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Chapter IV - RacePart I
Part I
An ingenious anatomist has written a book^1 to prove that races are
imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily changed
or destroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed races on any necessary
law, disclosing their ideal or metaphysical necessity; nor did he, on the
other hand, count with precision the existing races, and settle the true
bounds; a point of nicety, and the popular test of the theory. The individuals
at the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to
the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you
cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every writer makes a
different count. Blumenbach reckons five races; Humboldt three; and Mr.
Pickering, who lately, in our Exploring Expedition, thinks he saw all kinds of
men that can be on the planet, makes eleven.
[Footnote 1: The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Knox. London, 1850.]
The British Empire is reckoned to contain 222,000,000 souls - perhaps a
fifth of the population of the globe; and to comprise a territory of 5,000,000
square miles. So far have British people pre-dominated. Perhaps forty of
these millions are of British stock. Add the United States of America, which
reckon, exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a territory of 3,000,000
square miles, and in which the foreign element, however considerable, is
rapidly assimilated, and you have a population of English descent and language
of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000 souls.
The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a half millions in
the home countries. What makes this census important is the quality of the
units that compose it. They are free forcible men, in a country where life is
safe, and has reached the greatest value. They give the bias to the current
age; and that, not by chance or by mass, but by their character, and by the
number of individuals among them of personal ability. It has been denied that
the English have genius. Be it as it may, men of vast intellect have been born
on their soil, and they have made or applied the principal inventions. They
have sound bodies, and supreme endurance in war and in labor. The spawning
force of the race has sufficed to the colonization of great parts of the
world; yet it remains to be seen whether they can make good the exodus of
millions from Great Britain, amounting, in 1852, to more than a thousand a
day. They have assimilating force, since they are imitated by their foreign
subjects; and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the
dominion of their arts and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and slavery
does not exist under them. What oppression exists is incidental and temporary;
their success is not sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained constancy
and self-equality for many ages.
Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause? Men hear gladly
of the power of blood or race. Everybody likes to know that his advantages
cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and
quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain,
as it makes the praise more personal to him.
We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law of
physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found in one
healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found in or near the same
place in its congener; and we look to find in the son every mental and moral
property that existed in the ancestor. In race, it is not the broad shoulders,
or litheness, or stature that give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches as
far as to the wit. Then the miracle and renown begin. Then first we care to
examine the pedigree, and copy heedfully the training, - what food they ate,
what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which resulted in this mother -
wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred,
and Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac
Newton, William Shakespeare, George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert,
Henry Vane, to exist here? What made these delicate natures? was it the air?
was it the sea? was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are
samples of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found close to the
speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not
invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
It is a race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under
the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if
that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons
are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative
principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two
millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and
employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in
Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their
national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus "on the Manners of the Germans,"
not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant
points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our
Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.
But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is resisted by other
forces. Civilization is a reagent, and eats away the old traits. The Arabs of
to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh; but the Briton of to-day is a very
different person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious sect has its
physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the
nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners. Trades
and professions carve their own lines on face and form. Certain circumstances
of English life are not less effective; as, personal liberty; plenty of food;
good ale and mutton; open market, or good wages for every kind of labor; high
bribes to talent and skill; the island life, or the million opportunities and
outlets for expanding and misplaced talent; readiness of combination among
themselves for politics or for business; strikes; and sense of superiority
founded on habit, of victory in labor and in war; and the appetite for
superiority grows by feeding.
It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. Credence is a main
element. `Tis said that the views of nature held by any people determine all
their institutions. Whatever influences add to mental or moral faculty take
men out of nationality, as out of other conditions, and make the national life
a culpable compromise.
These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest others which
threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based. The fixity or
inconvertibleness of races as we see them is a weak argument for the eternity
of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point to the
duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in
our natural history, such as the melioration of fruits and of animal stocks,
has the worth of a power in the opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover,
though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure
races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and
strange resemblances meet us everywhere. It need not puzzle us that Malay and
Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see the
rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of
races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian
seas.
The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, or a straight
worm. As the scale mounts, the organizations become complex. We are piqued
with pure descent, but nature loves inoculation. A child blends in his face
the faces of both parents, and some feature from every ancestor whose face
hangs on the wall. The best nations are those most widely related; and
navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer
of nations.
The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Everything
English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language is
mixed; the names of men are of different nations, - three languages, three or
four nations; - the currents of thought are counter: contemplation and
practical skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; worldwide enterprise,
and devoted use and wont; aggressive freedom and hospitable law, with bitter
class-legislation; a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the
face of the whole earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes, - dukes
and chartists, Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers; nothing can be
praised in it without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without salvos
of cordial praise.
Neither do this people appear to be of one stem; but collectively a
better race than any from which they are derived. Nor is it easy to trace it
home to its original seats. Who can call by right names what races are in
Britain? Who can trace them historically? Who can discriminate them
anatomically, or metaphysically?
In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the historical
question of race, and, - come of whatever disputable ancestry, - the
indisputable Englishman before me, himself very well marked, and nowhere else
to be found, - I fancied I could leave quite aside the choice of a tribe as
his lineal progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath, "the Englishman was the mud
of all races." I incline to the belief that, as water, lime, and sand make
mortar, so certain temperaments marry well, and, by well-managed
contrarieties, develop as drastic a character as the English. On the whole, it
is not so much a history of one or of certain tribes of Saxons, or Frisians,
coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of
temperaments out of them all. Certain temperaments suit the sky and soil of
England, say eight or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear
trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive, whilst all the
unadapted temperaments die out.
The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities,
that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent
and character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute
acids at one pole, and alkalies at the other. So England tends to accumulate
her liberals in America, and her conservatives at London. The Scandinavians in
her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the
Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still.
Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what we
think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small
district. It excludes Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales, and reduces itself at
last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither. The portraits that
hang on the walls in the Academy Exhibition at London, the figures in Punch`s
drawings of the public men, or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop
windows, are distinctive English, and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish;
but `tis a very restricted nationality. As you go north into the manufacturing
and agricultural districts, and to the population that never travels, as you
go into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world`s Englishman is no longer
found. In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners;
a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes
itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is
the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland are the same climate and soil as in
England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence,
small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race.
These queries concerning ancestry and blood may be well allowed, for
there is no prosperity that seems more to depend on the kind of man than
British prosperity. Only a hardy and wise people could have made this small
territory great. We say, in a regatta or yacht race, that if the boats are
anywhere nearly matched, it is the man that wins. Put the best sailing master
into either boat, and he will win.
Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken traditions, though
vague, and losing themselves in fable. The traditions have got footing, and
refused to be disturbed. The kitchen-clock is more convenient than sidereal
time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnaean
classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are
presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed
by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
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