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HCIG4
All During WW2 Cannibal Jokes by Cannibal Nazis
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I guess you could call these guys neo Zionist
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Welcome to The Church of True Israel We do not necessarily agree with every point of view found in the
links listed on this page. Please read and then do the study to
prove what is true and accurate.
A Lot Of Interesting "Clicks"
"Edgar J. Steele" Conspiracy Pen Pal Follow this link to Noah Webster, Patrick Henry,
Louis Beam, Martin Luther, and MUCH more The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler
Redfeairn's Corner Bertrand L. Comparet William P Gale The Harold Wallace Rosenthal
Interview 1976 Part 1 The Harold Wallace Rosenthal Interview 1976 Part 2 Adolf Hitler
Dr. Wesley A. Swift
| VERBOTEN Adam is translated from the Hebrew word "AWDAWM" and means White Man. The basic derivative means: "Ruddy complexion, show blood in the face, transparent white skin. " The skin of the black and yellow races is not transparent nor is it with mongrels.
Even the ability to blush (show blood in the face) is confined to the White Race. This is caused by your sub-conscious which only God controls,
as He breathed His Living Spirit into Adam who passed it on to you, his
White descendants.
You are an infinitesimal projection of your Creator, so when you do or say something embarrassing, your sub-conscious rushes excess blood to your face.
The colored races, not having been. endowed with God's Spirit, have no abstract sense of right or wrong, consequently are never embarrassed.
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George Lincoln Rockwell Two Books (and more) Sheldon Emry TAKE YOUR CHOICE Separation or Mongrelization By Theodore G. Bilbo , Julius Streicher The Poisonous Mushroom,The Rising Tide of
Color By Lothrop Stoddard, A.M., Ph.D.Clifton A. Emahiser The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion
Henry Ford ( Slave master if the Jews In Germany durring WW2) The International Jew Plus the
Complete Unabridged Dearborne Press, Rudyard Kipling, The Passing of the Great Race By Madison
Grant, [See some excerpts below ED.] Jewish Ritual Murder by Arnold Leese Lt. Col. Gordon "Jack"
Mohr, A.U.S.Ret.(Two Books) THIS TIME BOMB Earnest Sevier Cox,White America:The American
Racial Problem as Seen in a Worldwide Perspective, A Jewish Defector Warns America by Benjamin H.Freedman(1961) The Anti-Humans by Dumitru Bacu STUDENT RE-EDUCATION IN ROMANIAN
PRISONS , Lost Israel Found (In the Anglo-Saxon Race) By E. P. Ingersol 1886 THIS AGE OF CONFLICT
By Ivor Benson Short Prayers, Humor, A Little Everything Links Page CALLED ZIONISM The GOG-MAGOG
ALLIANCE Neuman Britton "THE ORDER"
For God, Race and Country Identity Information Center
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We do not necessarily agree with any point of view found in the links listed on this page, or any of the texts excerpted , please read and
& review do the study to prove what is true and accurate. Don't stop with a partisan view find some that may be contrary to your beliefs and discuss and read whatever you can find use a library wisely
request they supply the books you request so others can share.
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If you have comments contact the source this material is for educational use sorry if you find this material ofensive it is
a part of the web and not ment as an indorcment sufice to say our views are perhaps at an opposit polarity and although it
is covered as to rights of free speach and so on I feal it is nessarry to see what others think.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.~ Aristotle
"He who rest on his or her laurels wears them in the wrong place."~Anon
" Lay down with Bears Expect some Hairs".~Anon
"Work is worship" ~A Shaker saying
"Breath is prayer"~A Sufi saying
"If you can think it, you can say it, if say it you do it.~"Advice from the Marquis DeSad
"Your Race is what good YOU achieveYOUR Philosophy IS what you do (just) before
you die." Anon
"Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit. Aristotle
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle
The gods too are fond of a joke. Aristotle
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims. Aristotle
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way...you become just by performing
just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions. Aristotle
We are what we repeatedly do. Aristotle
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Aristotle
Pleasure in the job put perfection in the work. Aristotle
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them. Aristotle
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Black Innovation?by V.S. Herrell
Recently, it has become popular to spread yet even more misinformation, this time regarding
black inventions. While history has proven that blacks have failed to contribute anything
significant to the building of civilization, campaigns are spreading across America attempting to
credit black ?inventors? with certain inventions. One such campaign is promoted by IBM who
offers a poster of Famous Black Inventions Included on this poster are pictures of blacks and
their supposed inventions including the traffic light.
While the black Garrett A. Morgan did submit and receive a patent for a traffic signal in
1923, he did not invent the traffic light.
The first traffic light was created in London in 1868, used to control the traffic of pedestrians
and buggies.
It was illuminated by gas using green and red colors, and was manually operated by policemen
who turned a lever to reveal the appropriate color to the appropriate lane of traffic. Railroads were
already using a lighting system as well. It was a police officer, William Potts, who first improved
on the gas-light invention, which required a police officer to operate.
William Potts recognized the need for something better when he observed that police officers
were spending much of their time directing traffic after the invention of the automobile.
He created an electric lighting system using red, amber, and green to control automobile traffic
in Detroit. It was first used in 1920 and was the herald of the modern traffic light.
William Potts was not black.
Garrett A. Morgan's traffic light of 1923 did not contribute significantly to the traffic light of today,
but resembled train switching lights already in use.
When reading these lists of so-called inventions, which are especially prevalent on the
Internet, it becomes painfully obvious the lies contained within those lists. These lists are
especially popular on college campuses. Afrocentrism is the term used to describe the attempts
to cover-up the truth of history by spreading lies which claim that the blacks of Africa actually
created civilization. This ridiculous theory is being taught in many schools and even
universities. Many college graduates think they are being intelligent when they state that without
H. A. Jackson, we wouldn?t have a kitchen table, which he ?invented? on October 6, 1896. This
is how ridiculous these lists have become. I am sure that the kitchen table was invented centuries
ago, although I don?t believe the blacks in Africa were furnishing their mud huts with kitchen
tables. H.A. Jackson may have submitted an idea for a patent which was a special modification
of the kitchen table, but he certainly did not invent it, and neither did his patent have any
significance on the civilization of the world. This is also true for W. R. Davis, Jr., who is
credited with inventing the library table? in 1878!
What many are doing is obtaining patent lists of blacks and then attempting to pass them off
as inventions. Most of what these people are doing is taking a certain invention, modifying it in
some way, and then patenting that modification. In other words, they are not patenting original
creations. Many are just outright lying. One list credits Sarah Boone, a female black, with the
invention of the ironing board in 1892. White people were ironing clothes on ironing boards
long before 1892.
J. Standard, another black, is credited with inventing the refrigerator in 1891. Yet, the truth
of history reveals this is another lie. William Cullen demonstrated the first known artificial.
refrigeration at the University of Glasgow in 1748. In 1805, Oliver Evans, an American,
designed the first refrigeration machine, and in 1844, John Gorrie used this design to build a
refrigerator which he used to cool the air for his patients suffering from yellow fever. This all
happened well before J. Standard ever submitted his patent. Furthermore, the concept of
refrigeration was known by whites long before the first artificial devices were ever created.
The lists go on and on. One credits the invention of the two-stroke gasoline engine in 1950
and the internal combustion engine in 1958 to a black, Frederick M. Jones. The truth is that
thermal engines were created as long ago as the 1600?s by whites. Almost one hundred years
before Frederick M. Jones, N. Otto developed the first successful four-stroke spark ignition
gasoline engine in the 1870?s. The same year, Dougald Clerk built the first successful two-stroke
engine, which remains in use today. The first person to actually experiment with the
internal combustion engine was a Dutchman, Christian Huygens, who did so in 1680. Most of
the modern gasoline engines are descendants of Gottlieb Daimler?s creation of 1885. For those
who don?t know this, Daimler was a German. Frederick M. Jones is also credited with the
invention of the starter generator in 1949; however, electric ignitions had already been
introduced in 1924. On the same note, another black, Andrew J. Beard, is credited with
inventing the rotary engine in 1892. This is completely unfounded. The first practical rotary
engine was created by a German, Felix Wankel, in 1927.
On a lighter note, Lydia O. Newman, a black, is credited with inventing the hairbrush in the
late 1800?s, despite the fact that white women have been brushing their hair for centuries.
Burridge and Marshman supposedly invented the typewriter in 1885, despite the fact that
Remington and Sons had already been selling the typewriter since 1874, and the original
machine was created in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes. The initial typewriter did not have
lowercase letters, but the shift key of the Number 2 typewriter, manufactured by Remington in
1878, allowed for lowercase letters. Other claims include riding saddles, which were supposedly
invented by W. D. Davis in 1895. Again, this is claimed despite the fact that riding saddles were
in use long before 1895, primarily by whites.
Another famous claim is that a black, Paul Williams, invented the helicopter. Again, a little
research will prove this to be false. The fact is that no one person ?invented? the helicopter.
However, Leonardo da Vinci did pen down his own version of a helicopter long before Paul E.
Williams was born. Furthermore, the first successful lift-off of a helicopter was accomplished in
1907 by a Frenchman, Paul Cornu, and Etienne Oehmichen, another Frenchman, was able to fly
a helicopter 1 kilometer in 1924. This flight lasted 7 minutes and 40 seconds. From that
moment, white engineers advanced and perfected the helicopter, and in 1937 the first practical
helicopter was introduced. Not surprisingly, this first practical helicopter was a German
creation? the Focke-Wulf Fw 61. Igor Sigorsky, a Russian, is credited with many innovations
and record setting flights after this time which greatly enhanced helicopter engineering.
Perhaps one of the most ridiculous claims is that a black, W. A. Lavallette, invented the
printing press, which he had patented in America. This was undoubtedly news to Gutenberg,
who had already invented the printing press in 1445, long before America was even a country
and almost fifty years before Columbus even landed.
The list goes on and on, and each and every so-called ?invention? can be refuted in a similar
manner, from the biscuit cutter (A. P. Ashbourne, 1875) to the portable shield for infantry?
(H. Spears, 1870). Anyone familiar with history should be aware that whites have been using
devices to cut out biscuits long before A. P. Ashbourne, and I am sure that Roman soldiers
from the first century never went into battle without a portable shield for infantry. Michael Harney,
another black, is credited with inventing the lantern. Why not credit him with inventing light or
fire? Again, these claims are so ridiculous as to boggle the mind, yet many Americans blindly
accept what they are being told as truth - white or black.
What is worse, children are being taught these lies in schools supported by our tax money.
There are also federally funded black history museums throughout the country spreading such lies.
Even the claim that the mulatto George Washington Carver invented peanut butter is false.
The truth is that early civilizations often crushed peanuts into paste and Civil War soldiers ate
peanut porridge.
As far as modern peanut butter is concerned, a St. Louis physician encouraged a food company
owner to produce and sell peanut butter in 1890 to individuals who had difficulty chewing food.
The physician had experimented with grinding peanuts and recognized peanut paste to be
highly nutritious. Bayle, the owner of the food company, sol peanut butter for 6 cents per pound.
Additionally, the first patent for peanut butter was obtained by John Harvey Kellogg, another physician experimenting with sources of protein for his patients. George Washington Carver didn't even begin
his peanut research until 1903.
Most of the so-called black inventors are mulattos like George Washington Carver, and do not deserve
to be called black anyway.
Lies such as these are harmful not only to whites, but to blacks as well.
Black children are armed with such flimsy lies which are easily torn down, and white children
are taught to appreciate so-called black culture as being better than white culture.
White children are no longer allowed to be proud of their heritage, which is full of white
men and women who have built nations, constructed civilizations, and who have contributed
to a full history of art and science.
While many of the claims stated above are almost comedic in their absurdity, it is no
laughing matter when lies such as these are spread. Some promoters of so-called black
inventions go so far as to claim that blacks created, among other things, civilization, chess,
medicine, paper and the alphabet. Liars use the fact that early white civilizations created
some of these things on the continent of Africa. Thus, they state that Africans invented all of these.
While the geological identification may be correct in some instances, the race is certainly not.
