Race life of the Aryan peoples

Front matter

GrN

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

CHAPTER XXV The Vision of the Ephemeris — et S^cula Sjeculorum, 356

Three parallel streams of Aryan blood, separate and distinct from each other, crossed the Atlantic to the New World in quest of homes: upon the south, the Ibero- Latin Spaniard; upon the north, the Celto-Latin Frenchman ; midway between, a mixed stream of Teutonic peoples. Of these three the Spaniard had the start of the Teuton by a century ; the Frenchman by some years. What became of these different streams of Aryan blood in the new lands, under new climatic conditions, with changed physical surroundings, in a vastly broader field of action, is the question which lies before us. As they had clashed and battled, the one against the other in the older home for supremacy and dominion, so they clashed and battled in the new. It was only the old conflict transferred to new fields. To the Teuton there was this difference, that whereas in the old home his land lay practically between the Slav on the north and the mixed Latin bloods upon the south, in the new home the Slav element to the problem was eliminated, and his battle for race supremacy was with the Latinized bloods alone. Yet the struggle was no less arduous, for to the forces

arrayed against each other in the new land the relative ir -1 [ ' ]

strengths remained much the same, only the elements differed somewhat. And again the Teuton lay midway between his rivals. It can scarcely be called a triangular contest, this battle for control of the New World which quickly arose, for, as in the old home in Europe, the position of the Teuton midway between put upon him the necessity of doing battle with both, while the same position midway between the other two kept them apart and permitted of little chance of their clashing with each other. In the New World then as in the Old, the struggle resolved itself down practically to a battle of one as against two. This position of the Teuton in the new land midway between his rivals, had the same advantages and the same disadvantages as in the older home in Europe ; for while it placed him, here as there, in the more masterful position, it was also, and for the same reasons, the more vulnerable position. Hence while it made the struggle all the harder, it also made the final result all the more decisive. To Frenchman and Spaniard it was largely only a battle each as against the Teuton whose lands lay between them. And to them the problem in the beginning was rendered the more simple from the fact that they were respectively each of the one speech, the one faith, the one type of political life, and each had back of him from the first, and continuously, the one parent power in the old home as supporter and ally. To the mixedTeutonic bloods, however, the problem was more complicated in that while they were of the one general race division as against the Latin, yet among themselves they differed in speech, in sympathies, in type of political life, somewhat less so yet still markedly in religion, and

had back of them at the first not one, but several different and not always friendly parent powers. Neither was there always the accord with the parent power itself which we find in the case of Frenchman and Spaniard.

The homogeneity of Spaniard and Frenchman respectively gave them from the very start an advantage as against the Teuton in the contest which quickly arose for race empire ; for the Teutonic bloods had first to settle this contest as between themselves, and so to develop and make firm a race homogeneity, before being fairly prepared to enter upon the contest with Frenchman and Spaniard upon anything like equal terms. That the Teuton was thus handicapped in the very start of the race has not, possibly, been sufficiently taken into account in contrasting the relative rates of progress of the different nationalities in the New World in the beginning.

Another factor lay back of the question of rapidity of race spread in the new lands, and this was not one of race fitness but of chance of location in the first settlement. The Frenchman landed at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Before him lay the deep, direct waterway of that river leading to the Great Lakes and on to the heart of the Continent. The Spaniard planted himself in the Floridas, greater and less, and at the mouth of the Mississippi, where another great waterway led on to the interior, and he also came to the narrow isthmus where a few miles' journey opened up to him the long coast line of the Pacific. That they quickly pressed on from the places of landing by the converging waterways to seize and hold between them the vast regions of the interior, and the Spaniard to possess also the coasts of the Pacific, is not to be wondered at. The wonder would be if they had not done so.

