaders. In Belgium there are two languages, in Switzerland four, to say nothing of the medley of languages in the old Austrian Empire. Only in Switzerland is there national unity, in spite of a diversity of tongue.
In America the events of the last hundred years, especially the vast tide of immigration, have greatly impaired our purity of race and our unity of religion and even threatened our inheritance of English speech. If our English language is saved it will be due in no small degree to the growing world power of the language itself and of its literature, as well as to the world-wide ocean commerce of Great Britain and her overseas empire.
In the United States today this unity of language is vigorously opposed by the foreign-language press. In all probability, however, this foreign press is doomed to die out as the older generation of immigrants passes from the scene. The fact that this non-English press represents a score or more of different languages makes it impossible for it in the long run to oppose successfully the English language.
In Canada the fact that the French language is officially recognized in Quebec and, for that matter, in the Parliament at Ottawa, makes the problem there more difficult. It may be here noted that the French language as spoken in Quebec is sneered at and ridiculed by the European French. The use of French speech in Quebec, like the attempted use of Erse in Ireland and Czechish in Bohemia, is merely serving to keep those speaking such language out of touch with modern literature and culture.
The absurdity of attempting to revive an obsolete language such as Erse is shown by its lack of literature of modern type. Sir Harry H. Johnston once said to the author that Erse was a perfectly good language, except for two facts—first, that nobody could pronounce it and, second, that nobody could spell it.
In Louisiana French is still spoken by the Creoles of New Orleans and by the French and Negro mixture called "Cajans." This linguistic diversity will in due course of time also disappear. More serious is the retention and use in New Mexico of the Spanish language by its Mexican-Indian population. Few people know that New Mexico is officially bi-lingual. Sooner or later this must be stopped, as it has greatly hindered the development of the State.
As to race, as distinct from language, religion, and nationality, we must consider our country today as being in large part a heterogeneous mixture of racial groups and individuals. Since America's first duty is to herself and to the people already here, she must weigh the effect upon the present, as well as upon the future, of such racial admixture as has already occurred and which promises to spread indefinitely.
A striking example of this was shown during the Washington Bicentennial in 1932, when some historians, in their efforts to placate the assertive groups of aliens in our midst, endeavored to show the existence in the colonies of substantial groups of these same aliens. For instance, they claimed that most of the Revolutionary personages of Irish descent were the same as the South Irish Catholics of today. That is wholly error. The so-called "Irish" of the Revolution were Ulster Scots either from the Lowlands of Scotland or from North England, who came to the colonies by way of the North of Ireland after having lived there for two or three generations. These Ulster Scots were reinforced by Protestant English who emigrated from Leinster and both were widely removed, religiously and culturally, from the South Irish Catholics, who did not come to this country in any numbers until the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840's drove them across the seas.
To take an example: In the Convention of 1787, which formulated the Constitution, certain individuals were put down as "Irish." These were Protestant Ulster Scots. In the Senate of today, a few of the senators are put down as "Irish." These are South Irish Catholics. To use the same term for these two different types of population is erroneous. They were widely separated religiously, racially, and culturally. The same thing is true of that part of our population which was referred to as "French." The French of the American Revolution and of our Constitutional Convention were Huguenot French, who, though few in numbers, took a prominent part in public affairs at the time of the Revolution. They were, for the most part, Nordic and were English-speaking. They were a distinguished group which had nothing whatever in common with the "Habitant" French of Quebec, who are Catholic Alpines. To call them both "French" is erroneous. A similar, but less marked distinction, exists between the North Germans and the Palatines, and they both differ from the South Germans in America, who are mostly Catholic Alpines.
In this connection it should be clearly understood that in discussing the various European races we are concerned only with such individuals of those races as came to America, and not with the populations which remained in the original homeland.
In Colonial times the Anglo-Saxon American avoided the danger arising from intermarriage with natives, which ruined the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World and threatened the destruction of the French colonies in Quebec. There was some crossbreeding between Englishmen and Indian squaws along the frontier, but the offspring was everywhere regarded as an Indian, just as a mulatto in the English colonies was regarded as belonging to the Negro race. This racial prejudice kept the white race in America pure, while its absence and the scarcity of white women ultimately destroyed European supremacy in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
At the time of the settlement of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the Roman Church was dominant. Its chief motive was to save souls for heaven rather than to perpetuate the control of Europeans. That church, therefore, favored marriage of the Europeans, Spaniard and Portuguese, with the native women and considered the children to be white. The same was true of the mixtures of French and Indians in Quebec, and the church recognized the resulting half-breed offspring as French and not native.
This policy of the church was aided by the lack of race dignity which is even today found sometimes among the French, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese. For example, in the South of Portugal there was a large Negro slave element introduced in the sixteenth century which is now absorbed into the surrounding population. Similar conditions exist in South Italy, where there is a substantial Negroid element, probably descended from the Negro slaves introduced by the Romans from Africa some two thousand years ago.
One of the unfortunate results of racial mixture, or miscegenation between diverse races, is disharmony in the offspring, and the more widely separated the parent stocks, the greater is this lack of harmony likely to be in both mental and physical characters. Herbert Spencer, in response to a request for advice, writing in 1892 to the Japanese statesman, Baron Keneko Kentaro, stated this biological fact very clearly when he said:
"To your remaining question respecting the intermarriage of foreigners and Japanese, which you say is 'now very much agitated among our scholars and politicians' and which you say is 'one of the most difficult problems,' my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. It should be positively forbidden. It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the intermarriages of human races and by the interbreeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is inevitably a bad one in the long run.... When, say of the different varieties of sheep, there is an interbreeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one—there arises an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings—the Eurasians in India, the half-breeds in America, show this. The physiological basis of this experience appears to be that any one variety of creature in course of many generations acquires a certain constitutional adaptation to its particular form of life, and every other variety similarly acquires its own special adaptation. The consequence is that, if you mix the constitution of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither—a constitution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions whatever. By all means, therefore, peremptorily interdict marriages of Japanese with foreigners."
The relative diminution of Anglo-Saxon blood in America and the present check to the expansion of the British Empire are due partly to a curious sentimental quality of the Anglo-Saxon mind, the effect of which is almost suicidal.
It is a striking fact that tragic and even fatal consequences may arise from the noblest motives. The abolition of the obsolete institution of slavery occupied the minds of some of the best men of the nineteenth century and serfdom was only stamped out finally at immense cost to the finest elements of our Anglo-Saxon stock. Looking back over these events at a distance of a half-century there appear many considerations which were neglected by those who were too close to the conflict to see into the future. Let us consider the consequences in the world at large of the abolition of slavery and of the breaking down of the barrier maintained by that institution between the Whites and the Blacks.
For instance, in the British Empire, the abolition of slavery a hundred years ago contributed in large part to the decline and finally to the almost complete disappearance of pure Nordic blood in the West Indies, where previously there had been rich and flourishing colonies of white men employing black slaves.
In South Africa the revolt and outtrekking of Boers beyond the Vaal River were due largely to the abolition of slavery and to the sentimental treatment of the slaves by the Home Government. The passions engendered at that time ultimately led to two bloody and useless wars between the Nordic peoples of South Africa.
Other European nations suffered similarly from the abolition of slavery in their American colonies. Undiluted white blood has almost disappeared in Jamaica and Puerto Rico, while the natives of the Virgin Islands are nearly all Negroes and Mulattoes.
The most tragic result of the loss of White control of the Blacks was shown in the history of Haiti and Santo Domingo. The freeing of the slaves and the disturbances resulting from the French Revolution had as a consequence the massacre or exile of practically every white person in the island. The French doctrinaires were responsible to some extent for this. Even Lafayette was President of the "Société des Amis des Noirs." Today the black inhabitants of this great island have reverted almost to barbarism.
The islands and coasts of the entire Caribbean Sea with much of the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico are fast becoming Negro Land and apparently in the near future the European element will be more and more in a hopeless minority.
In the United States we have a startling example of the effect of sentimentalism upon Nordic survival. The North was entirely right in endeavoring to keep slavery out of Kansas and the new States of the West, to that extent avoiding the color problem there. The sentimental interference with slavery, however, on the part of the Northern Abolitionists helped to precipitate the bloody Civil War and to destroy a very large portion of the best stock of the nation, especially in the South. The Southerners also were greatly to blame for their utter folly in seceding as a means of maintaining their peculiar institution, as they termed it.
If the question of slavery had been left alone, the issue of the preservation of the Union would have been postponed for at least a generation. In time the overwhelming numbers and wealth of the North would have made any serious question of secession an absurdity. As a consequence of the Civil War hundreds of thousands of men of Nordic stock were cut off in the full vigor of manhood, who otherwise would have lived to propagate their kind and populate the West. Besides this, slavery as an institution was outside of the pale of civilization long before the Civil War and it would have been peacefully abolished in a few decades through economic causes.
The Blacks themselves were raised by slavery from sheer savagery to a feeble imitation of white civilization, and they made more advance in America in two centuries than in as many thousand years in Africa. The presence of slaves, however, was injurious to the Whites. Serfdom has been a curse wherever it has flourished in the New World and it has had a profoundly demoralizing effect on the masters.
American democracy at the start rested on a base of population that was, as already said, homogeneous in race, religion, tradition, and language, and in a relative equality of wealth. All these features are things of the past and democracy has virtually broken down in spite of the fatuous ecstasy which characterizes the utterances of sentimentalists, who even claimed that the World War was fought "to make the World Safe for Democracy."
It seems strange that this so-called liberal point of view is so short-sighted that we have in our midst today organizations and groups who, with the best intentions, are encouraging the Negro within and the black, brown, and yellow men without, to dispute the dominance over the world at large of Christian Europeans and Americans. Throughout the world, there has gone forth a challenge to white supremacy and this movement in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere has been fostered by the Christian missionaries. It has even gone so far that it is openly stated that any assertion of race supremacy, or even discussion of race distinctions in this country, should be suppressed in the interests of the spread of Christianity in foreign countries—notably Japan. In the long run, however, these doctrines will work great injury to the Protestant churches if they persist in taking an anti-national point of view. While many of the individual ministers are well-meaning and kindly, their education is undeveloped in world affairs and their advice in such matters, on which they are uninstructed, is often very dangerous.