It is a well-known fact of history that Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and so on were white people
who created their respective civilizations.
Cleopatra was not black, and neither was Marc Antony. Both were very clearly white people who
bore no resemblance to the blacks or mongrels we see in America today. Alexander the Great
was a white man, though he may have visited the continent of Africa.
The builders of the pyramids were certainly not kin to the mud-hut builders of the desert.
Socrates, Hippocrates, Plato, and so on were also certainly not blacks.
Even Ethiopia was once a nation of white people, ruled by white kings and queens, until only
recently when the blacks took over.
These are all facts of history and easily verifiable, especially when one has the ability to read
the historians of the time, who were, once again, also white.
Unfortunately, most of these great nations toppled in the wake of the plague of mongrelization,
a story which has been repeated in every great nation founded by white men throughout history.
All of these attempts to change history and discredit white culture are merely the beginning
when it comes to the deviousness of the mongrel mind.
Martin Bernal of Cornell University
attempted to rewrite history over a decade ago with his books:
Black Athena The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization 1:
The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (London: Free Association Books.
and New Brunswick: Rutgers University: 1987)
and Black Athena 2: The.Archaeological and Documentary Evidence
(London, Free Association Books; New Brunswick:Rutgers University:1991).
Bernal?s works attempted to credit black Africans with the creation of the Greek
Civilization and therefore western civilization in general.
The works were easily refuted by leading Classicists and experts, yet Bernals work
continues to garner unwarranted attention.
Bernals work consists of trying to prove an Egyptian-Phoenician influence on Greek
Classical culture. Even if his interpretation of history were correct, which it is not, it is
certainly not correct to state that the ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations were
created by Negroes.
Bernals books are simply extensions of an earlier work and an on-gong attempt to change
the truth of history.
In 1954, George G.M. James published a book entitled Stolen Legacy, which offers no proof for
his claims of African influence on Greek philosophy.
In one argument, he states: [The Greeks] did not possess the native ability essential to the
development of philosophy ... the Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy,
but the Black people of North Africa, the Egyptians.
Again, his claims that the Hellenists stole their philosophical ideas from the Africans are
unfounded. Even more unfounded, however, is that the Black people of North Africa were the
same creators of the Egyptian civilization. The builders of the pyramids and Egyptian rulers
were most certainly white. Even Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek, whose family went to
extreme lengths to preserve their Greek racial line, even to the point of incest.
Two other works have been written refuting Bernal's claims. The first, Not Out of Africa by
Mary R. Lefkowitz easily discredits Black Athena. More recently, Black Athena Revisited,
Edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, offers over 500 pages of proof written
by numerous scholars against ?Afrocentrist? claims of the black creation of civilization. One
popular claim is that Aristotle and Alexander raided the library at Alexandria (which is in Egypt)
and that was where they stole their ideas from the Egyptian civilization and that Aristotle was
black. This, of course, is utterly ridiculous for several reasons.
First of all, the library at Alexandria was not built until at least 25 years after Aristotle's death.
Secondly, this library was assembled by a Greek student of Aristotle, Demetrius, and contained
books written almost entirely in Greek. Thirdly, the city of Alexandria, though located in Egypt,
was by no means an Egyptian city. It was the ruling center of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian
Greek family of which Cleopatra was a member. It was even designed by a Greek architect.
The name of the city was, of course, taken from the Greek ruler, Alexander the Great.
Even the colony of white Judeans living in Alexandria, which numbered over 1,000,000,
were a Greek-speaking people, as recorded in Philo. The Bible says, ?No lie is of the truth ...
no liar has eternal life? and ?the lake of fire was created for all liars and all who help make a lie.?
Like there are no lies in the bible...
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Thanks to Elvis Aaron Presley...
This book was quoted by both Sen. Bilbo in Take Your Choice: Seperation or Mongrelization
and by Earnest Cox in White America.
While some of Grant's material has been amended and updated in the years since 1916,
it still serves as an important work in the study of racial origins.
The Passing of the Great RaceBy Madison Grant
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Introduction
I. Race And Democracy
II. The Physical Basis Of Race
III. Race And Habitat
IV. The Competition Of Races
V. Race, Language, And Nationality
VI. Race And Language
VII. The European Races In Colonies
Part II - European Races In History
I. Eolithic Man
II. Paleolithic Man
III. The Neolithic And Bronze Ages
IV. The Alpine Race
V. The Mediterranean Race
VI. The Nordic Race
VII. Teutonic Europe.VIII. The Expansion Of The Nordics
IX. The Nordic Fatherland
X. Nordic Race Outside Of Europe
XI. The Racial Aptitudes
XII. Arya
XIII. The Origin Of The Aryan Languages
XIV. The Aryan Language In Asia
XV. Bibliography.Introduction
THE following pages are devoted to an attempt to elucidate the meaning of history in terms of
race; that is, by the physical and psychical characters of the inhabitants of Europe instead of by
their political grouping, or by their spoken language. Practically all historians, while using the
word race, have relied on tribal or national names as its sole definition. The ancients, like the
moderns, in determining ethnical origin, did not look beyond a man's name, language, or
country, and the actual information furnished by classic literature on the subject of physical
characters is limited to a few scattered and often obscure remarks.
Modern anthropology has demonstrated that racial lines are not only absolutely independent of
both national and linguistic groupings, but that in many cases these racial lines cut through them
at sharp angles and correspond closely with the divisions of social cleavage. The great lesson of
the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is
closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses. This continuity
of inheritance has a most important bearing on the theory of democracy and still more upon that
of socialism, and those, engaged in social uplift and in revolutionary movements are
consequently usually very intolerant of the limitations imposed by heredity.
Democratic theories of government in their modern form are based on dogmas of equality
formulated some hundred and fifty years ago, and rest upon the assumption that environment
and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development. Philanthropy and noble
purpose dictated the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the document
which to-day constitutes the actual basis of American institutions. The men who wrote the
words, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," were themselves
the owners of slaves, and despised Indians as something less than human. Equality in their
minds meant merely that they were just as good Englishmen as their brothers across the sea..
The words "that all men are created equal" have since been subtly falsified by adding the word
"free," although no such expression is found in the original document, and the teachings based
on these altered words in the American public schools of to-day would startle and amaze the
men who formulated the Declaration.
The laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in
the phenomena of inanimate nature, and the basis of the government of man is now and always
has been, and always will be, force and not sentiment, a truth demonstrated anew by the present
world conflagration.
It will be necessary for the reader to strip his mind of all preconceptions as to race, since
modern anthropology, when applied to history, involves an entire change of definition. We
must, first of all, realize that race pure and simple, the physical and psychical structure of man,
is something entirely distinct from either nationality or language, and that race lies to-day at the
base of all the phenomena of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons
of the past.
The antiquity of existing European populations, viewed in the light thrown upon their origins by
the discoveries of the last few decades, enables us to carry back history and prehistory into
periods so remote that the classic world is but of yesterday. The living peoples of Europe
consist of layer after layer of diverse racial elements in varying proportions, and historians and
anthropologists, while studying these populations, have been concerned chiefly with the recent
strata, and have neglected the more ancient and submerged types.
Aboriginal populations from time immemorial have been again and again swamped under
floods of newcomers and have disappeared for a time from historic view. In the course of
centuries, however, these primitive elements have slowly reasserted their physical type and
have gradually bred out their conquerors, so that the racial history of Europe has been in the
past, and is to-day a story of the repression and resurgence of ancient races.
Invasions of new races have ordinarily arrived in successive waves, the earlier ones being
quickly absorbed by the conquered, while the later arrivals usually maintain longer the purity of
their type. Consequently the more recent elements are found in a less mixed state than the older,
and the more primitive strata of the population always contain physical traits derived from still
more ancient predecessors.
Man has inhabited Europe in some form or other for hundreds of thousands of years, and during
all this lapse of time the population has been as dense as the food supply permitted. Tribes in
the hunting stage are necessarily of small size, no matter how abundant the game, and in the
Paleolithic period man probably existed only in specially favorable localities, and in relatively
small communities.
In the Neolithic and Bronze periods domesticated animals and the knowledge of agriculture,
although of primitive character, afforded an enlarged food supply, and the population in
consequence greatly increased. The lake dwellers of the Neolithic were, for example, relatively
numerous. With the clearing of the forests and the draining of the swamps during the Middle
Ages and, above all, with the industrial expansion of the last century, the population multiplied
with great rapidity. We can, of course, form little or no estimate of the numbers of the
Paleolithic population of Europe, and not much more of those of Neolithic times, but even the
latter must have been very small in comparison with the census of to-day.
Some conception of the growth of population in recent times may be based on the increase in
England. It has been computed that Saxon England at the time of the Conquest contained about
1,500,000 inhabitants; at the time of Queen Elizabeth the population was about 4,000,000,
while in 1911 the census gave for the same area some 35,000,000.
The immense range of the subject of race in connection with history from its nebulous dawn,
and the limitations of space, require that generalizations must often be stated without mention
of exceptions. These sweeping statements may even appear to be too bold, but they rest, to the
best of the writer's belief, upon solid foundations of facts, or else are legitimate conclusions
from evidence now in hand. In a science as recent as modern anthropology, new facts are
constantly revealed and require the modification of existing hypotheses. The more the subject is
studied the more provisional even the best-sustained theory appears, but modern research opens
a vista of vast interest and significance to man, now that we have discarded the shackles of
former false view-points and are able to discern, even though dimly, the solution of many of the
problems of race. New data will in the future inevitably expand, and perhaps change our ideas,
but such facts as are now in hand, and the conclusions based thereupon, are provisionally set
forth in the following chapters, and necessarily often in a dogmatic form.
The statements relating to time have presented the greatest difficulty, as the authorities differ
widely, but the dates have been fixed with extreme conservatism and the writer believes that
whatever changes in them are hereafter required by further investigation and study, will result
in pushing them back and not forward in prehistory. The dates given in the chapter of
"Paleolithic Man" are frankly taken from the most recent authority on this subject, "The Men of
the Old Stone Age," by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the writer desires to take this
opportunity to acknowledge his great indebtedness to this source of information, as well as to
Mr. M. Taylor Pyne and to Mr. Charles Stewart Davison for their assistance and many helpful
suggestions.
The author also wishes to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Professor William Z. Ripley's
great work on "The Races of Europe," which contains a vast array of anthropological data,
maps, and type portraits, providing a mine of information upon which the author has drawn
freely, for the present distribution of the three primary races of Europe.
The American Geographical Society and its staff, particularly Mr. Leon Dominian, have also
been of great assistance in the preparation of the maps contained herein, and this occasion is
taken by the writer to express his deep appreciation for their assistance..
Continue on to Chapter 1 - Race and Democracy.The Passing of the
Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter 1
Race and Democracy
FAILURE to recognize the clear distinction between race and nationality and the still greater
distinction between race and language, the easy assumption that the one is indicative of the
other, has been in the past a serious impediment to an understanding of racial values. Historians
and philologists have approached the subject from the view-point of linguistics, and as a result
we have been burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the Latin, the Aryan, the
Caucasian, and, perhaps, most inconsistent of all, the "Celtic" race.
Man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe, not in kind but only in
degree of development, and an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an
extended knowledge of other mammals, especially the primates. Instead of such essential
training, anthropologists often seek to qualify by research in linguistics, religion, or marriage
customs, or in designs of pottery or blanket weaving, all of which relate to ethnology alone.
The question of race has been further complicated by the effort of old-fashioned theologians to
cramp all mankind into the scant six thousand years of Hebrew chronology, as expounded by
Archbishop Ussher. Religious teachers have also maintained the proposition not only that man
is something fundamentally distinct from other living creatures, but that there are no inherited
differences in humanity that cannot be obliterated by education and environment.
It is, therefore, necessary at the outset for the reader to thoroughly appreciate that race,
language, and nationality are three separate and distinct things, and that in Europe these three
elements are only occasionally found persisting in combination, as in the Scandinavian nations.
To realize the transitory nature of political boundaries, one has only to consider the changes of
the past century, to say nothing of those which may occur at the end of the present war. As to
language, here in America we daily hear the English language spoken by many men who
possess not one drop of English blood, and who, a few years since, knew not one word of Saxon
speech.