The Teutonic stream, on the contrary, first came to the new Continent along a coast where no great rivers led inland as highways to the interior. Not only this, but before them lay, barring the pathway to that interior, the long forest-clad chain of the Appalachian Mountains, stretching with scarcely a break almost from the region of the Lakes southward well toward the Gulf, a wall that reached from Frenchman to Spaniard, and behind which the Latin could securely flank and head off the advance of the Teuton into the interior. In these days of wellbuilt mountain roads, of railways, and low-grade tunnels, men can hardly realize the retarding barrier that mountain wall was to the pioneer of two centuries ago. To his clumsy, ill-made wagon its steep sides were impassable. To pack trains the tangled underbrush was only less so. And back of all was the ever-present danger of the Indian ambuscade by day, and the peril of wild beasts by night. These difficulties and dangers, because of the ease and comparative security of their broad, open waterways, Frenchman and Spaniard largely escaped. That they quickly saw their advantage, and promptly availed themselves of it, is shown by the line of settlements and forts which were early planted from the Lakes down along the valleys of the Maumee and the Wabash, and up from the Gulf to the mouth of the Ohio, and backward up the valley of the Ohio as far as the forks where Pittsburg now stands, and up the valley of the lower Tennessee.

Into this flanking line of hostile power the Teuton drove an entering wedge. Its northern edge was the south bank of the Ohio, its southern limit the north bank of the Tennessee, its base the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia. And now the converging lines were in the Teuton's favor. The objective point was the confluence of the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Mississippi, with the debouchure of the Missouri only just above. It was the strategic center of the Latin line and the one all-important point in the battle for Continental dominion. To it all natural lines of travel and of transportation converged from the Atlantic coast. From it all such lines led out and diverged to the regions beyond. The advance upon it was a race repeating unconsciously the tactics of Epaminondas two thousand years before upon the field of Leuctra that fatal day when the long-drawn-out battle-line of Sparta was pierced and rolled back by the solid Theban phalanx " as the beak of a ship plows through a wave," and the ancient Spartan power went down to rise again no more. It was the strategy of the battle-field that other fateful day at Wagram when Macdonald led the forlorn hope which pierced the Austrian center and saved Napoleon. In each it was the deeper wedge-shaped column with its broad supporting base that won the battle.

This time the Teuton could not, as in Mid-Europe, be flanked and attacked from the rear, for behind his line of advance was the solid wall of the Appalachians with the strength of the hills as a second base. Down the converging lines of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio, this wedge of Teutonic population was driven into the long thin line of the Latin power until at the mouth of the Ohio it pierced and divided the Latin front ; the French line was broken and thrown back from the Illinois towns upon the Lakes; the Spanish forced from St. Louis down upon the Gulf; and the battle for the

mastery of a contment was practically won. All after

[Si was easy. And all this does not necessarily mean the battle of arms alone. The battle-field of mere arms seldom settles the ultimate fate of races. Louisburg and Kaskaskia, and the battling with Spaniard upon the south, are only incidents to the struggle between Teuton and Latin, just as the Great Kanawha, the Fallen Timbers, and Horse-shoe Bend are only incidents in the struggle between White Man and Indian. Both of these race struggles were broader, more far-reaching in their results, than any war of arms and battle-fields, and fought by other weapons besides the rifle and the sword. It was a war of rival and irreconcilable race civilizations.

Why is it that the Teuton, with the advantages of priority of settlement, and of the law of grades and transportation thus against him, and having the further disadvantage of division at the first in his own ranks and lack of efficient backing from the parent powers in the old home, yet in the end distanced both his rivals and remains master of the continent? The final causes must be sought elsewhere than upon the battle-field where men vie with each other in mere feats of arms ; for the actual conflicts at arms upon the field of battle were not many nor decisive. They seemed rather to mark than to make eras. Battle-fields are oftenest only mile-stones on the way; and the Teuton as often lost as won; for with all his love of fighting he was never renowned as a strategist.