Sentimental sympathy for other races of mankind is manifest today all over the world, but especially among Anglo-Saxons. It received a great impetus from President Wilson's doctrine of the right of Self Determination. The fruits of this doctrine can be seen in the rise of so-called nationalism everywhere, as in Ireland, Bohemia, Poland, Egypt, the Philippines, China, and India.
The racially suicidal result of all this is the undermining of the control of the Nordic races over the natives. The upper classes and, in many cases, the peasantry in eastern Germany, for example, are Nordics. One of the tragic consequences of the World War was the taking of political power in this region from the Nordics and transferring it, under the guise of democratic institutions, to Alpine Slavs. In Soviet Russia, also, through the massacre and exile of the Nordic upper classes, political power has passed into the hands of Alpines, exactly as in France during the Revolution the Alpine lower classes destroyed the Nordic nobility and assumed control of the state. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which followed killed off an undue proportion of Nordics in France and are said to have greatly shortened the stature of the French soldiers.
The revolt against European control, especially in the Orient, is becoming more and more pronounced. As said above it has been encouraged unintentionally by the missionaries, who, in educating the natives, succeed only in arousing them to assert their equality with the European races. Probably the greatest tragedy in the world today is the corrosive jealousy of the fair skin of the white races felt by those whose skin is black, yellow, or brown. The world will hear more of this as the revolt of the lower races spreads.
One of the manifestations of this jealousy of the fair skin of the Nordics is shown in those numerous cases where members of the colored races, or even dark-skinned members of the Nordic race regard the possession of a blonde woman as an assertion and proof of race equality. This has been true historically since the earliest times. It is more than ever in evidence at the present day.
All the foregoing points to the value of a critical consideration of the racial composition of the original thirteen colonies and an analysis of the situation as it is today.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This bill was framed and passed through the efforts of Honorable Albert Johnson of Washington. "A new Declaration of Independence," it has been happily called.
THE CRADLE OF MANKIND
Man is an immensely ancient animal. Over a million years have elapsed since he first made fire and more millions since he became a bipedal prehuman. He left the forests, at the latest, at the end of the Miocene, not less than seven million years ago and ventured out into the plains of Central Asia as a savage, powerful, clever biped, hunting in packs, or by sheer wit securing his prey single handed by pitfalls and other devices, the invention of which marks the development of growing intelligence.
Man's initial differentiation from his simian ancestry probably began when he came down from the trees and began to walk erect. The hand was then liberated from its use as an instrument of locomotion and was devoted primarily to defense, attack, discovery, and invention. It is by means of the opportunities afforded by the hand that the human brain has evolved into man's most important factor in racial survival.
Clear evidence of man's remote arboreal ancestry is offered by his stereoscopic or double-eyed vision. The great majority of ground animals, especially those living in the forest, have eyes on the sides of their heads; but in man's arboreal ancestors, by the recession of the intervening nasal and facial bones, the eyes were brought around to the front of the face. The resulting stereoptic vision enabled him to judge distance far more accurately than most mammals. Such power of determining distance is of course vital to an arboreal animal. Failure to judge accurately the length of a leap from branch to branch would be fatal.
One often hears it stated that man has lost his sense of smell; but this sense was probably never better developed within the human period than it is now. In the trees a sense of smell is not of much value. The monkey can sit on a branch and jabber with impunity at the leopard on the ground below. To forest animals, like the deer or boar, however, the sense of smell is the surest protection against attack and is much more highly developed than the sense of sight, which latter is often quite feeble. In fact, in the thick jungle it is almost useless (and at "black night" completely so).
Eurasia, where it is probable that mankind originated, was the greatest land mass on the globe in Tertiary times. Modern Europe and North Africa formed relatively small peninsulas in the extreme west of this Tertiary land mass. It is probably from Eurasia that man spread out to the uttermost parts of the habitable globe, carrying with him his language and such cultural features as had developed at the time of each successive migration. No race or language or cultural invention seems to have entered Eurasia from adjoining land areas. All went out. None came in. While the original center of dispersal of the Hominidæ or human family was probably Eurasia, it was at a later date also the center of the evolution of the higher types of man.
To the northeast of Eurasia lay the ancient land connection with North America via Alaska, over which various species of animals passed back and forth, some of them having their origin in Asia and others in western North America. It was undoubtedly over this land connection that man first entered America at a relatively recent period and probably he came in successive waves. The American Indians appear to have been derived from the Mongoloid tribes of northeastern Asia before the latter had developed some of those extreme specializations which characterize the typical Mongols of Central Asia and China proper today. Judging from the culture which these American Indians brought with them, this migration began before 10,000 B.C.
The existing races of mankind, and those either entirely extinct or now absorbed in other races, had their distinctive areas of differentiation and periods of radiation from Eurasia over the habitable globe. The most primitive types are now found farthest from this original centre of distribution in countries where through isolation they escaped competition with the higher types which evolved later.
The weight of evidence appears to show that Africa, or Ethiopia, lying far to the southwest of Eurasia, was peopled in earliest times, by way of Arabia, by a most primitive negroid type of mankind. While north of the Sahara migrations from Asia have continued until recent times, the south was left for a vast period in possession of the Negro. Even today, aside from the recent infiltration of Whites and Browns, Africa south of the Sahara belongs to three negroid groups; the Negroes proper, the Pigmies or Negrillos, and the Bushmen and Hottentots. These three human types are characterized by very dark or yellow skin, tightly curled hair, very scanty body hair, flaring nostrils, flattened noses and an absence of supraorbital ridges.
Again, Australia, Tasmania, and some of the adjoining islands are, or recently were, inhabited by what used to be considered one of the great divisions of mankind, the Australoids. These people have the black skin and certain features of the Negro; but differ from him in the possession of abundant body hair and of marked supraorbital ridges. Also the Australoid head hair is wavy, and not closely curled, a most important characteristic. The profound cleavage between the Negroes and the Australoids is now questioned in some quarters.
The differentiation of the human species into types so distinctly contrasted as Whites and Blacks and the problems of the evolution of higher types of man from original stocks bring us to a new classification of the genus Homo. Some anthropologists still maintain that all human beings are included in the species Homo sapiens; but this is an old-fashioned grouping. Sooner or later a new system must be formulated based on the same fundamental rules that are applied to the classification of other mammals. For instance, the physical differences between the Nordics and the Negroes, the Australoids and the Mongols, if found among the lower mammals, would be much more than sufficient to constitute not only separate species, but even subgenera, and they are now so regarded by some anthropologists.
Race is hard to define. It consists in the presence of a collection of hereditary characters common to the great majority of individuals in a given group. It lies in the preponderance of such characters as color of skin, hair, and eyes, facial and nasal contour, shape of skull, and even mental characteristics, which are more difficult to classify, but which are distinctly typical of specific human groups. Many individuals possess all the hereditary characters of a given race. But man is so ancient a being and intermixture has been so widespread that nearly every race shows signs of blending with others. This is especially true in Europe, where the intermingling of peoples has been extensive during the past twenty centuries.
Just as the classification of man according to race needs revision in the light of recent discoveries, so the definition of race must be understood anew in the light of genetics. Thirty years ago we talked glibly about the Aryan or Indo-European race, or the Caucasian or Germanic race. All these terms must be discarded. Aryan, Indo-European, and Germanic are only linguistic terms and Caucasian has no meaning except as used in America to distinguish between whites and colored.
Language or culture may spread quickly and widely among the peoples of the earth irrespective of race. For example, the bow and arrow may have originated with some specific race of mankind, yet we find this invention in use all over the globe and in the hands of the most diverse peoples. The use of firearms and of horses by the American Indians indicates nothing more than their contact with the Whites. It is unsafe to attribute the inception of any cultural feature to a given race.
Civilization itself, that is, agriculture and the domestication of animals, probably arose in West Central Asia, spreading east, south, southwest, and west. Although the earliest remains of the dog, the first animal tamed, are found in the Maglemose in Denmark approximately 8000 B.C., it may have been domesticated far earlier in Asia.
There were two centers of the development of civilization—two foci. The first was in southwestern Eurasia: the Valley of the Syr-Daria; Mesopotamia and its city states; Chaldea, Babylonia, Assyria; then Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome, and modern Europe. There is the possibility, or even the probability, of finding in the unexplored portions of southern Arabia, connecting links of early culture between the Valley of the Euphrates and the Valley of the Nile. Recent discoveries indicate a very early civilization in the Valley of the Indus, which apparently had been brought down from the north. All these regions formed a single group and were the first center.
The second focus was an independent, but similar and parallel expansion of civilization in southeastern Asia, now China. There was apparently little intercourse until modern times between the Far East and the Far West of Eurasia, except by caravan routes across Central Asia. The Romans knew the silk of China and there was a certain amount of trade in jewels, precious metals, and spices down through the Middle Ages, but the extraordinary fact that these two cultures developed independently with slight mutual influence of the one on the other is little appreciated. Both cultures seem, as said, to have had their origin in West Central Asia and to have radiated southwest, south, and east.
One of the periodic cycles of drought desiccated the central area, and separated the Western and Eastern worlds by an almost impassable series of deserts, like the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. In the west, even as late as the time of Alexander the Great, Bactria and Sogdiana, northwest of India, were populous and flourishing states. Here it is that future exploration may uncover the first beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animals—perhaps, also, the first written language.
Language, like culture, is not identical or co-extensive with race to any great degree. Witness the neighboring islands in the West Indies where Negroes speak Spanish in one, French in another, and English in a third. The language of a given group at a given time, however, being possibly a much more recent acquirement than its cultural inventions, does show either that it was originated by those who speak it or that it was imposed upon them by another race long in contact with them.
