CHAPTER VII

CIVILIZATIONS

THAT HAVE PER

ISHED THROUGH CONTACT

WITH COLORED RACES:

CHINA, MEXICO, PERU

The cultures of the Caucasian race that have receded as a result of absorption of the blood of colored races may be enumerated, in part, as follows: In Africa-Egypt, Abyssinia, Nigeria, Uganda, Mashonaland, the northern littoral. In AsiaIndia, Babylonia, Persia, Cambodia, Ceylon, Java, New Zealand (Maori), Polynesia, Northern China, Korea, Japan (early). In Europe-The southern provinces of Portugal, Spain, and Italy; Greece, and the Balkans. In America-Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru in early times; Hayti, and portions of the equatorial mainland, within the past hundred years.

Civilizations may have been overthrown by armed invasions, but if the victors were of the same race as the vanquished they assimilated the vanquished or were assimilated by the vanquished, and the world did not suffer a permanent loss. Greek culture was appropriated by the Roman conqueror, Roman culture by the Germans, and Holland's high place well filled by the English.

It is not when the fit replace the fit that civilization

suffers irretrievable loss, but when the fit is replaced by the unfit. It is not when a creative people succumb to the forceful measures of a people of their own race that culture decays, but when a creative people are submerged by a non-creative.

As a result of recent developments in anthropology and allied sciences, we may conclude that all civilizations have arisen from the white race. It is the Caucasian who has shown cultural capacity in such measure as to deserve to rank as "civilized." The cultures of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Phoenicia, India, Greece, and Rome; of modern Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and South Africa have been without question attributed to the white man. Keane, speaking of the Caucasian in relation to the higher human achievements, says, "Such is the dominant position of this the highest of the Hominidae, which seems alone destined to a great future, as it alone is heir to a great past. All the works of man worthy of record have, with few or doubtful exceptions, emanated from the large and much convoluted brain of the white Homo Caucasicus."

There remain three important cultural centers to be considered-those of ancient China and of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and Peru. We will now attempt to determine the relation of the early white man to these civilizations.

Early Chinese civilization so nearly resembled that of Babylonia as to cause some scientists to hold

that the Chinese moved en masse from the regions adjacent to Babylonia. As research progresses those inventions which were once accredited to Chinese ingenuity are one by one being traced to the Caucasian. The Chinese ability to hold but not advance his culture has been explained on the probable basis that the Chinese suffer arrest of mental development a little later in life than do the negroes. The latter's precociousness in childhood and relative stupidity in manhood is a trait characteristic of that race in all of its widely divergent branches.

A non-creative race, whose progress depends upon assimilating the progress of others, may nevertheless show high sustaining qualities. The culture imparted to them will not, of necessity, depart immediately upon the passing of the creative breed to which they are indebted, and the imparted culture is likely to have long lease of life if the non-creative race be yellow rather than black; for the yellow man represents a higher intellectual development than the black. Add to the yellow man's potentiality the additional capacity derived from a cross breeding with the white, and it would seem that one might safely infer that such a mixture would retain that white man's culture, at least in its rudiments, throughout many generations. Such hybrids will not continue the development of the culture of their white ancestors, for the white man himself is not of such intellectual qualities that his offspring from union with non

white are able to rise to the white man's culture level. We do not have to rely merely upon the question of Chinese origin in Mesopotamia to prove Caucasian influence in China, for we have more easily ascertained knowledge that such is the case. Manchus, Mongols, Koreans and Japanese are admitted to be partly Caucasian, the mongrel descendants of a neolithic, and possibly also a paleolithic movement of the Caucasian across northern Asia.

The presence of the early white man in central and east central Asia is now recognized by ethnologists. Deniker in his Races of Men, p. 363, says: "Southern Siberia, the Kirghiz steppes, north and northwestern Mongolia are covered with stone circles, barrows, tumuli, menhirs of every form, with burial places in which are found objects in wood, bone, bronze, copper, iron. The skulls which have been taken from some of these burial places, in the upper valley of the Hanssei, are dolichocephalic; the plaster mortuary masks found in the same region by Adrianof present a type somewhat European.""

Early Chinese records refer to blond tribes, and there yet remain tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, individuals in Manchuria and Korea, the racial outcroppings of the early Caucasian. China has been ruled by these northern mixbreed tribes for many centuries. The Great Wall of China was built to preserve China proper from the predatory incur

1See also The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant.