Democracy?, he contrasts the Nordic and Mediterranean races, and incidentally discusses the mentality of the Negro. Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society and author of The Passing of the Great Race, has attracted very wide attention and has been much criticized because his book contends that the Nordic race is the greatest of all races. In contrasting the Alpine, Nordic, and Mediterranean races he says: "These races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters and are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation. These moral and physical characters are not limited to one race but given traits do occur with more frequency in one race than in another. Each race differs in the relative proportion of what we may term good and bad strains, just as nations do, or, for that matter, sections and classes of the same nation." 15 ... "The Alpine race is always and everywhere a race of peasants, an agricultural and never a maritime race. In fact they only extend to salt water at the head of the Adriatic and, like all purely agricultural communities throughout Europe, tend toward democracy, although they are submissive to authority both political and religous being usually Roman Catholics in western Europe. This race is essentially of the soil and in towns the type is mediocre and bourgeois.16 "The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant and democratic character of the Alpines. The Nordic race is domineering, individualistic, self-reliant and jealous of their personal freedom both in political and religious systems and as a result they are usually Protestants. Chivalry and knighthood and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part. to the north.17 ... "The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned, although "Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, p. 226. Ibid., p. 227. "Ibid., p. 228. in literature and in scientific research and discovery the Nordics far excel it." 18 The most recent anthropologist to touch on this question is Clark Wissler, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, in his book, Man and Culture, New York, 1923. In reference to race differences, he says: "Our point is that these tests do bring out individual differences that are innate, and also tend to reveal group differences of the same character. Thus we have strong grounds for the assumption that variability is an observed characteristic of innate qualities, both in regard to individuals and groups," . . . and he adds, "On what grounds could we expect that, in view of all the individual variation we know to exist, large hereditary groups of men would show identical ranges and averages of mentality?" John M. Mecklin, professor of philosophy in the University of Pittsburgh, makes the following statement in his Democracy and Race Friction: "That racial differences do exist may be inferred from our knowledge of the psycho-physical organism which leads us to expect psychic differences where we find physiological differences." 19 Some other well-known American authors holding similar views are Samuel J. Holmes, professor of zoology in the University of California, in his The Trend of the Race, page 263; Hugo Münsterberg, late professor in Harvard, in Psychology, page 234; Edward A. Ross, in Principles of Sociology and The Old World in the New, etc.; Lothrop Stoddard, in The Rising Tide of Color, Revolt of Civilization, etc. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, p. 229. 19 P. 73. CHAPTER 49 WRITERS ON NEGRO INFERIORITY Sir H. H. Johnston-Lombroso-Carlyle-Jefferson-Shaler-Hart-EvansBryant and Others-Question of the Superiority of the Mulatto A NUMBER of writers, both scientific and lay, who have essayed to speak on racial problems, especially emphasize the inferiority of the Negro. For instance, Sir H. H. Johnston says that the Negro "in his wild state, exhibits a stunted mind and a dull content with his surroundings, which induces mental stagnation, cessation of all upward progress, and retrogression towards the brute. In some respects I think the tendency of the Negro for several centuries has been an actual retrograde one. As we come to read the unwritten history of Africa by researches into languages, manners, customs, traditions, we seem to see a backward rather than a forward movement going on for some thousand past years the return towards the savage, and even the brute. I can believe it possible that, had Africa been more isolated from contact with the rest of the world, and cut off from the immigration of Arabs and Europeans, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards the higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human.” 1 The English ethnologist, A. H. Keane, speaking of the Negro, makes the statement that "the standard attainable by pure Negro communities left to themselves may be measured by the social usage prevalent amongst the peoples of Ashanti, Dahomi, and the Oil Rivers, with their degraded fetishism and now abolished sanguinary customs." 2 Cesare Lombroso, in his L'Uomo Bianco e L'Uomo di colore, rates the Negro race as a very inferior one.3 M. Petit de Baroncourt, professor of history in the Academy of Paris, expresses his conviction of the physical and mental inferiority of the Negro.1 1 British Central Africa, p. 472. 2 Stanford, Compendium of Geography and Travel, Vol. 1, p. 332. See also Keane, Man, Past and Present, p. 40. 'P. 28. 'De l'Emancipation des Noirs, Paris, 1845. George N. Tricoche, in La Question Des Noirs aux Etats Unis, contends that the Negro is inferior and that his intermixture with the whites would be a catastrophe. A. M. Carr-Saunders, an English scholar, in his recent book, The Population Problem avers that "the Negro is intellectually on the average somewhat inferior, and certainly possesses somewhat different emotional and temperamental characteristics." " Thomas Carlyle, in his essay on "The Nigger Question," says: "That you should cut the ligature, and say 'He has made us equal,' would be saying a palpable falsity, big with hideous ruin for all concerned in it. . . ." Thomas Jefferson wrote his estimate of the Negro in the following guarded language: "I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind." • N. S. Shaler, late professor of geology in Harvard University, said of the Negro: "All the facts we have point to the same unhappy conclusion, that the Negro considered as a species, is, by nature incapable of creating or maintaining societies of an order above barbarism, and that, so far as we can discern, this feature of his nature, depending as it does, on the lack of certain qualities of mind, is irremediable." "97 Professor A. B. Hart, in The Southern South, closes his chapter on "Negro Character" with this statement: "Race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and race achievement.” 8 Charles B. Davenport's estimate of the Negro may be inferred from the following suggestion which he offers in reference to legislation to prevent un-eugenic marriages: "No person having one-half part or more Negro blood shall be permitted to take a white person as spouse. Any person having less than one-eighth part of the Negro blood shall not be given a license to marry a white person without a certificate from the State's Eugenics Board." Maurice Evans, an Englishman resident in South Africa, in his Black and White in the Southern States, comparing the Zulu and the American Negro, says that the former "have more native ability as they certainly have more dignity." 10 Again he says: "The idea that the Negro has only to get similar education to do as a white man has done in all his varied activities, is absurd, though this opinion is strongly held by those of mixed descent." 11 The Rev. A. T. Bryant, in his Mental Development of the South African Native, says in reference to the Negro: "First of all, we believe that some innate difference does at present exist between the mind of the average adult male of the European race and that of the average adult male of the African. The African boy is comparatively precocious up to about twelve when he undergoes an actual decline of mind-energy and decrease in mind-power to a point below that already reached in the preceding stage which is never regained.12. "The African intellect, as exemplified in its manhood is simply incapable of reaching the brilliancy or of attaining the range of the European. Be it a matter of reflecting, or of judging, or comprehending, or conceiving, the African is everywhere hopelessly outdistanced by the European. Only in the province of memory and of imitation can he bear a favorable comparison with him, for in these two respects the African is decidedly strong.13 "Negroes educated in European Universities," adds the Rev. Bryant, "are extraordinary specimens which do not justify any modification of our general position." 14 G. Elliot Smith, professor of anatomy in the University of Manchester, in his article, "The Influence of Racial Intermixture in Egypt," ,"15 offers the following comment on the Negro: "The Negro was as definitely negroid six centuries ago as he is now, and was as different from the round heads of the Mediterranean shores at the end of the Stone Age as at present, and all the millennia of exposure of their scattered descendants to vastly different climates and conditions of life, have produced amazingly little effect upon their physical characteristics." He believes that the physical, mental, and moral dis 10 Evans, Black and White in the Southern States, p. 85. |