Since we are to deal principally with the racial groups of Europe, namely the Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine, we might glance for a moment in more detail at this distinction between race and language. The Mediterraneans of Arabia speak a Semitic language, while the Berbers of North Africa, also a people of Mediterranean stock, speak a Hamitic language. This same Hamitic tongue was probably spoken all around the coast of the inland sea and up the west coast of Europe to the British Islands before Aryan speech was brought there by Nordic invaders from the north and east. Meanwhile the Alpines spoke languages related to Turki, a Ural-Altaic language—of course, non-Aryan—as they still do in Turkestan, Hungary, and Finland.
As to the Nordics, it would appear that this race originated the so-called Aryan or Indo-European group of languages. The Aryan tongue was probably developed in South Russia before the long isolation from Asia had been broken. At a period in the third millennium B.C. the Aryan language split into two groups: one, the Western or Centum group, which pushed west and north; the other, the Eastern or Satem group which pushed south and east. The Centum group included the Greek, Latin, Celtic, and Germanic languages. Curiously enough, an outlying member of this group, the Tokarian, was spoken in Turkestan as late as the seventh century A.D. The Satem group, sometimes called Iranian, included the Lithuanian, all the Slavic languages and those of ancient and modern Persia and the various forms of Sanscrit spoken in India and Burma.
Light-skinned invaders from the northwest appear to have entered India in successive waves and to have introduced the Aryan language known as Sanscrit. They were probably the Sacae or Scythians from South Russia. These Nordics in India can properly be called "Aryans." As used otherwise, however, the term Aryan is purely linguistic. Originally all the tribes who spoke the languages of the Centum and Satem groups were members of the Nordic race.
According to recent discoveries in the Valley of the Indus, a very elaborate civilization flourished at least five thousand years ago at Mohenjo-Daro, four hundred miles north of the mouth of the river. This civilization was as elaborate as the corresponding culture of Mesopotamia or of Egypt. The racial characters found in the bodies in the burials indicate that the mass of the population was then, as now, of Mediterranean race, but that the ruling class was long-headed and long-faced, and of a tall stature and sturdy build—a type clearly Nordic. In the earliest graves of Ur, in Mesopotamia, the skulls are very clearly of a race akin to those on the Indus. All this would tend to throw back the date of the invasion of men from the north by another thousand years or more. The same appears to be true of the invasions into Greece of the Achæans and of the Osco-Umbrians into Italy.
The wide distribution of the Satem or Iranian group to the south and west of Asia shows that the Nordics in great numbers conquered the aboriginal inhabitants of these countries and imposed on them the Aryan speech. They invented the caste system to maintain the purity of their blood. In fact, the Hindu word "varna" means both color and caste. In spite of all their efforts, however, the conquering invaders died out almost completely in India and Persia—leaving behind them only their language, and, in some cases, their religion.
With this brief review of the essential difference between race and language or culture, we may return to a consideration of humanity in terms of essentially racial characters.
The world as a whole can be roughly mapped racially according to the most obvious human differentiation—namely, color: white, yellow, red, black, and brown. The white race at the present day dominates Europe, northern Asia in part, Australia, and North America as far south as Mexico, with outposts scattered all over the globe. Eastern Asia is yellow. Southern Asia and northern Africa are brown. Africa south of the Sahara Desert is black, and there is a black tinge across southern Asia, as we shall see. The red men, or Amerinds, with but a small remnant in the United States and Canada, inhabit Latin America, where in some cases their blood is mixed with that of the descendants of Negro slaves, and, of course, to a still larger extent with that of South Europeans.
Color, however, is not the only character upon which a racial map of the world could be based. Perhaps a more satisfactory division could be made according to the cross section of human hair. However, in dealing with the racial groupings of Eurasia, we find different types of humanity arranged in definite zones according to certain outstanding physical characters.
Farthest south on the great land area of Eurasia lies a belt of Negroids, extending from Ethiopia with intervals through Arabia to the South Seas. The principal racial characteristics of these people are very dark or black skin, dark eyes, tightly curled black hair, and long, i.e., dolichocephalic skulls. In southern Persia the population shows a Negro admixture, and a distinctly Negroid type is numerous among the Pre-Dravidians of India. The Hindus themselves are very dark brown with wavy black hair.
A few decades ago there was much talk of the English officer and the Hindu in the ranks being of the same Aryan blood, because they both spoke widely diverse forms of the great group of Aryan languages. This, of course, did not imply the slightest trace of blood relationship—the Aryan speech of the Hindu had been imposed upon him by his conquerors from the north. Such fallacies were common a generation ago.
To the eastward we find remnants of Negro types in the Malay Peninsula and in the large islands to the east as far as the Philippines. This Negroid type extends also eastward through Melanesia. From this discontinuous distribution it would appear that the Negroes and Negritos were the original population of southern Eurasia. It is probable that from this region the true Negroes migrated westward into Ethiopia.
At a date far earlier than this hypothetical migration westward, an earlier type of Negroid pushed southeast to Tasmania, which was thereafter cut off from the land mass of Australia. In Australia itself these Tasmanians were absorbed or exterminated by the later coming Australoids from whom they differed materially.
The racial tangle in Australia, Papua, and the islands of Melanesia presents great difficulties in classification, but the basic element appears to be Negro with a large admixture of later Mongoloids coming from Asia.
The next zone of human population, superimposed in many cases upon the Negroids, but south of the great central mountain ranges of Eurasia, is constituted by the Mediterranean race. This race is characterized by black, wavy hair, very dark eyes, oval face with fairly regular features, dark olive skin, relatively short stature, and a somewhat slight skeletal and muscular structure. This last character is in sharp contrast with the powerful and sturdy build of the next two races to be considered, the Alpine and the Nordic. The principal character of the Mediterranean race, however, is its long (dolichocephalic) skull. The Negroes, as we have said, have long skulls, but of quite a different type.
The range of the Mediterraneans extends from the western part of the British Isles, through Spain and along both coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, down the east coast of Africa to Somaliland. In Asia it embraces the Arabs, South Persians, most of the Hindus, with an eastward extension. In Northeast Africa and India it is strongly mixed with Negro.
Spreading everywhere throughout Europe north of the territory dominated by the Mediterranean race, and often mixed with it, we find the Alpines. This race is characterized by a somewhat short, stocky build much sturdier than the Mediterranean, abundant dark, but not straight, head and body hair, dark eyes and round (brachycephalic) skull.
The center of origin of the Alpines was somewhere in Central Asia west of the true Mongols, north of the Mediterraneans, and east of the Nordics—possibly in Turkestan. The Alpines and Mongols are both characterized by a round skull but, as in the case of the long-skulled Mediterraneans and the long-skulled Negroes, the type of skull differs appreciably.
The Mongols and Alpines have been in close contact for ages. The Mongols have issued again and again from East and Central Asia and submerged the Alpines, driving them westward into Central Europe. There has been a great deal of intermixture and the Slavic Alpine population of eastern Europe frequently shows distinctive Mongol traits. However, the two races, while perhaps remotely connected, differ widely. The Alpines, like the Australoids and to a less extent like the Nordics, have abundant body hair and copious beard, while the Mongols (like their derivatives, the American Indians) are beardless and without body hair. Alpine hair is wavy, that of the Mongols and Mongoloids straight. Alpine features are rather coarse, often with a large prominent nose, while true Mongols have an exceedingly flat face, depressed nose, and a broad space between the eyes. This depressed nose, in adult Mongols, is the retention of an infantile character, as babies of all races are born with bridgeless noses. As to stature, most Alpines are of moderate height, although those from the Tyrol to Albania, the so-called Dinaric race, are decidedly tall.
It was a branch of tall Mongols, with a slight admixture of Alpines, that crossed into America from Asia and became the ancestors of the American Indians, who are of substantial height, often with prominent, almost hawklike noses and high cheek bones.
We might mention here the Malays, who are essentially Mongols and who pushed down into Indo-China and throughout the Malay Peninsula. There are many traces of their blood in Polynesia. This expansion was relatively recent and in those localities there are everywhere indications of earlier races, especially of the very ancient Negroid types known as Negritos. These Malays extended through the Philippines as far north as Japan, where they met and mingled with a stream of northern Mongoloid immigrants from Korea.
The Alpine domain at the present time extends from the center of France eastward in an ever widening wedge as far as the Himalayas. It includes the bulk of the population of Central France, North Italy, South Germany, Switzerland, the provinces of the recent Austrian Empire, and extends through the Balkan states, Russia, Asia Minor, and far into Asia. This race penetrated into and overran Central Europe during relatively recent times, probably at about the beginning of the Bronze Age, approximately 1800 B.C.
East and north of the Carpathians, about 400 A.D., the Alpines had a period of great expansion, chiefly at the expense of the Nordic race, whose distribution we shall discuss presently.
As the Nordic tribes moved into the Roman provinces, the lands they vacated were occupied by Alpine Slavs. All these movements may have been caused by the pressure from the east of Asiatic Mongols, who, like the Huns, were beginning their drive toward Europe. Our word slave coming from Slav reveals the social relation of these Alpines to West Europeans.
The westernmost of the Alpine Slavs were called Wends. In Charlemagne's time they occupied what is now Germany as far west as the Elbe. In its easternmost range these Alpines were called Turanians and were confused with the Mongols of Central Asia, who had again and again conquered them. The remnant of Wends in East Germany, the Bohemians, most Poles and South Slavs are all Alpines. The great mass of Russians are of this type, as well as the ancient Avars, Hunagars, Magyars, Cumans, and the Bulgars, all more or less mixed with Mongols. The Armenians are Alpines of an especially pronounced type and are probably descended from the ancient Hittites. The East European Alpines are saturated everywhere with Mongol blood, dating for the most part from their conquest by the Tatars during the thirteenth century.
The fact that Asia, north of the main mountain ranges, is pre-eminently the home of round skulls is very significant and suggests remote relationship between Alpine and Mongol.
The Alpine skull reaches a most extreme form among the Armenians, who have a very high skull, greatly flattened behind and somewhat like a sugar loaf in shape.
The division of the races of mankind based on long and round skulls is extremely ancient. We find both types among the fossil and semi-fossil skulls at the end of the Paleolithic.
The first definite appearance of round skulls mixed with long skulls is found in the burials at Offnet in Bavaria in the Azilian period at the very end of the Paleolithic, some twelve thousand years ago.
From that day to this in France, Bavaria, and elsewhere in western Europe as well as in eastern Europe the round skulls have expanded their range. This steady increase of round-skull Alpines everywhere in Central Europe in recent centuries is one of the most ominous racial facts that confront us.
The great French anthropologist, deLapouge, stated in a recent letter to the author that in France the cranial index has risen two points a century since the Middle Ages, so that France is no longer a Nordic land. This transformation is due, in the opinion of some observers, to a mixture of race in which round-headedness is dominant over long-headedness. In the opinion of the writer, however, it is due to the replacement of one race, the Nordic, by another, the Alpine. The Nordics not only incur disproportionate loss in war, but are also highly nomadic in habit, while the Alpines, on the other hand, stick close to the land and breed persistently.
Of the European races, there remains to be considered the Nordics, a people greatly specialized, who have developed a fair skin, light-colored eyes, tall stature of sturdy build, and long, i.e., dolichocephalic skulls, and definite mental traits. The slow but long-continued physical development of the Nordics has culminated in a powerful skeleton and musculature in sharp contrast to that of the Mediterranean race, to which the Nordic is more closely related than to any other. In fact, the mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in the British Islands may possibly be one of the few advantageous racial crossings.
As to the homeland of the original Nordic race, we have as yet only guesswork on the part of the anthropologist. When we shall know more about the condition of Central Eurasia during the glacial period and immediately thereafter, we may get nearer to an answer to the question of where and how this race originated and developed. It is certain, however, that the Nordics were originally located west of the Alpines and Mongols and north of the Mediterraneans.
We have fossil records of five or six extinct species or genera of man and more are constantly coming to light in Asia and outlying regions of the Old World. The impulse that forced the ancestors of man to develop his high energy and intelligence probably arose from the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation a million or more years ago. Mankind was then forced apart into widely separated areas where specific characters developed in isolation. The Nordics were most likely cut off from Asia by the Caspian and Aral Seas, which extended far to the north, where they met the oncoming ice. It was west of this barrier that the Nordic race developed its peculiar characters.
Later, when the ice retreated and this watery barrier disappeared, the Nordics were inundated again and again by floods of Asiatics, first Alpines and then Mongols. Sometimes the Nordics became the aggressors and expanded eastward in turn, conquering Persia, India, and Burma. Blond invaders of East Asia, called "the green-eyed devils," attacked the Great Wall of China as late as 200 B.C. They were also called "Wusuns," a Tatar word meaning "the tall ones." In the long run, however, the Nordics were forced westward.
When the retreating glaciers left habitable land in Scandinavia, it was into this region that the first westward migration of the Nordics found its way. This was probably as early as 8000 B.C. There it was, through the fogs and long winters of the north, that they developed in complete isolation their great stature and musculature, their fair or flaxen hair, and their blue eyes. The continental Nordics, however, who moved westward to settle around the Baltic and North Seas, retained the more generalized characters of brown hair of various shades, and eyes which tend to either brown, gray, or, to a less extent, blue. The light eyes of the Nordics include light brown or hazel, and may be of any and all shades of gray and green to the deepest violet blue.
The racial characters which most noticeably distinguish the Nordics are the colors of the skin, hair, and eyes. As sharply contrasted with the skin of the Mediterranean peoples, the color of the blood shows through the fair Nordic skin except when tanned by exposure to the sun. The light-colored hair is almost always blond in youth, turning darker with age, although in many individuals extreme blondness is retained through life. The brown hair, characteristic of the Nordics of the British Isles and America, runs from light to very dark brown; but blue-black hair, so rare in England and among native Americans, is never Nordic. The blond hair may tend towards golden red. In fact, in classic times, red hair seems to have been more common than now and may be more characteristic of the Celtic Nordics than of the Teutonic Nordics. In race mixtures between blond and black-haired peoples, the blondness tends to be lost.
On the other hand, light-colored eyes are much more persistent, and this sign of Nordic admixture is found about ten times more frequently than is blond hair among such peoples as the Albanians, where all other Nordic characters except stature seem to have been lost.
For thousands of years, Europe has been an arena of racial mixtures. Over great territories, as we shall see, the Nordic race has been dominant for the past thirty centuries, so that the majority of Alpine and Mediterranean types shows the impress of Nordic characters. For example, in Bavaria are found short, stocky, round-skulled Alpines with extremely blond hair and blue eyes. The French, who are today preponderantly Alpine, show outcroppings of profound Nordic characters throughout the population. Thus, while pure types exist everywhere in sufficient numbers to enable us to define race, nevertheless there has been so much intermixture in the past that it is hard sometimes to assign a given individual to a specific race. The definition of race, in fact, cannot be based on any one character, but on a preponderance of many racial characters which make up the resultant type.
We have now considered the main races of mankind, but should devote space to the Mongols and their derivatives. The Mongol is undoubtedly a very ancient and major subdivision of the Hominidæ, but appears to be intrusive in much of its present range. In Southeast Asia and in the Malay countries and islands it arrived later than the ancient Negroids.
The Mongoloids, as stated above, are characterized by a short, stocky build and generally a round skull, very straight black hair with a round cross section, a broad flat face with projecting malar bones, and a slanting eye often marked by the Mongol fold. The last characters distinguish them from the Alpine race, but are sometimes to be found in such members of that race as have a Mongoloid admixture.
These Mongolian characters occur often in Bohemia, in Moravia, and especially in Galicia, in which last province they probably date from the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Such traits, however, are not found among the Alpines of southern Germany or France.
In the American Indians, Mongoloid blood undoubtedly predominates but the high-bridged nose of some of the tribes and their high stature undoubtedly point to admixture with other races.
The Mongol is not inferior to the Nordic in intelligence, as is the Negro, but represents such a divergent type that the mixture between Nordics and Chinese or Japanese is not a good one. The overflow of these Asiatics into our Pacific Coast might have Mongolized the States there, had not the American laboring man taken alarm and secured legislation forbidding their immigration.
With the foregoing as a simple and generalized description of the primitive races of mankind as we know them today, and with special emphasis on the three principal European variants of the "white" race, we shall proceed to consider the distribution and racial influence of the Nordics in western Europe.
THE NORDIC CONQUEST OF EUROPE
About 1300 B.C. a blond, blue-eyed race of Libyans appears in Egyptian sculptures. Whence these blonds came or how they got into Libya is not known, but it is interesting to note that blond Berbers are to be found today in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. These, however, are probably more recent arrivals from the north.
About 1800 B.C. traces of Nordic infiltration appeared among the Hittites. These Nordic conquerors later entered Mesopotamia as the Mitanni and the Kassites, although it may be that they were only the ruling classes of these peoples.
In recorded history the Nordics first appear in the West as Achæans. They came from the North from the Dacian Plains and conquered Greece and Phrygia about 1400 or 1500 B.C.
About 1200 or 1300 B.C. a Nordic people, the Osco-Umbrians, sweeping down from the northeast, entered Italy. They were kindred to the Achæans and were the ancestors of the Latin tribes, including the early Romans. The aboriginal Mediterraneans were driven into southern Italy, where, in Calabria and Apulia, they persist to this day. The contrast between the peoples of North and South Italy is still profound.[2]
The Continental Nordics, as Celtic tribes, entered Gaul in the ninth century B.C. From the evidence of place names, they passed through South Germany. All Gaul except Aquitania, in the southwest, was overwhelmed.
Spain was conquered by Celtic Nordics about 600 B.C., but their domination was never complete and they soon mingled with the natives. The mixed inhabitants of the peninsula were called Celtiberians by the Romans.
During this same period the British Isles were overrun and thoroughly occupied by Celtic Nordics named Goidels and the Celtic tongue was imposed upon the Mediterranean population, although the latter survived as a race in large numbers, especially in the western parts of England and Ireland. These Celtic-speaking Mediterraneans were, until recently, called "Iberians"; but fifteen hundred years ago the invading Saxons called all the people they found in England "Welsh."
In about 300 B.C. a new wave of Celts entered Gaul and Britain. This time they came from the German plains, speaking a somewhat different form of Celtic. On the Continent they were known as the Belgæ and in the British Isles as the Brythons. They gave their name to the British Islands. By Cæsar's time they had conquered the northern third of Gaul and all of England; but the Roman armies put an end to their farther advance. They did not reach Ireland.
Roman writers describe the Celts in Gaul as pure Nordics and speak of them as forming the ruling classes and military aristocracy until their virtual destruction by Julius Cæsar in his ten years of conquest. His campaigns in Gaul are said to have destroyed a million men, chiefly of the warrior caste.
At the time of their greatest expansion the Gauls sacked Rome (387 B.C.). They pressed no farther south and soon retreated to and remained in Cisalpine Gaul, that is, the valley of the Po and the country north of the Apennines.
The Nordic Gauls or Galatians—to use the Greek form of their name—devastated Greece about 297 B.C. and passed over into Asia Minor. There they settled in what was long known as Galatia, now Angora, the present seat of the Turkish Government. These Galatians were the last Nordics to enter Asia Minor, if we except the armies of the Crusaders.
From the description of the physical characters of the Celtic-speaking tribes they closely resembled the Germanic tribes that followed them into the Roman Empire. Some French anthropologists find that the present-day population of France is nearly four-fifths Alpine and they have decided to call the Alpines "Celts," to avoid admitting that the Celts were physically the same as the hated Germans. This error is not shared by the leading French anthropologists, such as deLapouge, but it has been accepted by some anthropologists.
Careful study of the references to the Celts by classic writers leaves no doubt that the Gauls, Galatians, Belgæ, and Brythons were Nordics as were their successors the Visigoths, Suevi, Alemanni, Burgundians, and, above all, the Franks. In fact, France down to the time of the Reformation was a Nordic land.