As a result of certain religious and social doctrines, now happily becoming obsolete, race
consciousness has been greatly impaired among civilized nations, but in the beginning all
differences of class, of caste, and of color, marked actual lines of race cleavage.
In many countries the existing classes represent races that were once distinct. In the city of New
York, and elsewhere in the United States, there is a native American aristocracy resting upon
layer after layer of immigrants of lower races, and the native American, while, of course,
disclaiming the distinction of a patrician class, nevertheless has, up to this time, supplied the
leaders of thought and the control of capital, of education, and of the religious ideals and
altruistic bias of the community.
In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the
selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education,
and integrity. How this scheme of administration will ultimately work out remains to be seen,
but from a racial point of view, it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types
and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole.
The tendency in a democracy is toward a standardization of type and a diminution of the
influence of genius. A majority must of necessity be inferior to a picked minority, and it always
resents specializations in which it cannot share. In the French Revolution the majority, calling
itself "the People," deliberately endeavored to destroy the higher type, and something of the
same sort was, in a measure, done after the American Revolution by the expulsion of the
Loyalists and the confiscation of their lands.
In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual
and moral advantage a man of good stock brings into the world with him. We are now engaged
in destroying the privilege of wealth; that is, the reward of successful intelligence and industry,
and in some quarters there is developing a tendency to attack the privilege of intellect and to
deprive a man of the advantages of an early and thorough education. Simplified spelling is a
step in this direction. Ignorance of English grammar or classic learning must not be held up as a
reproach to the political and social aspirant.
Mankind emerged from savagery and barbarism under the leadership of selected individuals
whose personal prowess, capacity, or wisdom gave them the right to lead and the power to
compel obedience. Such leaders have always been a minute fraction of the whole, but as long as
the tradition of their predominance persisted they were able to use the brute strength of the
unthinking herd as part of their own force, and were able to direct at will the blind dynamic
impulse of the slaves, peasants, or lower classes. Such a despot had an enormous power at his
disposal which, if he were benevolent or even intelligent, could be used, and most frequently
was used, for the general uplift of the race. Even those rulers who most abused this power put
down with merciless rigor the antisocial elements, such as pirates, brigands, or anarchists,
which impair the progress of a community, as disease or wounds cripple an individual.
True aristocracy is government by the wisest and best, always a small minority in any
population. Human society is like a serpent dragging its long body on the ground, but with the
head always thrust a little in advance and a little elevated above the earth. The serpent's tail, in
human society represented by the antisocial forces, was in the past dragged by sheer force along
the path of progress. Such has been the organization of mankind from the beginning, and such it
still is in older communities than ours. What progress humanity can make under the control of
universal suffrage, or the rule of the average, may find a further analogy in the habits of certain
snakes which wiggle sideways and disregard the head with its brains and eyes. Such serpents,
however, are not noted for their ability to make rapid progress.
To use another simile, in an aristocratic as distinguished from a plutocratic, or democratic
organization, the intellectual and talented classes form the point of the lance, while the massive
shaft represents the body of the population and adds by its bulk and weight to the penetrative
impact of the tip. In a democratic system this concentrated force at the top is dispersed
throughout the mass, supplying, to be sure, a certain amount of leaven, but in the long run the
force and genius of the small minority is dissipated, if not wholly lost. Vox populi, so far from
being Vox Dei, thus becomes an unending wail for rights, and never a chant of duty.
Where a conquering race is imposed on another race the institution of slavery often arises to
compel the servient race to work, and to introduce it forcibly to a higher form of civilization. As
soon as men can be induced to labor to supply their own needs slavery becomes wasteful and
tends to vanish. Slaves are often more fortunate than freemen when treated with reasonable
humanity, and when their elemental wants of food, clothing, and shelter are supplied.
The Indians around the fur posts in northern Canada were formerly the virtual bond slaves of
the Hudson Bay Company, each Indian and his squaw and pappoose being adequately supplied
with simple food and equipment. He was protected as well against the white man's rum as the
red man's scalping parties, and in return gave the Company all his peltries-the whole product of
his year's work. From an Indian's point of view this was nearly an ideal condition, but was to all
in- tents serfdom or slavery. When, through the opening up of the country, the continuance of
such an archaic system became an impossibility, the Indian sold his furs to the highest bidder,
received a large price in cash, and then wasted the proceeds in trinkets instead of blankets, and
in rum instead of flour, with the result that he is now gloriously free, but is on the highroad to
becoming a diseased outcast. In this case of the Hudson Bay Indian the advantages of the
upward step from serfdom to freedom are not altogether clear. A very similar condition of
vassalage existed until recently among the peons of Mexico, but without the compensation of an
intelligent and provident ruling class.
In the same way serfdom in mediaeval Europe apparently was a device through which the
landowners overcame the nomadic instincts of their tenantry. Years are required to bring land to
its highest productivity, and agriculture cannot be successfully practised even in well-watered
and fertile districts by farmers who continually drift from one locality to another. The serf or
villein was, therefore, tied by law to the land, and could not leave except with his master's
consent. As soon as these nomadic instincts ceased to exist serfdom vanished.
One has only to read the severe laws against vagrancy in England, just before the Reformation,
to realize how widespread and serious was this nomadic instinct.
Here in America we have not yet forgotten the wandering instincts of our Western pioneers,
which in that case proved to be beneficial to every one except the migrants.
Continue on to Chapter 2 - The Physical Basis Of Race.The Passing of the
Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter 2
The Physical Basis of Race
In the modern and scientific study of race we have long discarded the Adamic theory that man
is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden
somewhere in Asia, to spread later over the earth in successive waves.
Many of the races of Europe, both living and extinct, did come from the East through Asia
Minor or by way of the African littoral, but most of the direct ancestors of existing populations
have inhabited Europe for many thousands of years. During that time numerous races of men
have passed over the scene. Some undoubtedly have utterly vanished, and some have left their
blood behind them in the Europeans of to-day.
It is a fact, however, that Asia was the chief area of evolution and differentiation of man, and
that the various groups had their main development there, and not on the peninsula we call
Europe.
We now know, since the elaboration of the Mendelian Laws of Inheritance, that certain bodily
characters, the so-called unit characters, such as skull shape, stature, eye color, hair color, and
nose form, are transmitted in accordance with fixed mathematical laws, and, further, that
various unit characters which are normally correlated, or belong together, may, after prolonged
admixture with another race, pass down separately, and form what is known as disharmonic
combinations. Such disharmonic combinations are, for example, a tall brunet, or a short blond;
blue eyes associated with brunet hair, or brown eyes with blond hair. In modern science the
meaning of the word "character" is now limited to physical instead of mental and spiritual traits
as in popular usage.
The process of intermixture of unit characters has gone far in existing populations, and with the
ease of modern methods of transportation this process is going much further in Europe, and in
America. The immediate results of such mixture are not blends, or intermediate types, but rather
mosaics of contrasted characters. Such blends, if any, as ultimately occur, are too remote to
concern us here. The first result of the crossing of a pure: brunet with a pure blond is to produce
either pure blonds or pure brunets in certain known proportions, instead of offspring of an
intermediate type; or else a third group which may be either blond or brunet, but which
possesses latent characters of the contrasted type. Such latent or recessive characters often
reappear in remote descendants.
In defining race in Europe it is necessary not only to consider pure groups or pure types, but
also the distribution of unit characters belonging to each particular subspecies of man found
there. The interbreeding of these populations has progressed to such an extent that in many
cases such an analysis of physical characters is necessary to reconstruct the elements which
have entered into their ethnic composition.
Sometimes we find a unit character appearing here and there as the sole remnant of a once
numerous race, for example, the occasional appearance in European populations of a skull of
the Neanderthal type, a race widely spread over Europe 40,000 years ago, or of the Cro-Magnon
type, the predominant race I6,000 years ago. Before the fossil remains of the Neanderthal and
Cro-Magnon races were studied and understood such reversional specimens were considered
pathological, instead of being recognized as the reappearance of an ancient and submerged type.
Unit characters are to all intents and purposes immutable, and they do not change during the
lifetime of a language or an empire. The skull shape of the Egyptian fellaheen, in the
unchanging environment of the Nile Valley, is absolutely identical in measurements,
proportions and capacity with skulls found in the predynastic tombs dating back more than six
thousand years.
There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of
education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of
man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American
mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past, and if allowed to go uncontradicted,
may do much more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the negro slave was an
unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun, and denied the blessings
of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War
period, and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and
going to school and to church, does not transform a negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or
Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga, and applauding his favorite
gladiator in the amphitheatre. We shall have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose
dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted
upon the stock of the nation.
Recent attempts have been made in the interest of inferior races among our immigrants to show
that the shape of the skull does change, not merely in a century, but in a single generation.
In 191O, the report of the anthropological expert of the Congressional Immigration
Commission, gravely declared that a round skull Jew on his way across the Atlantic might and
did have a round skull child, but that a few years later, in response to the subtle elixir of
American institutions, as exemplified in an East Side tenement, might and did have a child.
whose skull was appreciably longer; and that a long skull south Italian, breeding freely, would
have precisely the same experience in the reverse direction. In other words, the Melting Pot was
acting instantly under the influence of a changed environment.
What the Melting Pot actually does in practice, can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of
the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the
racial mixture which we call Mexican, and which is now engaged in demonstrating its
incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures of races, and the
character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.
It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of
relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or
primitive characters, tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the
mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized
and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a
white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and
the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
In the crossing of the blond and brunet elements of a population, the more deeply rooted and
ancient dark traits are prepotent or dominant. This is matter of everyday observation, and the
working of this law of nature is not influenced or affected by democratic institutions or by
religious beliefs.
As measured in terms of centuries, unit characters are immutable, and the only benefit to be
derived from a changed environment and better food conditions, is the opportunity afforded a
race which has lived under adverse conditions, to achieve its maximum development, but the
limits of that development are fixed for it by heredity and not by environment.
In dealing with European populations the best method of determining race has been found to lie
in a comparison of proportions of the skull, the so-called cephalic index. This is the ratio of
maximum length to maximum width taken at the widest part of the skull above the ears. Skulls
with an index of 75 or less, that is, when the width is three-fourths or less than the length, are
considered dolichocephalic, or long skulls. Skulls of an index of 80 or over are round skulls, or
brachycephalic. Intermediate indices, between 75 and 80, are considered mesocephalic. These
are cranial indices. To allow for the flesh on living specimens, about two per cent is to be added
to the index, and the result is the cephalic index. In the following pages only long and round
skulls are considered and the intermediate forms, or mesocephs, are assigned to the
dolichocephalic group.
This cephalic index, though an extremely important if not the controlling unit character, is,
nevertheless, but a single character and must be checked up with other somatological traits.
Normally, a long skull is associated with a long face, and a round skull with a round face..
The use of this test, the cephalic index, enables us to divide the great bulk of the European
populations into three distinct subspecies of man, one northern and one southern, both
dolichocephalic or characterized by a long skull, and a central subspecies which is
brachycephalic, or characterized by a round skull.
The first is the Nordic or Baltic subspecies. This race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned,
with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the
North and Baltic Seas, and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but
also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of
Aryan language and culture.
The second is the dark Mediterranean or Iberian subspecies, occupying the shores of the inland
sea, and extending along the Atlantic coast until it reaches the Nordic species. It also spreads far
east into southern Asia. It is long skulled like the Nordic race, but the absolute size of the skull
is less. The eyes and hair are very dark or black, and the skin more or less swarthy. The stature
is stunted in comparison to that of the Nordic race and the musculature and bony framework
weak.
The third is the Alpine subspecies occupying all central and eastern Europe, and extending
through Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs. The Armenoids constitute an Alpine
subdivision and represent the ancestral type of this race which remained in the mountains and
high plateaux of Anatolia and western Asia. The Alpines are round skulled, of medium height
and sturdy build, both as to skeleton and muscles. The coloration of both hair and eyes was
originally very dark and still tends strongly in that direction, but many light colored eyes,
especially gray, are now found in the Alpine populations of western Europe.
While the inhabitants of Europe betray as a whole their mixed origin, nevertheless the three
main subspecies are each found in large numbers and in great purity, as well as sparse remnants
of still more ancient races represented by small groups or by individuals, and even by unit
characters.
These three main groups have bodily characters which constitute them distinct subspecies of
Homo sapiens. Each has several varieties, but for the sake of clearness the word race and not
the word species or subspecies will hereafter be used nearly, but not quite, exclusively. In
zoology the term species implies the existence of a certain definite amount of divergence from
the most closely related type, but race does not require a similar amount of difference. In man,
where all groups are more or less fertile when crossed, so many intermediate or mixed types
occur that the word species has too limited a meaning for wide use. Related species when
grouped together constitute subgenera and genera.
The old idea that fertility or infertility of races of animals was the measure of species, is now
abandoned. One of the greatest difficulties in classifying man is his perverse predisposition to
mismate. This is a matter of daily observation, especially among the women of the better.classes,
probably because of their wider range of choice.
The cephalic index is of less value in the classification of Asiatic populations, but the
distribution of round and long skulls is similar to that in Europe. The vast central plateau of that
continent is inhabited by round skulls. In fact, Thibet and the western Himalayas were probably
the centre of radiation of all the round skulls of the world. In India and Persia south of this
central area occurs a long skull race related to Mediterranean man in Europe.
Both skull types occur, much intermixed, among the American Indians, and the cephalic index
is of little value in classifying the Amerinds. No satisfactory explanation of the variability of the
skull shape of this species has as yet been found, but the total range of variation of physical
characters from northern Canada to southern Patagonia is less than the range of such variation
from Normandy to Provence in France.
In Africa the cephalic index is also of small classification value because all of the populations
are characterized by a long skull.
The distinction between a long skull and a round skull in mankind probably goes back at least
to early Paleolithic times, if not to a period still more remote. It is of such great antiquity that
when new species or races appear in Europe at the close of the Paleolithic, between IO,OOO
and 7,000 years B.C., the skull characters among them are as clearly defined as they are to-day.
The fact that two distinct species of mankind both have long skulls, as have the north European
and the African negro, is no necessary indication of relationship, and in that instance is merely a
case of parallel specialization. The fact, however, that the Swede has a long skull and the
Savoyard a round skull does prove them to be descendants of distinct subspecies.
The claims that the Nordic race is a mere variation of the Mediterranean race, and that the latter
is, in turn, derived from the Ethiopian negro, rest upon a mistaken idea that a dolichocephaly in
common must mean identity of origin, as well as upon a failure to take into consideration many
somatological characters of almost equal value with the cephalic index. In this connection it is
well to remark that this measurement, being merely a ratio, may yield identical figures for
skulls differing in every other proportion and detail, as well as in absolute size and capacity.
Eye color is of very great importance in race determination, because all blue, gray, or green
eyes in the world to-day came originally from the same source, namely, the Nordic race of
northern Europe. This light colored eye has appeared nowhere else on earth, and is a
specialization of this subspecies of man only, and is consequently one of extreme value in the
classification of European races. Dark colored eyes are all but universal among wild mammals,
and entirely so among the primates, man's nearest relatives. It is, therefore, an absolute certainty
that all the original races of man had dark eyes.
One subspecies of man, and one alone, specialized in light colored eyes. This same subspecies
also evolved light or blond hair, a character far less deeply rooted than eye color, as blond.children
tend to grow darker with advancing years, and populations largely of Nordic
extraction, such as those of Lombardy, upon admixture with darker races, lose their blond hair
more readily than their light colored eyes.
Blond hair also comes everywhere from the Nordic species, and from nowhere else. Whenever
we find blondness among the darker races of the earth we may be sure some Nordic wanderer
has passed that way. When individuals of perfect blond type occur, as sometimes in Greek
islands, we may suspect a recent visit of sailors from a passing ship, but when only single
characters remain spread thinly, but widely, over considerable areas, like the blondness of the
Atlas Berbers or of the Albanian mountaineers, we must search in the dim past for the origin of
these blurred traits of early invaders.
The range of blond hair color in pure Nordic peoples runs from flaxen and red to shades of
chestnut and brown. The darker shades may indicate crossing in some cases, but absolutely
black hair certainly does mean an ancestral cross with a dark race-in England with the
Mediterranean race.
In Nordic populations the women are, in general, lighter haired than the men, a fact which
points to a blond past and a darker future for those populations. Women in all human races, as
the females among all mammals, tend to exhibit the older, more generalized and primitive traits
of the race's past. The male in his individual development indicates the direction in which the
race is tending under the influence of variation and selection.
It is interesting to note in connection with the more primitive physique of the female, that in the
spiritual sphere also, women retain the ancient and intuitive knowledge that the great mass of
mankind is not free and equal, but bond and unequal.
The color of the skin is a character of importance, but one that is exceedingly hard to measure
as the range of variation in Europe between skins of extreme fairness and those that are
exceedingly swarthy, is almost complete. In general the Nordic race in its purity has an
absolutely fair skin, and is consequently the Homo albus, the white man par excellence.
Many members of the Nordic race otherwise apparently pure have skins, as well as hair, more
or less dark, so that the determinative value of this character is uncertain. There can be no doubt
that the quality of the skin and the extreme range of its variation in color from black, brown,
red, yellow to ivory-white are excellent measures of the specific or subgeneric distinctions
between the larger groups of mankind, but in dealing with European populations it is sometimes
difficult to correlate shades of fairness with other physical characters.
It often happens that an individual with all the Nordic characters in great purity, has a skin of an
olive or dark tint, and it much more frequently happens that we find an individual with
absolutely pure brunet traits in possession of a skin of almost ivory whiteness and of great
clarity. This last combination is very frequent among the brunets of the British Isles. That these.
are, to some extent, disharmonic combinations we may be certain, but beyond that our
knowledge does not lead. Owners, however, of a fair skin have always been, and still are, the
objects of keen envy by those whose skins are black, yellow, or red.
Stature is another unit character of greater value than skin color, and perhaps than hair color,
and is one of much importance in European classification because on that continent we have the
most extreme variations of human height.
Exceedingly adverse economic conditions may inhibit a race from attaining the full measure of
its growth, and to this extent environment plays its part in determining stature, but
fundamentally it is race, always race, that sets the limit. The tall Scot and the dwarfed Sardinian
owe their respective sizes to race, and not to oatmeal or olive oil. It is probable that the fact that
the stature of the Irish is, on the average, shorter than that of the Scotch, is due partly to
economic conditions, and partly to the depressing effect of a considerable population of
primitive short stock.
Mountaineers all over the world tend to be tall and vigorous, a fact probably due to the rigid
elimination of defectives by the unfavorable environment. In this case altitude would operate
like latitude, and produce the severe conditions which seem essential to human vigor. The short
stature of the Lapps and the Esquimaux may have been originally attributable to the trying
conditions of an Arctic habitat, but in any event it has long since become a racial character.
So far as the main species of Europe are concerned, stature is a very valuable measure of race.
To recapitulate as to this character, the Mediterranean race is everywhere marked by a relatively
short stature, sometimes greatly depressed, as in south Italy and in Sardinia, and also by a
comparatively light bony framework and feeble muscular development.
The Alpine race is taller than the Mediterranean although shorter than the Nordic, and is
characterized by a stocky and sturdy build.
The Nordic race is nearly everywhere distinguished by great stature. Almost the tallest stature
in the world is found among the pure Nordic populations of the Scottish and English borders,
while the native British of Pre-Nordic brunet blood are, for the most part, relatively short; and
no one can question the race value of stature who observes on the streets of London the contrast
between the Piccadilly gentleman of Nordic race and the cockney costermonger of the old
Neolithic type.
In many cases where these three European races have become mixed, stature seems to be one of
the first Nordic characters to vanish, but wherever in Europe we find great stature in a
population otherwise lacking in Nordic characters, we may be certain of Nordic crossing, as in
the case of a large proportion of the inhabitants of Burgundy, of Switzerland, of the Tyrol, and
of the Dalmatian Alps south to Albania..These four unit characters, skull shape, eye color, hair
color, and stature, are sufficient to enable us to differentiate clearly between the three main races
of Europe, but if we wish to discuss the minor variations and mixtures, we would have to go much
further and take up other proportions of the skull than the cephalic index, as well as the shape and
position of the eyes, and the proportions and shape of the jaws and chin.
The nose also is an exceedingly important character. The original human nose was, of course,
broad and bridgeless. This trait is shown clearly in new-born infants who recapitulate in their
development the various stages of the evolution of the human genus. A bridgeless nose with
wide flaring nostrils is a very primitive character, and is still retained by some of the larger
divisions of mankind throughout the world. It appears occasionally in white populations of
European origin, but is everywhere a very ancient, generalized, and low character.
The high bridge and long, narrow nose, the so-called Roman, Norman, or aquiline nose, is
characteristic of the most highly specialized races of mankind. While an apparently unimportant
character, the nose is one of the very best clews to racial origin, and in the details of its form,
and especially in the lateral shape of the nostrils, is a race determinant of the greatest value.
The lips, whether thin or fleshy or whether cleancut or everted, are race characters. Thick,
protruding, everted lips are very ancient traits and are characteristic of primitive races. A high
instep also has long been esteemed an indication of patrician type, while the flat foot is often the
test of lowly origin.
The absence or abundance of hair and beard and the relative absence or abundance of body hair
are characters of no little value in classification. Abundant body hair is, to a large extent,
peculiar to populations of the very highest as well as the very lowest species, being
characteristic of the north European as well as of the Australian savages. It merely means the
retention in both these groups of a very early and primitive trait which has been lost by the
Negroes, Mongols, and the Amerinds.
The Nordic and Alpine races are far better equipped with head and body hair than the
Mediterranean, which is throughout its range a glabrous or relatively naked race.
The so-called red haired branch of the Nordic race has special characters in addition to red hair,
such as a greenish cast of eye, a skin of peculiar texture tending either to great clarity or to
freckles, and certain peculiar temperamental traits. This was probably a variety closely related
to the blonds, and it first appears in history in association with them.
In the structure of the head hair of all races of mankind we find a regular progression from
extreme kinkiness to lanky straightness, and this straightness or curliness depends on the shape
of the cross section of the hair itself. This cross section has three distinct forms, corresponding
with the most extreme divergences among human species.
While the three main European races are the subject of this book, and while it is not the.intention
of the author to deal with the other human types, it is necessary at this point to state
that these three European subspecies, are subdivisions of one of the primary groups or
subgenera of the genus Homo which, taken together, we must call the Caucasian for lack of a
better name.
The great mass of the rest of mankind can be roughly divided into the Negroes and Negroids,
and the Mongols and Mongoloids.
The former apparently originated in south Asia and entered Africa from the northeasterly corner
of that continent. Africa south of the Sahara is now the chief home of this race, though remnants
of Negroid aborigines are found throughout south Asia from India to the Philippines, while the
very distinct black Melanesians and the Australoids lie farther to the east and south.
A third subgenus of mankind includes the round skulled Mongols and their derivatives, the
Amerinds, or American Indians. This group is essentially Asiatic, and occupies the centre and
the eastern half of that continent. A description of these Negroid and Mongoloid subgenera and
their derivatives, as well as of certain aberrant species of man, lies outside of the scope of this
work.
In the consideration of this measurement, the cross section of the hair in connection with these
main subgenera, we find that a permanent relation exists, and that each of the three primary
divisions of mankind is, in the shape of the cross section of its hair, differentiated from the
others.
The cross section of the hair of the Negro and Negroid races is a flat ellipse with the result that
all the members of this subgenus have kinky hair.
The cross section of the hair of the Mongols and their derivatives, the Amerinds, is a complete
circle, and the hair of this subgenus is perfectly straight and lank.
The cross section of the hair of the so-called Caucasians, including the Mediterranean, Alpine,
and Nordic subspecies, is an oval ellipse, and consequently is intermediate between the cross
sections of the Negroids and Mongoloids. Hair of this structure is wavy or curly, never either
kinky or absolutely straight, and is characteristic of all the European populations, almost
without exception.
We have confined our discussion to the most important unit characters, but there are many other
valuable aids to classification to be found in the proportions of the body and the relative length
of the limbs. For an example, it is a matter of common knowledge that there occur among white
women two distinct types in this latter respect, the one long legged and short bodied, the other
long bodied and short legged. All such facts have a race value as yet not understood.
Without going into further physical details, it is probable that all relative proportions in the
body, the features, the skeleton, and the skull which are fixed and constant and lie outside of the.
range of individual variation represent dim inheritances from the past. Every human being
unites in himself the blood of thousands of ancestors, stretching back through thousands of
years, superimposed upon a prehuman inheritance of still greater antiquity, and the face and
body of every living man offer an intricate mass of hieroglyphs that science will some day learn
to read and interpret.
We shall use the foregoing main unit characters as the basis of our definition of race, and shall
later call attention to such temperamental and spiritual traits as seem to be associated with
distinct physical types.
We shall only discuss European populations and shall not deal with those quarters of the globe
where the races of man are such that other physical characters must be called upon to provide
clear definitions.
A fascinating subject would open up if we were to dwell upon the effect of racial combinations
and disharmonies, as, for instance, where the mixed Nordic and Alpine populations of
Lombardy retain the skull shape, hair color, and stature of the Alpine race, with the light eye
color of the Nordic race, or where the mountain populations along the east coast of the Adriatic
from the Tyrol to Albania have the stature of the Nordic race and an Alpine skull and
coloration.
Continue on to Chapter 3 - Race and Habitat.The Passing of the
Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter III
Race and Habitat
THE laws which govern the distribution of the various races of man and their evolution through
selection are substantially the same as those controlling the evolution and distribution of the
larger mammals.
Man, however, with his superior mentality, has freed himself from many of the elements which
impose restraint upon the expansion of animals. In his case selection through disease and social
and economic competition has replaced selection through adjustment to the limitations of food
supply.
Man is the most cosmopolitan of animals, and in one form or another thrives in the tropics and
in the arctics, at sea level and on high plateaux, in the desert and in the reeking forests of the
equator. Nevertheless, the various races of Europe with which we deal in this book have, each
of them, a certain natural habitat in which each achieves its highest development.
THE NORDIC HABITAT
The Nordics appear in their present centre of distribution, the basin of the Baltic, at the close
of the Paleolithic, as soon as the retreating glaciers left habitable land. This race was probably at
that time in possession of its fundamental characters, and its extension in the Teutonic group
from the plains of Russia to Scandinavia was not in the nature of a radical change of
environment. The race in consequence is now and always has been, probably always will be,
adjusted to certain environmental conditions, chief of which is protection from a tropical sun.
The actinic rays of the sun at the same latitude are uniform in strength the world over, and
continuous sunlight affects adversely the delicate nervous organization of the Nordics. The fogs
and long winter nights of the North serve as a protection from too much sun, and from its too
direct rays.
Scarcely less important is the presence of a large amount of moisture, but above all a constant
variety of temperature is needed. Sharp contrast between night and day temperature, and
between summer and winter are necessary to maintain the vigor of the blond race at a high.pitch.
Uniform weather, if long continued, lessens its energy. Too great extremes, as in
midwinter or midsummer in New England, are injurious. Limited but constant alternations of
heat and cold, of moisture and dryness, of sun and clouds, of calm and cyclonic storms, offer
the ideal surroundings for the Nordic race.
Men of the Nordic race may not enjoy the fogs and snows of the North, the endless changes of
weather, and the violent fluctuations of the thermometer, and they may seek the sunny southern
isles, but under the former conditions they flourish, do their work, and raise their families. In
the south they grow listless and cease to breed.
In the lower classes the increasing proportion of poor whites and "crackers" are symptoms of
lack of climatic adjustment. The whites in Georgia, the Bahamas, and above all the Barbadoes
are excellent examples of the deleterious effects of residence outside the natural habitat of the
Nordic race.
The poor whites of the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky and Tennessee present a more
difficult problem, because here the altitude, even though small, should modify the effects of
latitude, and the climate of these mountains cannot be particularly unfavorable to men of Nordic
breed. There are probably other hereditary forces at work here as yet little understood.
No doubt bad food and economic conditions, prolonged inbreeding, and the loss through
emigration of the best elements have played a large part in the degeneration of these poor
whites. They represent to a large extent the offspring of bond servants brought over by the rich
planters in early Colonial times. Their names indicate that, many of them are the descendants of
the old borderers along the Scotch and English frontier, and the persistence with which family
feuds are maintained certainly points to such an origin. The physical type is typically Nordic,
for the most part pure Saxon or Anglian, and the whole mountain population show somewhat
aberrant but very pronounced physical, moral, and mental characteristics which would repay
scientific investigation. The problem is too complex to be disposed of by reference to the
hookworm, illiteracy, or competition with negroes.
This type played a very large part in the settlement of the Middle West, by way of Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Missouri. Thence they passed both up the Missouri River and down the Santa
Fe trail, and contributed rather more than their share of the train robbers horse thieves, and bad
men of the West.
Scotland and the Bahamas are inhabited by men of precisely the same race, but the vigor of the
English in the Bahamas is gone, and the beauty of their women has faded. The fact that they
were not in competition with an autochthonous race better adjusted to climatic conditions has
enabled them to survive, but the type could not have persisted, even during the last two hundred
years, if they had been compelled to compete on terms of equality with a native and acclimated
population..Another element entering into racial degeneration on many other islands, and for that
matter in many New England villages, is the loss through emigration of the more vigorous and
energeticindividuals, leaving behind the less efficient to continue the race at home.
In subtropical countries, when the energy of the Nordics is at a low ebb, it would appear that the
racial inheritance of physical strength and mental vigor were suppressed and recessive rather
than destroyed. Many individuals who were born in unfavorable climatic surroundings, but who
move back to the original habitat of their race in the north, recover their full quota of energy
and vigor. New York and other Northern cities have many Southerners who are fully as
efficient as pure Northerners.
This blond race can exist outside of its native environment as land owning aristocrats who are
not required to do manual labor in the fields under a blazing sun. As such an aristocracy it
continues to exist under Italian skies, but as a field laborer the man of Nordic blood could not
compete with his Alpine or Mediterranean rival. It is not to be supposed that the Teutonic
armies which for a thousand years after the fall of Rome poured down from the Alps like the
glaciers to melt in the southern sun, were composed solely of knights and gentlemen who
became the landed nobility of Italy. The man in the ranks also took up his land and work in
Italy, but he had to compete directly with the native under climatic conditions which were
unfavorable to his race. In this competition the blue eyed Nordic giant died, and the native
survived. His officer, however, lived in the castle and directed the labor of his bondsmen
without other preoccupation than the chase and war, and he long maintained his vigor.
The same thing happened in our South before the Civil War. There the white men did not work
in the fields or in the factory. The heavy work under the blazing sun was performed by negro
slaves, and the planter was spared exposure to an unfavorable environment. Under these
conditions he was able to retain much of his vigor. When slavery was abolished, and the white
man had to plough his own fields or work in the factory, deterioration began.
The change in the type of men who are now sent by the Southern States to represent them in the
Federal Government from their predecessors in ante-bellum times is partly due to these causes,
but in a greater degree it is to be attributed to the fact that a very large portion of the best racial
strains in the South were killed off during the Civil War. In addition the war shattered the
aristocratic traditions which formerly secured the selection of the best men as rulers. The new
democratic ideals with universal suffrage in free operation among the whites result in the choice
of representatives who lack the distinction and ability of the leaders of the Old South.
A race may be thoroughly adjusted to a certain country at one stage of its development and be at
a disadvantage when an economic change occurs, such as was experienced in England a century
ago when the nation changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing community. The type of
man that flourishes in the fields is not the type of man that thrives in the factory, just as the type
of man required for the crew of a sailing ship is not the type useful as stokers on a modern
steamer..THE HABITAT OF THE ALPINES AND MEDITERRANEANS
The environment of the Alpine race seems to have always been the mountainous country of
central and eastern Europe, as well as western Asia. This type has never flourished in the
deserts of Arabia or the Sahara, nor has it succeeded in maintaining its colonies in the north of
Europe within the domain of the Nordic long heads. It is, however, a sturdy and persistent
stock, and, while much of it may not be overrefined or cultured, undoubtedly possesses great
potentialities for future development.
The Alpines in the west of Europe, especially in Switzerland and the districts immediately
surrounding, have been so thoroughly Nordicized, and so saturated with the culture of the
adjoining nations, that they stand in sharp contrast to backward Alpines of Slavic speech in the
Balkans and east of Europe.
The Mediterranean race, on the other hand, is clearly a southern type with eastern affinities. It is
a type that did not flourish in the north of Europe under old agricultural conditions, nor is it
suitable to the farming districts and frontiers of America and Canada. It is adjusted to
subtropical and tropical countries better than any other European type, and will flourish in our
Southern States and around the coasts of the Spanish Main. In France it is well known that
members of the Mediterranean race are better adapted for colonization in Algeria than are
French Alpines or Nordics. This subspecies of man is notoriously intolerant of extreme cold,
owing to its sensibility to diseases of the lungs, and it shrinks from the blasts of the northern
winter in which the Nordics revel.
The brunet Mediterranean element in the native American seems to be increasing at the expense
of the blond Nordic element generally throughout the Southern States, and probably also in the
large cities. This type of man, however, is scarce on our frontiers. In the Northwest, and in
Alaska in the days of the gold rush, it was in the mining camps a matter of comment if a man
turned up with dark eyes, so universal were blue and gray eyes among the American pioneers.
Continue on to Chapter 4 - The Competition of Races.The Passing of the
Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter IV
The Competition of Races
WHERE two races occupy a country side by side, it is not correct to speak of one type as
changing into the other. Even if present in equal numbers one of the two contrasted types will
have some small advantage or capacity which the other lacks toward a perfect adjustment to
surroundings. Those possessing these favorable variations will flourish at the expense of their
rivals, and their offspring will not only be more numerous, but will also tend to inherit such
variations. In this way one type gradually breeds the other out. In this sense, and in this sense
only, do races change.
Man continuously undergoes selection through social environment. Among native Americans of
the Colonial period a large family was an asset, and social pressure and economic advantage
both counselled early marriage and numerous children. Two hundred years of continuous
political expansion and material prosperity changed these conditions and children, instead of
being an asset to till the fields and guard the cattle, became an expensive liability. They now
require support, education, and endowment from their parents, and a large family is regarded by
some as a serious handicap in the social struggle.
These conditions do not obtain at first among immigrants, and large families among the newly
arrived population are still the rule, precisely as they were in Colonial America, and are to-day
in French Canada, where backwoods conditions still prevail.
The result is that one class or type in a population expands more rapidly than another, and
ultimately replaces it. This process of replacement of one type by another does not mean that
the race changes, or is transformed into another. It is a replacement pure and simple and not a
transformation.
The lowering of the birth rate among the most valuable classes, while the birth rate of the lower
classes remains unaffected, is a frequent phenomenon of prosperity. Such a change becomes
extremely injurious to the race if unchecked, unless nature is allowed to maintain by her own
cruel devices the relative numbers of the different classes in their due proportions. To attack
race suicide by encouraging indiscriminate breeding is not only futile, but is dangerous if it
leads to an increase in the undesirable elements. What is needed in the community most of all,
.is an increase in the desirable classes, which are of superior type physically, intellectually, and
morally, and not merely an increase in the absolute numbers of the population.
The value and efficiency of a population are not numbered by what the newspapers call souls,
but by the proportion of men of physical and intellectual vigor. The small Colonial population
of America was, man for man, far superior to the average of the present inhabitants, although
the latter are twenty-five times more numerous. The ideal in eugenics toward which
statesmanship should be directed, is, of course, improvement in quality rather than quantity.
This, however, is at present a counsel of perfection, and we must face conditions as they are.
The small birth rate in the upper classes is, to some extent, offset by the care received by such
children as are born, and the better chance they have to become adult and breed in their turn.
The large birth rate of the lower classes is, under normal conditions, offset by a heavy infant
mortality, which eliminates the weaker children.
Where altruism, philanthropy, or sentimentalism intervene with the noblest purpose, and forbid
nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding, the multiplication of inferior
types is encouraged and fostered. Efforts to indiscriminately preserve babies among the lower
classes often result in serious injury to the race.
Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity
of human life, tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of
such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the
obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or
race.
It is highly unjust that a minute minority should be called upon to supply brains for the
unthinking mass of the community, but it is even worse to burden the responsible and larger,
but still overworked, elements in the community with an ever increasing number of moral
perverts, mental defectives, and hereditary cripples.
The church assumes a serious responsibility toward the future of the race whenever it steps in
and preserves a defective strain. The marriage of deaf mutes was hailed a generation ago as a
triumph of humanity. Now it is recognized as an absolute crime against the race. A great injury
is done to the community by the perpetuation of worthless types. These strains are apt to be
meek and lowly, and as such make a strong appeal to the sympathies of the successful. Before
eugenics were understood much could be said from a Christian and humane view-point in favor
of indiscriminate charity for the benefit of the individual. The societies for charity, altruism, or
extension of rights, should have, however, in these days, in their management some small
modicum of brains, otherwise they may continue to do, as they have sometimes done in the
past, more injury to the race than black death or smallpox.
As long as such charitable organizations confine themselves to the relief of suffering.individuals,
no matter how criminal or diseased they may be, no harm is done except to our own
generation, and if modern society recognizes a duty to the humblest malefactors or imbeciles,
that duty can be harmlessly performed in full, provided they be deprived of the capacity to
procreate their defective strain.
Those who read these pages will feel that there is little hope for humanity, but the remedy has
been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the
elimination of those who are weak or unfit-in other words, social failures-would solve the
whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who
crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished,
educated, and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization
must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever
increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and
inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social
discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending
gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately
to worthless race types.
Efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes of the community, while most
desirable, encounter great difficulties. In such efforts we encounter social conditions over which
we have as yet no control. It was tried two thousand years ago by Augustus, and his efforts to
avert race suicide and the extinction of the old Roman breed were singularly prophetic of what
some far seeing men are attempting in order to preserve the race of native Americans of
Colonial descent.
Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement. He can breed from the best, or he can
eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization. The first method was adopted by the
Spartans, who had for their national ideals, military efficiency and the virtues of self control,
and along these lines the results were completely successful. Under modern social conditions it
would be extremely difficult in the first instance to determine which were the most desirable
types, except in the most general way, and even if a satisfactory selection were finally made, it
would be, in a democracy, a virtual impossibility to limit by law the right to breed to a
privileged and chosen few.
Experiments in limiting breeding to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in
mediaeval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome, social conditions
were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life, were compelled to seek refuge from
the violence of the times in monastic institutions, and upon such the church imposed the
obligation of celibacy, and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes.
In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment, and
banishment, the free thinking, progressive, and intellectual elements were persistently
eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal,
.the servile, and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by
these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of
over three centuries, from the year I47I to I78I, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or
imprisonment an average of I,OOO persons annually. During these three centuries no less than
32,000 were burned alive, and 291,OOO were condemned to various terms of imprisonment
and other penalties, and 7,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in
prison or had fled the country.
No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised, and
if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the
superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability
took place in northern Italy and in France, and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of
thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.
Under existing conditions the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is
through the elimination of the least desirable elements in the nation by depriving them of the
power to contribute to future generations. It is well known to stock breeders that the color of
a herd of cattle can be modified by continuous elimination of worthless shades, and of course
this is true of other characters. Black sheep, for instance, have been practically destroyed by cutting out generation after generation all animals that show this color phase, until in carefully
maintained flocks a black individual only appears as a rare sport.
In mankind it would not be a matter of great difficulty to secure a general consensus of public
opinion as to the least desirable, let us say, ten per cent of the community. When this
unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated, together with the great
mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism, and feeblemindedness associated therewith, it would be
easy to consider the advisability of further restricting the perpetuation of the then remaining
least valuable types. By this method mankind might ultimately become sufficiently intelligent
to deliberately choose the most vital and intellectual strains to carry on the race.
In addition to selection by climatic environment, man is now, and has been for ages, undergoing
selection through disease. He has been decimated throughout the centuries by pestilences such
as the black death and bubonic plague. In our fathers' days yellow fever and smallpox cursed
humanity. These plagues are now under control, but similar diseases, now regarded as mere
nuisances to childhood, such as measles, mumps, and scarlatina, are terrible scourges to native
populations without previous experience with them. Add to these smallpox and other white
men's diseases, and one has the great empire builders of yesterday. It was not the swords in the
hands of Columbus and his followers that decimated the American Indians, it was the germs
that his men and their successors brought over, implanting the white man's maladies in the red
man's world. Long before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, smallpox had flickered up
and down the coast until the natives were but a broken remnant of their former numbers.
At the present time the Nordic race is undergoing selection through alcoholism, a peculiarly.
Nordic vice, and through consumption, and both these dread scourges unfortunately attack those
members of the race that are otherwise most desirable, differing in this respect from filth
diseases like typhus, typhoid, or smallpox. One has only to look among the more desirable
classes for the victims of rum and tubercule to realize that death or mental and physical
impairment through these two causes have cost the race many of its most brilliant and attractive
members.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This book was quoted by both Sen. Bilbo in Take Your Choice: Seperation or Mongrelization and
by Earnest Cox in White America. While some of Grant's material has been amended and updated
in the years since 1916, it still erves as an important work in the study of racial origins.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Introduction
I. Race And Democracy
II. The Physical Basis Of Race
III. Race And Habitat
IV. The Competition Of Races
V. Race, Language, And Nationality
VI. Race And Language
VII. The European Races In Colonies
Part II - European Races In History
I. Eolithic Man
II. Paleolithic Man
III. The Neolithic And Bronze Ages
IV. The Alpine Race
V. The Mediterranean Race
VI. The Nordic Race
VII. Teutonic Europe.
VIII. The Expansion Of The Nordics
IX. The Nordic Fatherland
X. Nordic Race Outside Of Europe
XI. The Racial Aptitudes
XII. Arya
XIII. The Origin Of The Aryan Languages
XIV. The Aryan Language In Asia
XV. Bibliography.
Introduction
THE following pages are devoted to an attempt to elucidate the meaning of history in terms of
race; that is, by the physical and psychical characters of the inhabitants of Europe instead of by
their political grouping, or by their spoken language. Practically all historians, while using the
word race, have relied on tribal or national names as its sole definition. The ancients, like the
moderns, in determining ethnical origin, did not look beyond a man's name, language, or
country, and the actual information furnished by classic literature on the subject of physical
characters is limited to a few scattered and often obscure remarks.
Modern anthropology has demonstrated that racial lines are not only absolutely independent of
both national and linguistic groupings, but that in many cases these racial lines cut through them
at sharp angles and correspond closely with the divisions of social cleavage. The great lesson of
the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is
closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses. This continuity
of inheritance has a most important bearing on the theory of democracy and still more upon that
of socialism, and those, engaged in social uplift and in revolutionary movements are
consequently usually very intolerant of the limitations imposed by heredity.
Democratic theories of government in their modern form are based on dogmas of equality
formulated some hundred and fifty years ago, and rest upon the assumption that environment
and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development. Philanthropy and noble
purpose dictated the doctrine expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the document
which to-day constitutes the actual basis of American institutions. The men who wrote the
words, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," were themselves
the owners of slaves, and despised Indians as something less than human. Equality in their
minds meant merely that they were just as good Englishmen as their brothers across the sea..
The words "that all men are created equal" have since
been subtly falsified by adding the word "free," although
no such expression is found in the original document,
and the teachings based on these altered words in the American public schools of to-day would startle and
amaze the men who formulated the Declaration.
The laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in
the phenomena of inanimate nature, and the basis of the government of man is now and always
has been, and always will be, force and not sentiment, a truth demonstrated anew by the present
world conflagration.
It will be necessary for the reader to strip his mind of all preconceptions as to race, since
modern anthropology, when applied to history, involves an entire change of definition. We
must, first of all, realize that race pure and simple, the physical and psychical structure of man,
is something entirely distinct from either nationality or language, and that race lies to-day at the
base of all the phenomena of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons
of the past.
The antiquity of existing European populations, viewed in the light thrown upon their origins by
the discoveries of the last few decades, enables us to carry back history and prehistory into
periods so remote that the classic world is but of yesterday. The living peoples of Europe
consist of layer after layer of diverse racial elements in varying proportions, and historians and
anthropologists, while studying these populations, have been concerned chiefly with the recent
strata, and have neglected the more ancient and submerged types.
Aboriginal populations from time immemorial have been again and again swamped under
floods of newcomers and have disappeared for a time from historic view. In the course of
centuries, however, these primitive elements have slowly reasserted their physical type and
have gradually bred out their conquerors, so that the racial history of Europe has been in the
past, and is to-day a story of the repression and resurgence of ancient races.
Invasions of new races have ordinarily arrived in successive waves, the earlier ones being
quickly absorbed by the conquered, while the later arrivals usually maintain longer the purity of
their type. Consequently the more recent elements are found in a less mixed state than the older,
and the more primitive strata of the population always contain physical traits derived from still
more ancient predecessors.
Man has inhabited Europe in some form or other for hundreds of thousands of years, and during
all this lapse of time the population has been as dense as the food supply permitted. Tribes in
the hunting stage are necessarily of small size, no matter how abundant the game, and in the
Paleolithic period man probably existed only in specially favorable localities, and in relatively
small communities.
In the Neolithic and Bronze periods domesticated animals and the knowledge of agriculture,
although of primitive character, afforded an enlarged food supply, and the population in
consequence greatly increased. The lake dwellers of the Neolithic were, for example, relatively
numerous. With the clearing of the forests and the draining of the swamps during the Middle
Ages and, above all, with the industrial expansion of the last century, the population multiplied
with great rapidity. We can, of course, form little or no estimate of the numbers of the
Paleolithic population of Europe, and not much more of those of Neolithic times, but even the
latter must have been very small in comparison with the census of to-day.
Some conception of the growth of population in recent times may be based on the increase in
England. It has been computed that Saxon England at the time of the Conquest contained about
1,500,000 inhabitants; at the time of Queen Elizabeth the population was about 4,000,000,
while in 1911 the census gave for the same area some 35,000,000.
The immense range of the subject of race in connection with history from its nebulous dawn,
and the limitations of space, require that generalizations must often be stated without mention
of exceptions. These sweeping statements may even appear to be too bold, but they rest, to the
best of the writer's belief, upon solid foundations of facts, or else are legitimate conclusions
from evidence now in hand. In a science as recent as modern anthropology, new facts are
constantly revealed and require the modification of existing hypotheses. The more the subject is
studied the more provisional even the best-sustained theory appears, but modern research opens
a vista of vast interest and significance to man, now that we have discarded the shackles of
former false view-points and are able to discern, even though dimly, the solution of many of the
problems of race. New data will in the future inevitably expand, and perhaps change our ideas,
but such facts as are now in hand, and the conclusions based thereupon, are provisionally set
forth in the following chapters, and necessarily often in a dogmatic form.
The statements relating to time have presented the greatest difficulty, as the authorities differ
widely, but the dates have been fixed with extreme conservatism and the writer believes that
whatever changes in them are hereafter required by further investigation and study, will result
in pushing them back and not forward in prehistory. The dates given in the chapter of
"Paleolithic Man" are frankly taken from the most recent authority on this subject, "The Men of
the Old Stone Age," by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the writer desires to take this
opportunity to acknowledge his great indebtedness to this source of information, as well as to
Mr. M. Taylor Pyne and to Mr. Charles Stewart Davison for their assistance and many helpful
suggestions.
The author also wishes to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Professor William Z. Ripley's
great work on "The Races of Europe," which contains a vast array of anthropological data,
maps, and type portraits, providing a mine of information upon which the author has drawn
freely, for the present distribution of the three primary races of Europe.
The American Geographical Society and its staff, particularly Mr. Leon Dominian, have also
been of great assistance in the preparation of the maps contained herein, and this occasion is
taken by the writer to express his deep appreciation for their assistance..
Continue on to Chapter 1 - Race and Democracy.
The Passing of t Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter 1
Race and Democracy
FAILURE to recognize the clear distinction between race and nationality and the still greater
distinction between race and language, the easy assumption that the one is indicative of the
other, has been in the past a serious impediment to an understanding of racial values. Historians
and philologists have approached the subject from the view-point of linguistics, and as a result
we have been burdened with a group of mythical races, such as the Latin, the Aryan, the
Caucasian, and, perhaps, most inconsistent of all, the "Celtic" race.
Man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe, not in kind but only in
degree of development, and an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an
extended knowledge of other mammals, especially the primates. Instead of such essential
training, anthropologists often seek to qualify by research in linguistics, religion, or marriage
customs, or in designs of pottery or blanket weaving, all of which relate to ethnology alone.
The question of race has been further complicated by the effort of old-fashioned theologians to
cramp all mankind into the scant six thousand years of Hebrew chronology, as expounded by
Archbishop Ussher. Religious teachers have also maintained the proposition not only that man
is something fundamentally distinct from other living creatures, but that there are no inherited
differences in humanity that cannot be obliterated by education and environment.
It is, therefore, necessary at the outset for the reader to thoroughly appreciate that race,
language, and nationality are three separate and distinct things, and that in Europe these three
elements are only occasionally found persisting in combination, as in the Scandinavian nations.
To realize the transitory nature of political boundaries, one has only to consider the changes of
the past century, to say nothing of those which may occur at the end of the present war. As to
language, here in America we daily hear the English language spoken by many men who
possess not one drop of English blood, and who, a few years since, knew not one word of Saxon
speech.
As a result of certain religious and social doctrines, now happily becoming obsolete, race
consciousness has been greatly impaired among civilized nations, but in the beginning all
differences of class, of caste, and of color, marked actual lines of race cleavage.
In many countries the existing classes represent races that were once distinct. In the city of New
York, and elsewhere in the United States, there is a native American aristocracy resting upon
layer after layer of immigrants of lower races, and the native American, while, of course,
disclaiming the distinction of a patrician class, nevertheless has, up to this time, supplied the
leaders of thought and the control of capital, of education, and of the religious ideals and
altruistic bias of the community.
In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the
selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education,
and integrity. How this scheme of administration will ultimately work out remains to be seen,
but from a racial point of view, it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types
and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole.
The tendency in a democracy is toward a standardization of type and a diminution of the
influence of genius. A majority must of necessity be inferior to a picked minority, and it always
resents specializations in which it cannot share. In the French Revolution the majority, calling
itself "the People," deliberately endeavored to destroy the higher type, and something of the
same sort was, in a measure, done after the American Revolution by the expulsion of the
Loyalists and the confiscation of their lands.
In America we have nearly succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual
and moral advantage a man of good stock brings into the world with him. We are now engaged
in destroying the privilege of wealth; that is, the reward of successful intelligence and industry,
and in some quarters there is developing a tendency to attack the privilege of intellect and to
deprive a man of the advantages of an early and thorough education. Simplified spelling is a
step in this direction. Ignorance of English grammar or classic learning must not be held up as a
reproach to the political and social aspirant.
Mankind emerged from savagery and barbarism under the leadership of selected individuals
whose personal prowess, capacity, or wisdom gave them the right to lead and the power to
compel obedience. Such leaders have always been a minute fraction of the whole, but as long as
the tradition of their predominance persisted they were able to use the brute strength of the
unthinking herd as part of their own force, and were able to direct at will the blind dynamic
impulse of the slaves, peasants, or lower classes. Such a despot had an enormous power at his
disposal which, if he were benevolent or even intelligent, could be used, and most frequently
was used, for the general uplift of the race. Even those rulers who most abused this power put
down with merciless rigor the antisocial elements, such as pirates, brigands, or anarchists,
which impair the progress of a community, as disease or wounds cripple an individual.
True aristocracy is government by the wisest and best, always a small minority in any
population. Human society is like a serpent dragging its long body on the ground, but with the
head always thrust a little in advance and a little elevated above the earth. The serpent's tail, in
human society represented by the antisocial forces, was in the past dragged by sheer force along
the path of progress. Such has been the organization of mankind from the beginning, and such it
still is in older communities than ours. What progress humanity can make under the control of
universal suffrage, or the rule of the average, may find a further analogy in the habits of certain
snakes which wiggle sideways and disregard the head with its brains and eyes. Such serpents,
however, are not noted for their ability to make rapid progress.
To use another simile, in an aristocratic as distinguished from a plutocratic, or democratic
organization, the intellectual and talented classes form the point of the lance, while the massive
shaft represents the body of the population and adds by its bulk and weight to the penetrative
impact of the tip. In a democratic system this concentrated force at the top is dispersed
throughout the mass, supplying, to be sure, a certain amount of leaven, but in the long run the
force and genius of the small minority is dissipated, if not wholly lost. Vox populi, so far from
being Vox Dei, thus becomes an unending wail for rights, and never a chant of duty.
Where a conquering race is imposed on another race the institution of slavery often arises to
compel the servient race to work, and to introduce it forcibly to a higher form of civilization. As
soon as men can be induced to labor to supply their own needs slavery becomes wasteful and
tends to vanish. Slaves are often more fortunate than freemen when treated with reasonable
humanity, and when their elemental wants of food, clothing, and shelter are supplied.
The Indians around the fur posts in northern Canada were formerly the virtual bond slaves of
the Hudson Bay Company, each Indian and his squaw and pappoose being adequately supplied
with simple food and equipment. He was protected as well against the white man's rum as the
red man's scalping parties, and in return gave the Company all his peltries-the whole product of
his year's work. From an Indian's point of view this was nearly an ideal condition, but was to all
in- tents serfdom or slavery. When, through the opening up of the country, the continuance of
such an archaic system became an impossibility, the Indian sold his furs to the highest bidder,
received a large price in cash, and then wasted the proceeds in trinkets instead of blankets, and
in rum instead of flour, with the result that he is now gloriously free, but is on the highroad to
becoming a diseased outcast. In this case of the Hudson Bay Indian the advantages of the
upward step from serfdom to freedom are not altogether clear. A very similar condition of
vassalage existed until recently among the peons of Mexico, but without the compensation of an
intelligent and provident ruling class.
In the same way serfdom in mediaeval Europe apparently was a device through which the
landowners overcame the nomadic instincts of their tenantry. Years are required to bring land to
its highest productivity, and agriculture cannot be successfully practised even in well-watered
and fertile districts by farmers who continually drift from one locality to another. The serf or
villein was, therefore, tied by law to the land, and could not leave except with his master's
consent. As soon as these nomadic instincts ceased to exist serfdom vanished. One has only to
read the severe laws against vagrancy in England, just before the Reformation, to realize how
widespread and serious was this nomadic instinct.
Here in America we have not yet forgotten the wandering instincts of our Western pioneers,
which in that case proved to be beneficial to every one except the migrants.
Continue on to Chapter 2 - The Physical Basis Of Race.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter 2
The Physical Basis of Race
In the modern and scientific study of race we have long discarded the Adamic theory that man
is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden
somewhere in Asia, to spread later over the earth in successive waves.
Many of the races of Europe, both living and extinct, did come from the East through Asia
Minor or by way of the African littoral, but most of the direct ancestors of existing populations
have inhabited Europe for many thousands of years. During that time numerous races of men
have passed over the scene. Some undoubtedly have utterly vanished, and some have left their
blood behind them in the Europeans of to-day.
It is a fact, however, that Asia was the chief area of evolution and differentiation of man, and
that the various groups had their main development there, and not on the peninsula we call
Europe.
We now know, since the elaboration of the Mendelian Laws of Inheritance, that certain bodily
characters, the so-called unit characters, such as skull shape, stature, eye color, hair color, and
nose form, are transmitted in accordance with fixed mathematical laws, and, further, that
various unit characters which are normally correlated, or belong together, may, after prolonged
admixture with another race, pass down separately, and form what is known as disharmonic
combinations. Such disharmonic combinations are, for example, a tall brunet, or a short blond;
blue eyes associated with brunet hair, or brown eyes with blond hair. In modern science the
meaning of the word "character" is now limited to physical instead of mental and spiritual traits
as in popular usage.
The process of intermixture of unit characters has gone far in existing populations, and with the
ease of modern methods of transportation this process is going much further in Europe, and in
America. The immediate results of such mixture are not blends, or intermediate types, but rather
mosaics of contrasted characters. Such blends, if any, as ultimately occur, are too remote to
concern us here. The first result of the crossing of a pure: brunet with a pure blond is to produce
either pure blonds or pure brunets in certain known proportions, instead of offspring of an
intermediate type; or else a third group which may be either blond or brunet, but which.possesses
latent characters of the contrasted type. Such latent or recessive characters often
reappear in remote descendants.
In defining race in Europe it is necessary not only to consider pure groups or pure types, but
also the distribution of unit characters belonging to each particular subspecies of man found
there. The interbreeding of these populations has progressed to such an extent that in many
cases such an analysis of physical characters is necessary to reconstruct the elements which
have entered into their ethnic composition.
Sometimes we find a unit character appearing here and there as the sole remnant of a once
numerous race, for example, the occasional appearance in European populations of a skull of
the Neanderthal type, a race widely spread over Europe 40,000 years ago, or of the Cro-Magnon
type, the predominant race I6,000 years ago. Before the fossil remains of the Neanderthal and
Cro-Magnon races were studied and understood such reversional specimens were considered
pathological, instead of being recognized as the reappearance of an ancient and submerged type.
Unit characters are to all intents and purposes immutable, and they do not change during the
lifetime of a language or an empire. The skull shape of the Egyptian fellaheen, in the
unchanging environment of the Nile Valley, is absolutely identical in measurements,
proportions and capacity with skulls found in the predynastic tombs dating back more than six
thousand years.
There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of
education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of
man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American
mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past, and if allowed to go uncontradicted,
may do much more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the negro slave was an
unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun, and denied the blessings
of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War
period, and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and
going to school and to church, does not transform a negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or
Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga, and applauding his favorite
gladiator in the amphitheatre. We shall have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose
dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted
upon the stock of the nation.
Recent attempts have been made in the interest of inferior races among our immigrants to show
that the shape of the skull does change, not merely in a century, but in a single generation.
In 191O, the report of the anthropological expert of the Congressional Immigration
Commission, gravely declared that a round skull Jew on his way across the Atlantic might and
did have a round skull child, but that a few years later, in response to the subtle elixir of
American institutions, as exemplified in an East Side tenement, might and did have a child
whose skull was appreciably longer; and that a long skull south Italian, breeding freely, would
have precisely the same experience in the reverse direction. In other words, the Melting Pot was
acting instantly under the influence of a changed environment.
What the Melting Pot actually does in practice, can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of
the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the
racial mixture which we call Mexican, and which is now engaged in demonstrating its
incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures of races, and the
character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.
It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of
relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or
primitive characters, tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the
mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized
and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a
white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and
the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
In the crossing of the blond and brunet elements of a population, the more deeply rooted and
ancient dark traits are prepotent or dominant. This is matter of everyday observation, and the
working of this law of nature is not influenced or affected by democratic institutions or by
religious beliefs.
As measured in terms of centuries, unit characters are immutable, and the only benefit to be
derived from a changed environment and better food conditions, is the opportunity afforded a
race which has lived under adverse conditions, to achieve its maximum development, but the
limits of that development are fixed for it by heredity and not by environment.
