The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

of slave-owning, and still more to the Roman roads, we owe the fact that there is not in Western Europe a single race of unmixed blood, for even the Basques, if they are indeed the last survivors of the old Iberian stock, have intermarried with the French and Spanish people about them. An ethnologist of the eighth century, meditating on the wave upon wave of destructive immigration that submerged England, might well have doubted whether so extraordinary a mixture of races could ever develop patriotism and pride of race, and yet it did not take many centuries to evolve in the English a sense of nationality with insular prejudice superadded. Nationality and patriotism are in fact purely artificial and geographical sentiments. We feel none of the bitter hate of our Saxon forefathers for their Norman conquerors ; the path of our advance through the centuries is strewn with the corpses of patriotisms and race hatreds.

“ Nor was the mixture of races in Europe, the mere mingling of peoples descended from a common Aryan stock, for if that were so, what has become of the Persians and Egyptians, worshippers of Aeon and Serapis and Mithras, who garrisoned the Northumberland wall; of the host of Asiatic and African soldiers and slaves scattered through Europe during the Roman Empire ; of the Negroes introduced into Southern Portugal by Prince Henry the Navigator ; of the Jews that swarmed in every medieval city; of the Moors in Southern Spain ? Did none of these intermarry with Aryans, and leave a half-caste Semitic or Negro or Tartar progeny behind them? How otherwise can one account for the extraordinary diversity in skull measurement, in proportion and in colour which is found in the population of every European country ?

“If we except the inhabitants of remote islands probably there has never been an unmixed race since the Paleolithic Age. Long before the dawn of history kingdoms rosé and fell. Broken tribes, fleeing from invaders, put to sea and founded colonies in distant lands. Troy was no exception to the rule of the old world that at the sack of every city the men were slain and the women reserved to be the wives of their conquerors. Doubtless it was to keep the Hebrew blood pure that Saul was commanded to slay ‘both man and woman, infant and suckling’ of the Amalekites, the ancestors of the Bedawin of the Sinai peninsula.

‘“ It may be argued that the laws of custom have been swept away by conquering races

many times in the world’s history without any far-reaching consequences—those of the Neolithic people of the long barrows by the warriors of the Bronze Age; those of the British by the Romans ; those of the RomanoBritish by the Saxons ; those of the Saxons by the Normans. But there was this difference ; in all these cases the new customs were forced upon the weaker race by the strong hand of its conquerors, and as it had obeyed its own laws through fear of the Unseen, so it adopted the new laws through fear of its new masters. It was a rough, but in the end a wholesome schooling. We go another way to work ; we do not as a rule come to native races with the authority of conquerors ; we saunter into their country and annex it ; we break down their customs, but do not force them to adopt ours; we teach them the precepts of Christianity, and in the same breath assure them that instead of physical punishment by disease, which they used to fear, their disobedience will be visited by eternal punishment after death —a contingency too remote to have any terrors for them ; and then we leave them like a ship with a broken tiller free to go whithersoever the wind of fancy drives them, and it is not surprising that they prefer the easy vices of civilization to its more difficult virtues. In civilizing a native race the suaviter in modo is a more dangerous process than the fortiter in re. . . .”

There an exceptionally penetrating colonial administrator, who was specially engaged in the problems of Polynesian human biology, gives an admirable summary of the mutual destruction of traditions. What he says of Fiji applies with appropriate modifications and differences of intensity to the whole world of mankind. Amidst this dissolution of traditions Science draws the lines for a fresh material and moral organization of our race,

§ 3 The Supersession of War

Paleolithic man in most of his varieties may have been a very combative creature as an individual, he was probably as fiercely territorial as many birds, but it is doubtful if anything of the nature of war had a place in human experience until these later stages in the Paleolithic record, when the social group had grown to the dimensions of a tribe. Then probably the collective hunting of big game and tribal bickering and warfare developed together.

The settled population of the Neolithic

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