Soon after the time when the Belgæ first appear in Europe, Nordic tribes speaking a Germanic dialect are mentioned in history. The first of these tribes to come in conflict with the Romans were the Teutones and Cimbri, who after defeating several Roman armies, were utterly destroyed in 103 B.C. These people were the forerunners of many tribes and nations which emerged, one after another, from the swamps and forests of the north. The original home of most of them seems to have been in Scandinavia, where they had been developing for several thousand years. These newcomers were the latest and final linguistic group to appear in the history of Europe. As Teutonic Nordics they have dominated the scene ever since. The use of the word Teutonic is here purely linguistic in order to distinguish these late comers from the earlier, Celtic-speaking Nordic tribes.
The Teutonic Nordics formed a substantial element among the Belgæ and Brythons and their expansion may well have been the cause of the westward thrust of the latter. The Teutons began to press southward on the Roman Empire early in the Christian era and this pressure continued for some three centuries until the Empire collapsed under their successive invasions.
As said above, the Celts and the Teutons were identical physically and the use of the word "Celtic" cannot be justified as a racial term at the present day. Among living Nordics, those of Celtic origin cannot be distinguished physically from those of German or Scandinavian extraction. Possibly red hair and the psychical peculiarities associated with it may be rather more Celtic than Scandinavian. We find in classical writers the names and description of the barbarians beyond the borders of the Empire. They were all described as blue-eyed, fair or red-haired giants. Height, however, must be considered as relative to that of the Romans, whose legions in the later years of the empire were apparently composed of small men. With each generation the names applied to the barbarian tribes change, but the description of physical characters remains the same.
The finest of these Teutonic barbarians were the Goths who, according to their historian, Jordanes, crossed over from Sweden about 300 B.C. and settled on the banks of the Vistula, whence they expanded into South Russia, which they occupied for centuries. In fact, a remnant of their language (Krim Götisch) was spoken in the Crimea until the seventeenth century. The Gepidæ were a branch of the Goths who lay to the west of the main body, and the Alans, a closely related tribe, were located well to the east. It is interesting to note that some of the Alans, fleeing from the Huns, took refuge in the Caucasus where the Ossetes to this day show occasional Nordic physical characters.
The main body of the Gothic nation was split in two in 375 A.D. by the invasion of the Huns, a Tatar people from Central Asia. Those who took refuge in the west, in South Germany and Gaul, were called Visigoths. A part of the Visigoths, however, fled across the Danube, devastated the provinces of the Byzantine Empire and slew the reigning emperor, Valens, in 378 A.D.
The eastern branch, or Ostrogoths, were conquered by the Huns and remained in Dacia. Later, after Attila's death and the disruption of his empire, the Ostrogoths, under the great Theodoric, invaded Italy and came near to building a unified Italian nation nearly fourteen hundred years ago.
The Visigoths, who had been long in contact with Roman civilization, occupied Gaul. When Attila crossed the Rhine in 451 A.D. they fought on the side of the Romans at Chalons, one of the decisive battles of history, and their king, the Visigothic Theodoric, fell in the battle. The Ostrogoths, on the other hand, were the best troops of the Hunnish host.
The Visigoths entered Spain in 412 A.D. Their allies, the Suevi, conquered and ruled Galicia and the provinces on the Atlantic which now constitute Portugal. The invasion of Spain by the Visigoths resulted in the expulsion of a closely related Teutonic people, the Vandals, who, with their allies, a remnant of the Alans, crossed over into Africa in 428 A.D. On the site of Carthage the Vandals erected a kingdom which lasted a hundred years. They ruled the African coast westward to the Atlantic, conquered and settled in Corsica and under their king, Genseric, sacked Rome in 455 A.D.
These Vandals, originally from Sweden, first appear in history on the Baltic coast, thence they passed down through Central Europe and westward into France and thence into Spain, where they settled and remained until they were driven into Africa. They may have left behind some of their blood to mingle with the later-coming Germanic tribes in Spain. It is possible also, though not probable, that to them are due some of the blond characters still found in the Atlas Mountains. As a race, however, their disappearance is complete.
The Visigoths maintained their control in Spain until 711 A.D. when the Mohammedan Arabs crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and completely defeated the Visigothic armies. Why the power of this people collapsed so suddenly and completely is one of the mysteries of history, but after the great seven days' battle on the Guadalquivir in which their king, Roderick, was slain, the whole peninsula was easily conquered by the Arabs. At this time, it is true, the blood of the Visigoths had been greatly mixed with that of the subject races, resulting perhaps in a weakening of their fighting power.
One of the reasons for the easy conquest of the Visigoths by the Moors lay in the hatred for them as Arians by the old Orthodox Catholic population who regarded their conquerors as heretics, and the assistance rendered by the Jews whom the Visigoths had treated harshly and who are reputed to have induced the Moors to make their invasion.
A remnant of the Visigoths fled northerly into southern Gaul, which was called Gothia Septimania. There the name Visigoths was corrupted into Vigot or Bigot, which was a term of reproach used by the orthodox natives.
It is important to note that the relations between the populations of the Roman Empire and the invading Teutonic Nordics were greatly affected by the fact that the latter were the followers of the schismatic monk Arius who, about 350 A.D., converted the Goths to a Unitarian form of Christianity. The denial of the Trinity by the Barbarians roused a fierce hatred among their subject peoples. Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals and Alans, Burgundians and Lombards, all were Arians. The Franks alone among the Barbarians were converted directly to Orthodox Christianity. This greatly facilitated their conquest of Gaul. In consequence, France for more than a thousand years was regarded as the eldest son of the church.
Down to our time, the aristocracy of Spain, and more especially that of Portugal, shows a marked inheritance of blondness coming down largely from Visigothic and Suevic ancestry. The province of Galicia still retains very appreciable marks of Gothic blood, especially in a high percentage of light-colored eyes.
The Visigoths left behind them in Spain a legacy of names which now are regarded as most typically Spanish, as for instance Rodrigo, Alfonso, Alvarez, Guzman, and Velasquez. In the same manner we find a Nordic legacy of names reaching from Italy into France even where little Nordic blood is left. In other words, while blood dies out, names persist.
At the time of Spanish greatness the predominant blood in the peninsula was still Gothic,[3] and the adventurers who went overseas and were lost to the race were of this blood. In Portugal, the one great poet, Camoens,[4] and in Spain Cervantes, who was his contemporary, were descendants of the old Gothic nobility and had marked Nordic characteristics, as had the Cid Campeador. The case was the same in Italy[5] at this period. The great men were from the northern part of the peninsula. Dante, Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and virtually all of the leading men of the Renaissance were blond Nordics. Columbus himself, supposed to have come from Genoa, is described as having blue eyes and fair hair. In southern France, in the so-called Gothic Septimania and in the country around Toulouse, the home of the Troubadours, Gothic names abound.[6] A similar condition prevails throughout France. French names are Gothic, Frankish, or Burgundian today, though disguised by their spelling, as, for example, Joffre from Gotfrid. In the opinion of Count deLapouge, France as late as the settlement of America was more Nordic than is the Germany of today.
The main body of the Visigoths who survived the conquest by the Arabs took refuge in the northwestern part of Spain where they maintained some small kingdoms which ultimately coalesced and became the nucleus of a Christian Spain, which in the course of a seven-hundred-year crusade gradually reconquered the peninsula and finally expelled the Moors in 1492.
The Arabs who conquered Spain, and the Islamized Persians and Moors, had a wonderful period of intellectual expansion during the seventh and following centuries. This amazing outburst of genius, which preserved for us much of the science and learning of the Greeks, came to an end when the Mediterranean Mohammedans began mixing their blood with that of their Negro slaves. Mohammedanism has always appealed to the lower races, especially the Negro, because when they became followers of the Prophet they were admitted to social and racial equality with the superior race. This and the lure of the Negro women ruined the Arab race. Today, all through Africa and Egypt and in parts of Arabia, the so-called Arabs are often Negroid in appearance. In this case polygamy was a racial curse because the richer and abler men had the most slave women and left a larger progeny of half-breed children than did their poorer countrymen.
The exact reverse happened in the case of the Turks, who were originally Alpines from Central Asia strongly mixed with Mongol. They conquered Asia Minor and the nations of Southeast Europe up to and including Hungary. Everywhere they seized the most beautiful women and, being polygamists, the ablest Turks had the most children by the finest women of the subject countries. Thus the Turks bred up as the Arabs bred down. To this day the Turks are the superior race in Asia Minor and have eliminated, at least from the ruling classes, practically all the physical traces of their Asiatic origin.
The women of the Caucasus, especially the Circassians and Georgians, who retain some remnants of the Nordic Alans, have always been noted for their physical beauty. They were in great demand in Turkish Harems.
Incidentally the Kurds are, or rather were, Nordic and it is interesting to note that Saladin, of Crusading fame, was a Kurd.
Concerning other Teutonic Nordics, we need mention only those whose blood enters largely into modern nations. Of these, one of the most interesting peoples were the Burgundians, who settled on the western bank of the upper Rhine in what is now Alsace, and in Burgundian France and French-speaking Switzerland. They were a very promising and flourishing nation until their overthrow in the middle of the fifth century by Attila and his Huns, a tragedy which supplies the subject matter of the Niebelungenlied. Appollonius Sidonius refers to the Burgundians as being seven feet high; while this is an obvious exaggeration, it is interesting to note that in the old Burgundian provinces we find the tallest stature in France today.
When the Lombards first appear in history about 165 A.D. they were in northern Germany. They entered Italy in 568 A.D. and conquered the Peninsula even more thoroughly than had their predecessors, the Ostrogoths. They not only occupied Italy north of the Apennines for three hundred years, but also established several large duchies in the south. The valley of the Po, where they settled, had been for centuries Cisalpine Gaul, and this Lombard territory is today the backbone of modern Italy. The percentage of light-colored eyes around Milan is high, and blondness through this district is as common a characteristic of the peasantry as it is of the aristocracy throughout the rest of Italy.
The Lombards were Arians and were in constant conflict with the Popes and their Orthodox followers and were consequently generally maligned. Just as a similar situation facilitated the conquest of Spain by the Moors, so the destruction of the Lombard Kingdom by the Franks was made the easier by this antagonism.