Possibly of all causes leading to Teutonic supremacy in the New World, more important than priority of settlement, or advantage of location even, is the law of pure blood. The Teuton, and more especially the Englo-

Teuton, who for reasons yet to be considered became the dominant strain of Teutonic blood in America, has more largely than the other peoples kept his blood free from admixture with inferior races. Theorize as we may about the original oneness of all mankind, the practical fact remains that now the races of men are many and unlike. And a further fact is also well established, That the limits within which race bloods may be crossed without resultant deterioration are not broad, but narrow. In the great groupings of the families of mankind the lines of demarcation are well established, and may not lightly be transgressed. Transgression means too often to the resultant progeny an inheritance of the vices, the weaknesses of both the parent bloods, the possession of the virtues, the strength of neither. And even within the families themselves the lines are apparently narrowing. It seems to be a process of race selection and evolution going on through the ages whereby out of it all shall be brought about the survival of the fittest ; and that fittest is evolved by successive steps of selection and advancement from the original ranks of the less fit. Thus, Aryan no longer crosses without harm to the progeny with non- Aryan bloods. And even within Aryan lines the process of selection is going on until Teuton no longer crosses without deterioration with all of the non-Teutonic Aryan bloods. This second law is not as yet so far advanced in its workings as the first, yet no close observer can fail to note its existence and its results in the intermingling of Aryan bloods among themselves.

We possess a striking example of the baneful effects of the mixing of Aryan with non-Aryan bloods in the history of the Latin settlements in America. In the sixteenth century the best blood of Spain — and it was a strong, adventurous, aggressive blood, the blood of the Spain of Carlos V. when Spain was the dominant power of Western Europe, and her banners on every battlefield from the gates of Granada to the dikes of Holland, while her fleets sailed every sea— that strong aggressive blood was poured like a flood into the fairest regions of the Western Continent. From Cape Horn to the banks of the Mississippi it, and its congener the Latin Portuguese, held all the land. No other race in Europe was powerful enough to even dispute possession. Yet that blood has left as its heir to all these broad regions only the mongrel broods of the south lands, Indian, Negro, Latin, all mixed and mingled into one. The Ibero-Latin failed to take his home with him. The mother of his children in the new land had never known the shores of Spain or the banks of the Tagus. The blood of Conquistador was smothered in the baser tide that surged in the veins of the great subject Indian peoples. Cortez, De Soto, Ponce de Leon, Pizarro, Coronado, left progeny — but no successors. Spanish America to-day, after all the four centuries, with its ever-recurring revolutions and its inability to maintain settled governments, shows the ferment even yet unended. Will it ever end ? Possibly only with the incoming of a newer race, stronger, purer-blooded.

Upon the north, a century later, came to the banks of the St. Lawrence the man of the France of Louis XIV.; and now France, the France of " Le Grand Monarque," had succeeded Spain as the dominant power of Western Europe. And now the sturdiest blood of the Celto- Latin began to try its fortunes in a virgin land. Before it lay the deep direct waterway of the St. Lawrence leading to

the heart of the continent, and along this the first settlements were made. Beyond were the Great Lakes and all their branching river lines tapping the lands. And again the whole interior of a continent opened up to a Latinized blood. It was a possibility of empire such as has fallen to but few peoples. And behind stood as backer and supporter all France. But like the Ibero-Latin upon the south, the Frenchman also left his family behind. The mother of his children in the new land was not of Aryan blood ; and the tawny-faced voyageur with his half-breed lineage roams over the lands of his knightly sire and his nameless mother, while another, not of his blood or kin, rules in the land and is filling it with his homes. Most potent of all the factors which have cost the Latin his empire in the New World may be classed the debasing of his stronger Aryan blood by this crossing with an alien and a dying race.