In passing, we need only remark that there were small bands of other Nordics, who entered Italy as Saxons, Alemanni, and Suevi, and who entered France as Alans and Saxons. These small bands differed in few respects from the larger Nordic peoples and were quickly absorbed in them. All these barbarian tribes were closely related racially.
Before we leave the Alemanni who occupied southwest Germany with Alsace and German-speaking Switzerland, we may note that their name, Alemanni, did not mean 'All Men' in the sense of a mixed company, but rather The Men "par excellence,"—the German "All" being the analogous of the Greek "Pan."
We come next to the Franks, who appear in history about the time of the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.D. in which they took an unimportant part, but in the following centuries they rapidly gained the ascendency throughout Gaul and western Germany. The conquests by the Franks were the most important and enduring of those of the Teutonic Nordics in Continental Europe. We know very little about the Franks from the Romans, although they may have been the Varini, who were located in northwestern Germany in classic times. As a result of the Crusades, Roman Orthodox, as contrasted with Greek Christians, are known as "Ferangi" to this day in the Levant. Being Orthodox Christians and not Arians, the Franks had the support of the Roman Church in all their conquests.
The Flemings of Belgium are remnants of the original Franks who retained their own language. Most of these invaders, like the Franks, Visigoths, Lombards, and Normans, adopted the Latin language of their subject peoples when they settled within the confines of the Roman Empire.
Except in eastern England and northern France the numbers of the conquering Nordics were not sufficient entirely to evict and replace the conquered populations, but they everywhere formed the upper classes and land-owning aristocracy and to this day these same classes in all European nations continue to show, in more or less purity, the physical characters of the Nordic race.
During the Middle Ages, the dominating and war-like Nordics paused long enough from fighting each other to carry on the Crusades and to beat back the onrush of the Saracens at Tours in 732 A.D. They saved Europe from the Mongols in 1241 A.D. at the Battle of Liegnitz (now Wahlstatt) in Silesia where the Duke of Liegnitz and the Nordic nobility, outnumbered five to one, lay dead upon the field of battle; but checked the advance of the Asiatic hordes and saved the budding civilization of Europe from the fate of Asia.
This race supplied the navigators of the expansion period, when the world was for the first time opened up in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and since then they have formed the fighting men, soldiers, sailors, explorers, hunters, adventurers, and frontiersmen of Europe and her colonies.
After mastering the north of France, the Franks subjugated the remnants of the Burgundians and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom which still flourished in the south of Gaul. They also conquered the country on the east bank of the Rhine known as Franconia, and under Charlemagne seized northern Italy. In 800 A.D. Charlemagne revived the Western Roman Empire, which under various guises lasted down to 1807.
Charlemagne's greatest and most difficult conquest, however, was that of the Saxons, who were pure Nordics. They occupied the districts of northwest Germany, centering in Hanover, and even today this part of Germany is still the most Nordic portion of that country.
When Charlemagne reached the Elbe in his conquests he found beyond it the heathen Alpine Wends and from his day down to the World War, the history of Central Europe has been the pushing back of the frontier of Alpine Asia from the Elbe eastward toward the Urals.
These eastern lands were conquered and little by little Christianized and civilized from the west. This process went on as far as the Vistula, where it met the culture, and Greek Orthodox religion, of the Byzantine Empire, which had followed up the rivers of Russia from the Black Sea and had given to Moscovia and to the Ukraine their religion, alphabet, and art.
The Northmen were the last of the Nordic barbarians to appear on the scene. In the ninth and tenth centuries they raided the coasts of Europe from England to Greece. They established themselves as permanent settlers on all the Scottish islands and on many parts of the Scottish coast. In Caithness, the northernmost corner of Scotland, Norse was spoken as late as the seventeenth century. They formed settlements and left place names all around the coasts of Wales and England. In the tenth century as Danes they subjugated northeastern England and imposed their rule east of the line of Watling Street, which runs from London to Chester. These Danes had barely been overcome by the Saxons when a new group of Nordics arrived as Normans from France and conquered England in 1066.
Ireland was attacked by the Norse who came in from the north and by the Danes who entered from the south. The island was overrun by these two peoples who have left many traces in the place names and in the blood of Ireland.
On the Continent the coasts of France and Germany were harried by the Northmen and the country since called Normandy was conquered by them in 911 A.D. The Danish conquest of England, referred to above, must have been largely Norse while, in France, Rollo's followers were probably to an overwhelming extent Danes.
The Norman element in England and to some extent in America down to this very day has supplied a very large proportion of the conquerors, seamen, explorers, and frontiersmen. This same ruling and restless strain showed itself in the individual adventurers who went to South Italy and Sicily, which they thoroughly conquered in the twelfth century. They even attacked the Byzantine Empire. To this day blue eyes in Sicily are called "Norman eyes" and are to some extent characteristic of the upper classes there.
It was in this period that the Norse rovers under Leif Ericson discovered the northeast mainland of America about 1000 A.D., nearly five hundred years before Columbus, who probably knew of their voyages, crossed the Atlantic.
At the time of this Norwegian and Danish expansion, there was a similar outpouring of Swedes who, as Varangians, crossed the Baltic into Russia, which they conquered and ruled for many centuries. The name Varangian is strongly suggestive of Varini or Franks and the name "Russian" means "rowers." The Varangians came across the seas precisely as their ancestors, the Goths, had done a thousand years earlier. After the expansion of this so-called Viking period, Scandinavian activities came to an end.
Man undoubtedly crossed back and forth on dry land from Europe to England in Neolithic and earlier times. In fact, some of the earliest records of man have been found in England and the recent discoveries in Norfolk of chipped implements and hearths show that man made tools and used fire in England before the appearance of the first glaciers—something over a million years ago.
These early species and genera of men largely died out or were exterminated and were succeeded at the beginning of Neolithic times by invasions of the small, dark, long-skulled Mediterranean race which for many thousands of years formed the basis of the population of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
About the beginning of the Bronze Age, some 1800 B.C., a tall, round-skulled type from the Continent called the Beaker Makers appeared on the scene in England. They resembled somewhat the present Dinaric race, a tall, round-skulled branch of the Alpines now found from the Tyrol southward to Albania on the east side of the Adriatic. It is clear that the Beaker Makers entered from the east across the narrow seas and their remains indicate a tall, masterful type which seems to have disappeared to a large extent, although some of the round-skulled, heavily built Englishmen, found numerously among the commercial classes, may be their representatives today.
The racial composition of the British Isles when the Nordic first appeared on the scene may be safely said to have been composed of small, brunet Mediterraneans interspersed with a small number of round-skulled types and including, very probably, remnants of still earlier races.
The Celtic-speaking Nordics appear to have crossed the Rhine into France and the countries to the southwest about 800 B.C. At about the same time they forced their way into the British Isles which they thoroughly conquered. These Nordics were called Goidels or "Q" Celts and their language is represented today by the remnants of Erse in Ireland, Gaelic in Scotland, and Manx on the Isle of Man. These "Q" Celts, as contrasted with the later coming "P" Celts, are now represented by the Macs (meaning son) just as the later Cymric or Brythonic Celts are called "P" Celts because in their language Ap means son.
The aborigines were called Picts in Scotland. These Mediterranean Picts spoke a language related to Hamitic or Egyptian, and many place names of this origin are still to be found.
It is not definitely known whether the Gaelic speech of Scotland is a remnant of early Goidel invasion or whether it was reintroduced from Ireland in the early centuries of our era. The latter appears probable, because the second conquest by the Celts was nearly complete throughout Britain, although it did not reach Ireland. This second subjugation of Britain was by the "P" Celts or Brythons, speaking a Cymric form of Celtic. It occurred in the fourth century B.C. and was so thorough that it is not probable that remnants of the earlier Goidelic speech could have survived in Scotland.
These Brythons were represented on the continent by the Belgæ, who, in Cæsar's time, occupied Gaul between the Rhine and the Seine. A remnant of their speech survives in Brittany as Armorican.
The "P" Celts gave their speech to all England and remnants of it are found in the recently extinct Cornish in Cornwall and in the Cymric of Wales. Both the "Q" Celts and the "P" Celts were, on their arrival in Britain, pure Nordics, but in many cases they soon merged with the aboriginal population. They were everywhere the ruling military class, in Britain as well as in Gaul.
Having imposed their language on the conquered people, they died out almost completely, leaving, as in Wales, their speech on the lips of the little Mediterranean native. Whatever truth there is in the legends of King Arthur and his resistance to the Saxons they clearly indicate a blond, Celtic aristocracy ruling over an underclass of small Mediterraneans. The same condition is indicated in Irish legends where the Celts appear as a distinct, fair-haired military class.
The next Nordic invasion of Britain was by the Saxons from the country around the present duchy of Holstein and by the Angles and Jutes from farther north on the mainland of Denmark or Jutland. These tribes which entered England in the fifth century were probably more purely Nordic than the continental Teutons and this also was true of the Norse and Varangians of a later date. Their conquest was almost completed during the century after their arrival but there was sufficient resistance in the western part of England to postpone its final subjugation for several centuries. However, gradually the population of practically all England and the lowlands of Scotland became purely Nordic. This racial stock was reinforced by the invasion of Danes, who occupied most of northeast England.
The Norsemen settled around the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, England, and, especially, Wales, and added a very considerable contribution to the pure Nordic element of the population.
The next and last invasion of Britain by the Nordics was the Norman conquest in 1066. The Norman leaders and soldiers were pure Nordics from the most Nordic part of France. In fact, the Normans were heathen Danes speaking a Teutonic tongue when they arrived in Normandy in 911 A.D. so that on coming to England they had been in France only a little over one hundred and fifty years. In those years they had accepted Christianity, had learned French, and had become the exponents of the highest culture in Europe. Into England they brought with them many followers of Alpine origin, and the clergy whom they imported was also composed very largely of Latinized Alpines.
At this point we may remark that Wales, especially along the coasts, has a very large Nordic population. It is absurd to distinguish between England, Scotland, North Ireland, and Wales as is done in the census of the United States. We might just as well distinguish between North England and South England on the ground that the first is Anglian and Danish and the other Saxon and Jutish. The lowlands of Scotland are pure English territory and have been such for a thousand years. The Ulster Scots who came to America were only two or three generations removed from the Scottish and English borderers and had not mixed with the native Irish. It is also to be remarked that the Norman conquest of England was that of one Nordic people by another, and that Great Britain and Ireland constitute a group, the membership of which is overwhelmingly Nordic in its racial inheritance.
At the time of the discovery of America, all Europe was far more Nordic than it is today. Germany at that time had not witnessed the expansion of the Alpines of the south and east which is characteristic of the present era. In England, before the industrial revolution created a demand for little brunet Mediterraneans to drive spindles, the Nordic had the field to himself. As farmer, soldier, sailor, explorer, and pioneer he was pre-eminent. The brunet Mediterranean element, formerly called Iberians, had been forced back into the extreme west of England and into Wales, and was not an important economic or political factor. Nor was there any considerable immigration of that racial stock into the American colonies. These were settled primarily by the descendants of the Normans, Saxons, Anglians, and Danes coming from the distinctly Nordic districts of the mother land.
Norfolk and Suffolk were settled by the Angles and afterwards formed a part of the Danish kingdom. As said above the lowlands of Scotland and the English borders were Anglian and Dane, while the coasts and islands of Scotland were everywhere Norse. The Highlands were Celtic with an admixture of Norse, Anglian, and Norman. There were also remnants of the old Mediterranean populations, probably Picts. Curiously enough these Mediterraneans contributed their dark eyes and hair color, but not their short stature. The population of West Scotland has the greatest height of all the peoples of Europe.
Ireland, like England, was settled as we have seen originally by the Neolithic Mediterraneans. They in turn were conquered by the Goidelic or "Q" Celts, blond Nordics who imposed their language on the aborigines. In the ninth century, Ireland was overrun by the Norse and Danes, whose descendants today constitute a very considerable portion of the population. The very name Ireland is Danish. Most of the big blond Irish of today, although they like to claim "Celtic" descent, are, in fact, of Norse, Danish, Saxon, Norman, or Scotch derivation.
The Nordic elements in Ireland were reinforced again and again by the English and Normans, who, from the days of their original entry into the island down to our day have formed the great majority of the nobility and upper classes of the country. The Celtic Goidel in Ireland today is a negligible quantity which cannot be racially identified. The brunet elements in western Ireland, though to some extent Celtic in speech, are descended from the old Neolithic or Mediterranean population of the British Isles, mixed with a primitive, aboriginal race of great antiquity, the Firbolgs.
Ireland has shown a singular power of absorbing its conquerors. The descendants of Danish, Norman, and English settlers consider themselves pure Irish "Celts." It is a strange fact that the English, Scotch, Norman, Danish, and even the French Huguenots who have settled in Ireland have acquired and have handed down an extraordinary temperamental unity. As to language, by the time of Elizabeth the English Pale constituted a part of eastern Leinster, and there English was uniformly spoken. The English language ultimately spread over the whole of Ireland, leaving only a few remnants of Celtic speech in the extreme west.
From the times of James I to those of William III, large numbers of English and Scotch borderers passed over to the northeast corner of the island into the province of Ulster. They were fervent Presbyterians and hated the native Catholic Irish. It was the sons and grandsons of these immigrants who came to America in the eighteenth century and are sometimes miscalled the "Scotch Irish." They had special grievances of their own against England on account of economic restrictions imposed upon their industries.
Before this time a large number of Cromwellian soldiers had settled in Leinster, but not having their own women with them they intermarried with the Catholic Irish and their descendants today are most intensely Irish in national feeling. The Reformation never had much hold on Ireland, so that the Catholic Irish today represent the mixed population of Ireland before the sixteenth century, together with numerous converts from the Scotch and English immigrants.
With this brief survey of the distribution of the Nordic race in Europe down to the time of the discovery of America and the beginning of emigration to the colonies of the New World, we can pass on to one of the most dramatic mass-migrations of man.
From West Central Asia where it was in contact with the Mongoloids on the east, the Nordic race pushed across Europe to the extreme western coasts. We shall show how it traversed the Atlantic Ocean and then in three centuries subdued a continent. Generation after generation it fought its way westward, until it reached the Pacific Ocean, where today it stands confronting Asia and its immemorial rivals, the Mongols, this time on the west.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] In Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades, by J.K. Wright of the American Geographic Society, p. 320, the author says: "In these authorities we find that the differences between the inhabitants of the northern and southern parts of Italy were fully appreciated in the twelfth century. 'The Lombards,' Gunther says, 'are a keen, skillful, and active people; foresighted in counsel; expert in justice; strong in body and spirit, full of life and handsome to look upon, with slight, supple bodies that give them great power of endurance; economical and always moderate in eating and drinking; masters of their hands and mouths; honorable in every business transaction; mighty in the arts and always striving for the new; lovers of freedom and ready to face death for freedom's sake. These people have never been willing to submit to kings.... But what a contrast the people of Apulia in the south present to the Lombards. Dirty, lazy, weak, good-for-nothing idlers that they are.'"
[3] The Spanish popular heroes, Don Rodrigo and the Cid Campeador, were Gothic, to judge by their names, as was the brave crusader, Count Raymund of Toulouse. L. Wilser has called attention to the number of Gothic names still in use in the Iberian peninsula: Alfonso or Affonso, Alonzo (Gothic Athalafuns); Alvaro and Alvarez (Gothic Alavair); Bermuy (Gothic Berimud); Bertran (Gothic Bairhtram); Diego and Diaz (Gothic Thiudareiks, Dietrich); Esmeralda; Fernando and its genitive Fernandez (Gothic Ferdinanths); Froilaz and Fruela (Gothic Fravila); Gelmirez (Gelimer); Gomez (Gothic Guma); Gonzalo and Gonzalez (Gothic Gunthimir, Gundemar); Guilfonso (Gothic Viljafuns); Guzman (Gothic Godaman, Gutmann); Ildefonso (Gothic Hildifuns); Isabella; Marques (Gothic Markja); Menendez (Gothic Herminanths); Mundiz and Munnez (Gothic Mundila); Pizarro (Gothic Pitzas); Ramiro (Gothic Radomir or Ragnimir); Ramon and Renmondez (Gothic Ragnimund); Rodrigo and Rodriguez; Ruiz (Gothic Rudoreiks); Sesnandes (Gothic Sisenand); Vasco and Vasquez (Nordic Wasce); Velasquez (Gothic Vilaskja?). See p. 107, vol. II, of book Die Germanen, by Doctor Ludwig Wilser.
[4] Describing Camoens, George Edward Woodberry (The Torch, pp. 203-4; New York, 1920) says: "He was of the old blue blood of the Peninsula, the Gothic blood, the same that gave birth to Cervantes. He was blond, and bright-haired, with blue eyes, large and lively, the face oval and ruddy—and in manhood the beard short and rounded, with long untrimmed mustachios—the forehead high, the nose aquiline; in figure agile and robust; in action 'quick to draw and slow to sheathe,' and when he was young, he writes that he had seen the heels of many, but none had seen his heels. Born about the year 1524, of a noble and well-connected family, educated at Coimbra, a university famous for the classics, and launched in life about the court at Lisbon, he was no sooner his own master than he fell into troubles."
[5] Wilser cites Woltmann's essay, "Have the Goths disappeared in Italy?," which shows that even in the latter part of the Middle Ages many people lived according to Gothic law; that in some cities there even existed Gothic sections; and that many Gothic names can be traced, as Stavila, Nefila, Leuuia, Hermia, Hilpja, Ansefrida, Gilliefredus, Totila, Vila.
[6] In fact, almost all the names of the Troubadours are Teutonic, says Wilser, giving the following examples of French names, with the Teutonic original in parentheses: Arnaut (Arnold); Aimeric (Emerich); Bernart (Bernhard); Bertrand (Bertram); Gaucelm (Walchelm); Gautier (Walther); Guillem (Wilhelm); Guiraut (Gerold); Gunot (Wido); Jaufre or Joffre (Gotfrid); Raimon (Raginmund); Rambaut (Raginbald); Rudel (Rudolf); Savaric (Sabarich). See p. 107, vol. II, of Die Germanen, by Doctor Ludwig Wilser.
THE NORDIC SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA
Before considering the question of the origin of the English settlers of the Atlantic seaboard, it is important to understand the motives that actuated the newcomers.
The impelling motive of the settlers who crossed the ocean to America from the earliest Colonial times down to 1880 was land hunger, and just as we speculate in stocks today, so down to one hundred years ago our ancestors speculated in lands on the frontier.
It is difficult to realize the extent to which the ownership of the land in Europe was monopolized, largely through the exercise of Royal favor, by the upper classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This established English tradition and practice, brought to America by the early settlers, coupled with the favoritism of the royal governors in land grants, was one of the causes which led to the Revolution. After the American victory much land was confiscated on the plea that the owners were Loyalists.
The distribution of free land in the United States came substantially to an end about 1880, when the public domain became exhausted. Up to that date, the immigration into America had been assimilated readily. Certain exceptions will be dealt with later. Practically all of it was from northwestern Europe, and the immigrants came mostly of their own volition. It took some degree of enterprise to leave home, cross the Atlantic, and establish oneself in a new country amid strange surroundings. Settling new land meant clearing the forests and destroying the game, as well as buying off or fighting the Indians, whose ideas about land ownership were vague. To the frontiersman in early days, the term "a clearing" was synonymous with "a settlement."
Religious motives and the desire for political and economic independence, of course, were also great factors in the Pilgrim and Puritan migration to New England from 1620 to 1640.
The New England Puritans represented only a part and relatively a small part of the exodus from England. They were pure English from the most Anglo-Saxon part of England and consisted largely of yeomen and the lesser gentry, who found the religious and political conditions in England under the Stuarts intolerable for freemen. They were essentially dissenters, who refused to bend the knee to prelate or to king.
In 1640, under the Commonwealth the Puritans seized the reins of government in England and only permitted the return of royalty in 1660 under conditions which established for all time the supremacy of Parliament. In fact, during the Commonwealth the power of Parliament had become so great that many of the best minds of England felt that a restoration of the monarchy was needed as a check.
The settlers of New England may be regarded as essentially rebels against established religion and established authority when the religion and authority were not of their own choosing. This non-conformist spirit persisted in the successive new frontiers as they were settled by New Englanders. The early New England settlers of western New York and the old Northwest Territory gave birth to an astonishing number of new sects, religions, "isms," and communities, ranging all the way from Mormonism to Shakers and the Oneida Community. They were, however, law-abiding in their own way and murders and crimes of violence were relatively infrequent.
This is in sharp contrast to the southern frontiersmen, who were and are addicted to killings and physical violence. That, however, is chiefly true of the inhabitants of the Appalachian valleys, who always have been lawless. The dissent and predisposition to rebellion among the New Englanders dates back to the Puritans in England and the lawlessness and violence of the Ulster Scots to the endless border warfare on the Scottish frontier. The southern frontiersman was originally a Presbyterian, but he found his religion too intellectual for isolated communities and turned in many cases to the more emotional creeds of the Methodist and Baptist. The hatred of England by the Ulster Scotch frontiersmen dated back to the unjust and oppressive interference with their industries in the north of Ireland, as well as to a deep-seated impatience of all authority.
After the Revolution this hatred of authority was transferred to the tidewater aristocrats and was accentuated by the debtor complex, which has characterized all our frontiers.
The character of the frontier from the very beginning remained the same. Each generation of the restless, the discontented and the failures pushed West, carrying with them some of the fine qualities of the original settlers of the seaboard, but more often developing a new complex of intolerance for the restraints and usages of the older communities.
There is an amusing and significant evolution of these traits in families who settled around Massachusetts Bay and then moved to the Connecticut Valley; thence to Vermont, western New York, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Los Angeles, where they now flourish.
At the time of the Revolution the intense hatred in New England of the mother country was due partly to a desire to confiscate the lands of the Loyalists and partly to that which they considered unfair restrictions on their overseas trade, as well as to an unwillingness to being taxed to pay a part of the great cost of conquering Canada.
The net result of these forces was a widespread anti-British and, later, anti-governmental complex, which has characterized our country ever since. In contrast to England and to Canada, we are an essentially lawless people.
Ireland.
In the North the Revolution was largely a movement of various Calvinist communities. The few Episcopalians in New England and the more numerous adherents of that church in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were almost all Loyalists. In Virginia, however, and further to the south the numerous Church of England planter class took the American side and as a result retained their leadership as an aristocracy down to the time of the Civil War. Even at the time of the Revolution this church contributed more than its quota of leaders. Of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, thirty-four are classified as Episcopalians, twelve as Congregationalists, five as Presbyterians, two Quakers, one Baptist and one Roman Catholic. Of the Continental Congress which ratified this Declaration, nearly two-thirds are said to have been Episcopalians.
In the North following the expulsion of the Loyalists, the Church of England was left prostrate, and it was some time after the Revolution before it was successfully reorganized and was definitely designated as the Protestant Episcopal Church to become, after a century, the fashionable church of the Atlantic seaboard. The Protestant Episcopal Church has never had any substantial hold in the Middle or Far West and even today it is there largely a missionary church with a tendency towards ritualism, which has checked its normal development.
The Roman Catholic population of the colonies was negligible. In 1790 out of a white population of a little over 3,000,000, there were not more than 35,000 Catholics in the United States. This number included 5000 Negroes and some Germans. They were located for the most part in Maryland and Pennsylvania, showing that the South Irish Catholics had not come over in appreciable numbers during Colonial times. Many of the colonies legislated against Roman Catholics.
The Revolution itself was political and social, carrying to an extreme development the political theories of the English Whigs. The distrust of officialdom in power, engendered by the Revolution, led to all manner of constitutional and legal restrictions, in place of a reliance on the personal character of office holders as in England.
During Colonial times two distinct types of population developed. First, the older communities along the tidewater districts, closely in touch with Europe and having a long tradition of culture and wealth. Second, a type grew up on the frontier which from the very beginning showed itself intolerant of the control of the older and richer settlements. This found its expression in Shays's Rebellion in West Massachusetts in 1786-87, in the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794, and, still earlier, in 1770, when the "Regulators" in North Carolina were in open rebellion. After the Revolution this tendency became more and more marked until the then West under Andrew Jackson took over the control of the country and, with many unfortunate results, carried Jefferson's ideals to an extreme.
The Revolution emphasized this second attitude of mind and resulted in the loss, by expulsion, of some of the best Nordic blood in the country. The Loyalists from Boston, for instance, comprised many of the oldest and most distinguished families. The representative families of that city today are not descended wholly from the aristocratic Colonial families, but largely from the population of the small towns and villages in its neighborhood. It is said that a total of eighty to a hundred thousand Loyalists left the colonies and went to Canada and England and to the English West Indies.
New England to a greater extent than any other colony had been at war with France and her Canadian Indians for the best part of one hundred and fifty years, but the memory of this prolonged and bloody struggle was obliterated by the Revolution. In its place there arose in America a sentiment for France, caused largely by the romantic personality of Lafayette, which survives to this day. The Jeffersonian emotional sympathy with the French Revolution also played a large part. The fact nevertheless is that we had a naval war in 1798 with the French, although no formal war was declared. It was caused by French depredations on American commerce, resulting in several duels between American and French frigates. All this is conveniently forgotten or ignored in some of our school text-books.
The earliest permanent settlements of importance in New England were around Massachusetts Bay, and in Virginia along navigable streams. From such centers settlements spread up and down the coast until all the desirable lands accessible to salt water became occupied. In New England the coasts of southern Maine, of Rhode Island, and of Connecticut were quickly occupied. Migration then went overland from Massachusetts Bay, westward to the Connecticut River. This was our first real northern frontier, and it took more than a century to populate southern and western New England.
The settlement of Connecticut westward was blocked by the colony of New York, while the Indians delayed the advance of Massachusetts to the north. Connecticut in turn threw out colonies at an early date, such as Newark in New Jersey in 1666.
Vermont was not settled until just before the Revolution, owing to the danger from the Indians and a serious dispute between New Hampshire and New York as to its ownership. At the time of the Revolution it was a typical frontier with all of its bad features. At that time it was about as rough and tough as Kentucky or Tennessee. After the Revolution some of the best of its population migrated to western New York, along with settlers from all over New England who went for the most part through Vermont.
Early in the eighteenth century nearly all the desirable lands within reach of salt water had been occupied from New Jersey southward, and later coming immigrants were forced back into the uplands of the West beyond the so-called Fall Line at which the Atlantic rivers cease to be navigable.
New York interposed an absolute bar to westward migration because the Iroquois Indians held almost all the fertile lands to the west of the Hudson River. The east bank of the Hudson was more or less filled up with New Englanders and the west bank with its undesirable lands was turned over to late coming immigrants, chiefly Germans. The Dutch population of New York was but small. The total population of the colony at the time of its seizure by England in 1664 was little more than 10,000 and there were already many English among them.
The English settlers occupied both banks of the Delaware around Philadelphia, forcing the later-coming Germans and Ulster Scots to the west. The Swedish settlement along the river was trifling and was soon absorbed. There is very little trace of it left in place or personal names. On the upper reaches of the Delaware River, in Pennsylvania, and in New York, there were some small settlements of French Huguenots, who suffered severely from Indian depredations during the Revolution.
Delaware and the country east of Chesapeake Bay are purely English, as was Maryland, except that western Maryland was really part of western Pennsylvania and western Virginia.
Virginia itself was the mother of States and in Colonial times extended in fact, as other colonies did in theory, to the Mississippi, without mentioning claims to the South Sea. The tidewater population of Virginia differed profoundly from that of the western part of the State, including the Shenandoah Valley, which was settled largely from western Pennsylvania.
There was a marked difference between the settlement of New England and that of Virginia. To New England the earliest settlers brought their women and families, while in Virginia the early arrivals were nearly all males. Women were afterwards sent over by the shipload, but this was only during the early days of the colony.
Like Virginia, North Carolina in Colonial times extended nominally to the Mississippi. Its population lacked the tidewater aristocrats of the Old Dominion and contained many Scots, straight from the Highlands, who, strangely, took the British side during the Revolution, as well as a very large number of Ulster Scots in the western mountains, and in the counties which were afterwards Tennessee.
Kentucky and Tennessee were both settled from the colonies immediately to the east, but largely by the Ulster Scots, coming from western Pennsylvania through the mountainous districts of Virginia and North Carolina. These Ulster Scots came south along the Appalachian valleys, which trend in a southwesterly direction. They were reinforced by the numerous groups of the same people, who came up from South Carolina. Kentucky was much more purely English than Tennessee.
It is a fact but little understood, that the frontier was not much reinforced from the coast but extended itself. In other words, the frontier from the beginning was pushed onward by the backwoodsmen, each generation advancing a little farther westward and making new clearings.
The people along the coast, after a couple of generations of severe privation, became relatively rich as compared with the frontiersmen. The inhabitants of the coast cities for the most part preferred a sea-faring life rather than the hewing out of a homestead in the wilderness. There have been many cases in our Colonial history where men went from the coast towns to the wilderness, but for the most part they were content to stay at home.
As to the original racial complexion of the colonies, New England was purely Nordic and English. The handful of Ulster Scots in New Hampshire was not to be distinguished from the English, and the individual Huguenot families around Boston were only trifling in number. This remained true of all New England during the Colonial period.
In New York, however, conditions were different. Dutch New Amsterdam, afterwards English New York City, was always an important port and attracted to itself from the earliest times a substantial number of foreigners. In addition to the Dutch founders a considerable number of French Huguenots were among the earlier settlers. There were also a few Germans and Portuguese.