Unlike Spaniard and Frenchman, the Teuton brought his family with him. The mother of his children was of his own land, his own faith, his own blood. No extensive crossing with Indian blood ever took place. The brand of a social ostracism has ever been placed upon the man who has transgressed the unwritten code of the race by a mesalliance with an inferior blood ; and the progeny takes caste with the race of the mother, not of the father. And this phase of the family and social life of the Teutonic race in America has back of it a race history long antedating the days of Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Of all the Aryan bloods of Europe the Teutonic is probably the purest. Celt, Latin, and Slav have no such clear family escutcheon. The baton sinister which casts a shadow across the shield of the other branches of the Aryan folk

of Western Europe from admixture with the pre-Aryan bloods, has made little, if any, mar upon his. Other races have had to die out before him, or remain as an inferior caste at his gates. In this instinctive pride of race blood the Teuton, and notably the Englo-Teuton, stands side by side with his kinsmen the Iranic Parsee and the Brahmanic Hindu. Immeasurably beyond all other causes it has been the Teutonic home, and the law of pure blood, that has given America to the Teutonic peoples. It was the Teutonic wife that settled the question of race empire in America.

Yet other, altho as compared with this possibly less potent, causes have been at work to help to the same end of Teutonic supremacy in America. And possibly the most potent of these has been the influence of climatic law. The Spaniard landed south of his normal climatic home. Spain lies in the latitude of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The same parallel passes through Madrid and Philadelphia. The isothermal line of Spain is that of the Carolinas ; yet Spain, with its mountain uplands, has the colder winter and the drier summer. From practically the climatic line of the Middle States, therefore, the Spaniard migrated to the hot, humid shores of the West Indies and the shore line of the Gulf of Mexico, and to the great equatorial plains of the east slope of the Andes. While he gained other outlying possessions, the regions just specified constituted the greater portion of his territorial acquisitions in the New World, and remained to the last his chief places of settlement and the center of his power. The average annual rainfall of the greater portion of this new homeland is double that of his old home in Spain. His settlement of the drier and cooler Pacific coast came later, and because of remoteness was

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scant and feeble. This change was to the Spaniard somewhat such a change as comes to the English man who from the salubrious shores of Britain goes out to the tropical plains of India. The enervating climate of the West Indies, bathed ever as they are in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the hot, damp subtropical shore-line of the Gulf of Mexico, the tierra caliente with its malaria and its yellow fever, the tropical plains of the Orinoco and the Amazon, these could not breed the iron-sinewed man of the high dry mesas of Castile and Leon. The children of the men who, clad in armor, could toil through the everglades of Florida battling their way on to the banks of the Mississippi, and who could brave the marshy plains of the tierra caliente with their dread vomito — the half-breed children of these men of storm and stress swung in the hammock under tropical shades, smoking the cigarette, and dreaming away the noonday hours, while men of a sterner breed despoiled them of their patrimony. The life of storm and stress for them did not exist ; and the empire their fathers had won in toil and battling slipped unheeded from nerveless hands.

The Frenchman, also, in coming to the New World left his normal race home. Not in latitude, for Canada and the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes are all between the same parallels as France. But the cool arctic current which sets out from Davis Strait and follows down the coast inside the Gulf Stream reverses the work which the latter does upon the other side of the sea for the West- European shore, and gives to this American France the isothermal lines of Norway and Sweden. To the Frenchman in the New World a life of battling did indeed fall

as his lot, but it was with climate rather than with man.

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No grape-clad hillsides cheered the new home. The wine song gave way to the shrill whistle of winds that swept down from the arctic snows with no kindly barrier of sheltering mountain range between. To a short, hot summer as of Northern Africa succeeded a long cold winter as of the Asiatic uplands. While the Spaniard, leaving his home in the mid-temperate zone, had migrated to a subtropic clime ; the Frenchman, likewise leaving a home in a mid-temperate land, had, on the contrary, migrated to a subarctic zone. Here life became a battle with the elements. The Frenchman escaped the enervation which robbed his Spanish kinsman upon the south of his energy ; but the struggle at the first was too sharp, too arduous, to conduce to the rapid building up of a race ; and he lagged behind in the attempt to carry out that old injunction to " Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth."

The Teuton, on the contrary, escaped both of these extremes. Measured by latitude, it is true that he, like the Spaniard, has gone wide of the parallel of his old home in Europe. There he dwelt between the parallels of fifty and sixty north ; in the new home he has moved southward to a belt lying between the parallels of thirty and forty-five. The change would seem to be great. In latitude it is. Yet measured by the isothermal line he is still in the latitude of his old home. The line of a mean annual temperature of 50° F. passes through Germany, Holland, Britain, and New York. True there are minor differences, as of winter and summer extremes, and of relative degrees of moisture ; yet to him the change has been far less radical than to either Spaniard or Frenchman. While he also had to endure the privations and the hardships incident to migration and to life in a new and untamed land, yet he escaped upon the one hand the tropic enervation and diseases of the Spaniard, and upon the other the battle with the extreme rigors of the Canadian winter which the Frenchman had to face. And then his new climatic home could breed Teutons ; breed them rapidly, and improve upon the breed. And when the battle for race supremacy resolved itself into a contest of race vitality and endurance even more than of arms, this advantage alone would ultimately have decided the struggle. For while Conquistador and Chevalier left progeny but no successors, Puritan and Cavalier left successors as well as progeny. They are to be found in the pioneers of the Mississippi Valley, the pathfinders of the overland trails, the Argonauts of forty-nine, and the gold explorers of the Sierra.

Still another factor, however, lies back of, and helps to explain the relative rates of increase of population of the Latin and the Teuton. Religious clashings have always been a fruitful cause of migration. But the Latin bloods knew only one religion. The Inquisition and St. Bartholomew's had done their work only too well. Their religious expatriations were already past. The hundreds of thousands of Huguenots who went out from France for conscience' sake to the Teutonic lands had already been absorbed and assimilated by the Teutonic peoples. Their numbers, their industry, their mechanical skill, had gone to help upbuild Teutonic p>ower. They had not even been permitted to find a home in exile under the Latin flags. When a little band asked permission of Louis XIV. to emigrate to Louisiana the reply was,

" The King has not driven Protestants from France to make a republic of them in America." When another band of them had settled in Florida, the Spaniards broke up the settlement and hanged the colonists, placing above the suspended bodies the placard, " Not as unto Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans." And so, outlawed by France, rejected by Spain, the Huguenot blood which emigrated to the New World went to swell the current of the Teutonic stream in Georgia and the Carolinas, and to give good account of itself among the pioneers of that great Teutonic wedge which finally broke the Latin power in the Mississippi Valley. But then, after all, the Huguenot was not really Latin, but the Norse blood of Rolf the Ganger and his Vikings. The outgoing was only the Northman turning to his own again. In Latin lands persecution had largely ceased because there was no longer any opposing faith left to persecute. Religious peace reigned among the Latin peoples — that religious peace which is born of spiritual death. Among the Teutonic peoples it was different. The clashing of rival faiths and creeds was still on in all its theological bitterness, falling short of the Latin bloodthirstiness, yet intense enough to drive men out from the old home for peace and conscience' sake. A steady stream of migration flowed across the Atlantic to the New World to escape from the social and political disabilities which dissent brought as its penalty.

Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics— the stream never checked for a century. This added immensely to what would otherwise only have been the normal healthy overflow of the more adventurous spirits, of the older homeland. Within twenty years twenty thousands of Puritans alone landed upon the shores of Massachusetts Bay from Britain. Immigration poured in similar floods upon the shores of the Delaware and the Chesapeake, and southward over the lands of Georgia and the Carolinas. And all these, fleeing largely for conscience' sake and for peace, came to stay, bringfing wives, children, household goods, farming implements, live stock, with them. They came to make homes, the Teutonic home. Very different was this from the stream of adventurers who crossed from the Latin lands in quest of gold and peltries, and who in lack of women of their own blood consorted with the women of the native races of the land. While the race speech was retained through the fathers, the race identity was obscured through the mothers.

And so it came to pass, not by chance but through the working of purely natural laws, and laws which are general in scope, not special, that the Teuton and not the Latin was to control the New World. It was only one more illustration of that survival of the fittest which is the key to all human progress since the world began.

But the law did not cease its workings with the victory of Teuton over Latin. The battle was still on, and this time between the Teutonic peoples themselves. Circumstances and environments over which these various Teutonic settlements had little control were steadily forcing them into a common race life under which race differences must inevitably disappear. But such race amalgamation seldom, if ever, comes as a compromise. The rule is that some one of the number absorbs and assimilates the others. And again it is the survival, or rather the supremacy, of the fittest. English man, SwedSi Hollander, German, Huguenot — which was it to be? This

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was the question which arose for settlement, for all had crossed the water to make homes in the new land ; and it was not long before the clashing began. Upon the solution of this question the whole future history of America was to turn ; and it was no slight issue that was at stake, for already marked divergences in race character and race possibilities had shown themselves even among the Teutonic peoples ; and it was a continent that was at stake.

II

Engle, Saxon, and Jute crossed the narrow waters of the English Channel to found a new homeland. It was the stronger Engle blood that prevailed and made out of all, Eng-land. Dane, Norman, Huguenot, came after, but they were quickly absorbed into the Engle race ; their speech merged insensibly into the Engle speech ; their separate race life disappeared in his. The Celt also, who had preceded him as a dweller in the land, soon began to lose his race speech, and to sink his race identity in the broader life of his conqueror. Out of it all was built up one race, one speech, and that was neither Saxon, Jute, Dane, Norman, nor Celt, but English ; and to-day Britain knows practically only one man in speech, in national sympathies and aspirations, and that is the English man.

We now come to consider the second great mingling of Teutonic peoples. Again, but this time across the broad waters of the Atlantic, passed oversea a varied folk, English, Dutch, Norse, German, Huguenot, and also the Celt. These landed, as has already been described, upon the mid-coast of America, between the Celto-Latin Frenchman and the Ibero-Latin Spaniard. The English man settled along the New England coasts, in Virginia, and in Maryland, and Georgia. The Dutchman possessed himself of the valley of the Hudson, and the coast line adjacent to its mouth, and also settled in the valley of the

lower Mohawk. The Swede seized the west shore of the

Delaware. The Huguenots made their homes more especially in the Carolinas ; while the Celt scattered wherever the English man went. And now again in this second mixed mass of Teutons and Celts a process of absorption and assimilation set in ; and again the one blood proved to be the stronger and absorbed the others; and again it was the Engle blood which prevailed. And this second era of assimilation was probably as little foreseen and planned for as was the first upon the other side of the Atlantic. When the Puritan landed upon the shores of Massachusetts Bay it was with no apparent thought or purpose of admitting others of alien speech and blood to the privileges of the commonwealth which he built up. On the contrary, he resented and rebuffed their coming. So Henry Hudson, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company of Amsterdam, that day as the Half Moon sailed silently into the placid waters of theTappan Zee little foresaw the great city of English speech that was to grow up about the mouth of the river which was to bear his name. And the old Patroons of the upper Hudson fought determinedly against the process of absorption which soon began to threaten the perpetuation in America of a new Holland. The Swede of the Delaware shore as little desired the change which fell to his lot, and through which the new Sweden shortly lost identity and name. Neither did the English of the colonies farther south, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, foresee at the first their broader future. English man, Hollander, Swede, each came intent upon seizing and holding his own piece of the new land ; there to build up a second edition of his older home where the race speech, the race political institutions, might be perpetuated. The Huguenot came, not seeking dominion but peace. He tound the peace he sought; but with it race obliteration. And the Celt? He, as ever, drifted with the tide, nor dreamed nor planned of aught. The race doom to be only a feeder and an enricher of other bloods was still upon him. He was still to be only a builder up of other men's dominion. It was his doom before the Latin ; his doom in the doors of the Teuton ; and it followed him across the seas. First of the Aryan peoples in their migration westward to the new lands, his doom has ever been the doom of Reuben, that other first-born, " Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."