In dealing with European populations the best method of determining race has been found to lie
in a comparison of proportions of the skull, the so-called cephalic index. This is the ratio of
maximum length to maximum width taken at the widest part of the skull above the ears. Skulls
with an index of 75 or less, that is, when the width is three-fourths or less than the length, are
considered dolichocephalic, or long skulls. Skulls of an index of 80 or over are round skulls, or
brachycephalic. Intermediate indices, between 75 and 80, are considered mesocephalic. These
are cranial indices. To allow for the flesh on living specimens, about two per cent is to be added
to the index, and the result is the cephalic index. In the following pages only long and round
skulls are considered and the intermediate forms, or mesocephs, are assigned to the
dolichocephalic group.
This cephalic index, though an extremely important if not the controlling unit character, is,
nevertheless, but a single character and must be checked up with other somatological traits.
Normally, a long skull is associated with a long face, and a round skull with a round face..
The use of this test, the cephalic index, enables us to divide the great bulk of the European
populations into three distinct subspecies of man, one northern and one southern, both
dolichocephalic or characterized by a long skull, and a central subspecies which is
brachycephalic, or characterized by a round skull.
The first is the Nordic or Baltic subspecies. This race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned,
with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the
North and Baltic Seas, and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but
also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of
Aryan language and culture.
The second is the dark Mediterranean or Iberian subspecies, occupying the shores of the inland
sea, and extending along the Atlantic coast until it reaches the Nordic species. It also spreads far
east into southern Asia. It is long skulled like the Nordic race, but the absolute size of the skull
is less. The eyes and hair are very dark or black, and the skin more or less swarthy. The stature
is stunted in comparison to that of the Nordic race and the musculature and bony framework
weak.
The third is the Alpine subspecies occupying all central and eastern Europe, and extending
through Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs. The Armenoids constitute an Alpine
subdivision and represent the ancestral type of this race which remained in the mountains and
high plateaux of Anatolia and western Asia. The Alpines are round skulled, of medium height
and sturdy build, both as to skeleton and muscles. The coloration of both hair and eyes was
originally very dark and still tends strongly in that direction, but many light colored eyes,
especially gray, are now found in the Alpine populations of western Europe.
While the inhabitants of Europe betray as a whole their mixed origin, nevertheless the three
main subspecies are each found in large numbers and in great purity, as well as sparse remnants
of still more ancient races represented by small groups or by individuals, and even by unit
characters.
These three main groups have bodily characters which constitute them distinct subspecies of
Homo sapiens. Each has several varieties, but for the sake of clearness the word race and not
the word species or subspecies will hereafter be used nearly, but not quite, exclusively. In
zoology the term species implies the existence of a certain definite amount of divergence from
the most closely related type, but race does not require a similar amount of difference. In man,
where all groups are more or less fertile when crossed, so many intermediate or mixed types
occur that the word species has too limited a meaning for wide use. Related species when
grouped together constitute subgenera and genera.
The old idea that fertility or infertility of races of animals was the measure of species, is now
abandoned. One of the greatest difficulties in classifying man is his perverse predisposition to
mismate. This is a matter of daily observation, especially among the women of the better
classes, probably because of their wider range of choice.
The cephalic index is of less value in the classification of Asiatic populations, but the
distribution of round and long skulls is similar to that in Europe. The vast central plateau of that
continent is inhabited by round skulls. In fact, Thibet and the western Himalayas were probably
the centre of radiation of all the round skulls of the world. In India and Persia south of this
central area occurs a long skull race related to Mediterranean man in Europe.
Both skull types occur, much intermixed, among the American Indians, and the cephalic index
is of little value in classifying the Amerinds. No satisfactory explanation of the variability of the
skull shape of this species has as yet been found, but the total range of variation of physical
characters from northern Canada to southern Patagonia is less than the range of such variation
from Normandy to Provence in France.
In Africa the cephalic index is also of small classification value because all of the populations
are characterized by a long skull.
The distinction between a long skull and a round skull in mankind probably goes back at least
to early Paleolithic times, if not to a period still more remote. It is of such great antiquity that
when new species or races appear in Europe at the close of the Paleolithic, between IO,OOO
and 7,000 years B.C., the skull characters among them are as clearly defined as they are to-day.
The fact that two distinct species of mankind both have long skulls, as have the north European
and the African negro, is no necessary indication of relationship, and in that instance is merely a
case of parallel specialization. The fact, however, that the Swede has a long skull and the
Savoyard a round skull does prove them to be descendants of distinct subspecies.
The claims that the Nordic race is a mere variation of the Mediterranean race, and that the latter
is, in turn, derived from the Ethiopian negro, rest upon a mistaken idea that a dolichocephaly in
common must mean identity of origin, as well as upon a failure to take into consideration many
somatological characters of almost equal value with the cephalic index. In this connection it is
well to remark that this measurement, being merely a ratio, may yield identical figures for
skulls differing in every other proportion and detail, as well as in absolute size and capacity.
Eye color is of very great importance in race determination, because all blue, gray, or green
eyes in the world to-day came originally from the same source, namely, the Nordic race of
northern Europe. This light colored eye has appeared nowhere else on earth, and is a
specialization of this subspecies of man only, and is consequently one of extreme value in the
classification of European races. Dark colored eyes are all but universal among wild mammals,
and entirely so among the primates, man's nearest relatives. It is, therefore, an absolute certainty
that all the original races of man had dark eyes.
One subspecies of man, and one alone, specialized in light colored eyes. This same subspecies
also evolved light or blond hair, a character far less deeply rooted than eye color, as blond
children tend to grow darker with advancing years, and populations largely of Nordic
extraction, such as those of Lombardy, upon admixture with darker races, lose their blond hair
more readily than their light colored eyes.
Blond hair also comes everywhere from the Nordic species, and from nowhere else. Whenever
we find blondness among the darker races of the earth we may be sure some Nordic wanderer
has passed that way. When individuals of perfect blond type occur, as sometimes in Greek
islands, we may suspect a recent visit of sailors from a passing ship, but when only single
characters remain spread thinly, but widely, over considerable areas, like the blondness of the
Atlas Berbers or of the Albanian mountaineers, we must search in the dim past for the origin of
these blurred traits of early invaders.
The range of blond hair color in pure Nordic peoples runs from flaxen and red to shades of
chestnut and brown. The darker shades may indicate crossing in some cases, but absolutely
black hair certainly does mean an ancestral cross with a dark race-in England with the
Mediterranean race.
In Nordic populations the women are, in general, lighter haired than the men, a fact which
points to a blond past and a darker future for those populations. Women in all human races, as
the females among all mammals, tend to exhibit the older, more generalized and primitive traits
of the race's past. The male in his individual development indicates the direction in which the
race is tending under the influence of variation and selection.
It is interesting to note in connection with the more primitive physique of the female, that in the
spiritual sphere also, women retain the ancient and intuitive knowledge that the great mass of
mankind is not free and equal, but bond and unequal.
The color of the skin is a character of importance, but one that is exceedingly hard to measure
as the range of variation in Europe between skins of extreme fairness and those that are
exceedingly swarthy, is almost complete. In general the Nordic race in its purity has an
absolutely fair skin, and is consequently the Homo albus, the white man par excellence.
Many members of the Nordic race otherwise apparently pure have skins, as well as hair, more
or less dark, so that the determinative value of this character is uncertain. There can be no doubt
that the quality of the skin and the extreme range of its variation in color from black, brown,
red, yellow to ivory-white are excellent measures of the specific or subgeneric distinctions
between the larger groups of mankind, but in dealing with European populations it is sometimes
difficult to correlate shades of fairness with other physical characters.
It often happens that an individual with all the Nordic characters in great purity, has a skin of an
olive or dark tint, and it much more frequently happens that we find an individual with
absolutely pure brunet traits in possession of a skin of almost ivory whiteness and of great
clarity. This last combination is very frequent among the brunets of the British Isles. That these
are, to some extent, disharmonic combinations we may be certain, but beyond that our
knowledge does not lead. Owners, however, of a fair skin have always been, and still are, the
objects of keen envy by those whose skins are black, yellow, or red.
Stature is another unit character of greater value than skin color, and perhaps than hair color,
and is one of much importance in European classification because on that continent we have the
most extreme variations of human height.
Exceedingly adverse economic conditions may inhibit a
race from attaining the full measure of its growth, and to
this extent environment plays its part in determining stature,
but fundamentally it is race, always race, that sets the limit.
The tall Scot and the dwarfed Sardinian owe their respective
sizes to race, and not to oatmeal or olive oil. It is probable that
the fact that the stature of the Irish is, on the average, shorter
than that of the Scotch, is due partly to economic conditions,
and partly to the depressing effect of a considerable population
of primitive short stock.
Mountaineers all over the world tend to be tall and vigorous, a fact probably due to the rigid
elimination of defectives by the unfavorable environment. In this case altitude would operate
like latitude, and produce the severe conditions which seem essential to human vigor. The short
stature of the Lapps and the Esquimaux may have been originally attributable to the trying
conditions of an Arctic habitat, but in any event it has long since become a racial character.
So far as the main species of Europe are concerned, stature is a very valuable measure of race.
To recapitulate as to this character, the Mediterranean race is everywhere marked by a relatively
short stature, sometimes greatly depressed, as in south Italy and in Sardinia, and also by a
comparatively light bony framework and feeble muscular development.
The Alpine race is taller than the Mediterranean although shorter than the Nordic, and is
characterized by a stocky and sturdy build.
The Nordic race is nearly everywhere distinguished by great stature. Almost the tallest stature
in the world is found among the pure Nordic populations of the Scottish and English borders,
while the native British of Pre-Nordic brunet blood are, for the most part, relatively short; and
no one can question the race value of stature who observes on the streets of London the contrast
between the Piccadilly gentleman of Nordic race and the cockney costermonger of the old
Neolithic type.
In many cases where these three European races have become mixed, stature seems to be one of
the first Nordic characters to vanish, but wherever in Europe we find great stature in a
population otherwise lacking in Nordic characters, we may be certain of Nordic crossing, as in
the case of a large proportion of the inhabitants of Burgundy, of Switzerland, of the Tyrol, and
of the Dalmatian Alps south to Albania..
These four unit characters, skull shape, eye color, hair color, and stature, are sufficient to enable
us to differentiate clearly between the three main races of Europe, but if we wish to discuss the
minor variations and mixtures, we would have to go much further and take up other proportions
of the skull than the cephalic index, as well as the shape and position of the eyes, and the
proportions and shape of the jaws and chin.
The nose also is an exceedingly important character. The original human nose
was, of course,broad and bridgeless. This trait is shown clearly in new-born
infants who recapitulate in their development the various stages of the evolution
of the human genus.
A bridgeless nose with wide flaring nostrils is a very primitive character, and is still
retained by some of the larger divisions of mankind throughout the world. It
appears occasionally in white populations of European origin, but is everywhere
a very ancient, generalized, and low character.
The high bridge and long, narrow nose, the so-called Roman, Norman, or aquiline
nose, is characteristic of the most highly specialized races of mankind.
While an apparently unimportant character, the nose is one of the very best clews
to racial origin, and in the details of its form,and especially in the lateral shape of the nostrils, is a race determinant of the greatest value.
The lips, whether thin or fleshy or whether cleancut or everted, are race characters.
Thick, protruding, everted lips are very ancient traits and are characteristic of primitive races. A high instep also has long been esteemed an indication of patrician type,
while the flat foot is often the test of lowly origin.
The absence or abundance of hair and beard and the relative absence or abundance of body hair
are characters of no little value in classification. Abundant body hair is, to a large extent,
peculiar to populations of the very highest as well as the very lowest species, being
characteristic of the north European as well as of the Australian savages. It merely means the
retention in both these groups of a very early and primitive trait which has been lost by the
Negroes, Mongols, and the Amerinds.
The Nordic and Alpine races are far better equipped with head and body hair than the
Mediterranean, which is throughout its range a glabrous or relatively naked race.
The so-called red haired branch of the Nordic race has special characters in addition to red hair,
such as a greenish cast of eye, a skin of peculiar texture tending either to great clarity or to
freckles, and certain peculiar temperamental traits. This was probably a variety closely related
to the blonds, and it first appears in history in association with them.
In the structure of the head hair of all races of mankind we find a regular progression from
extreme kinkiness to lanky straightness, and this straightness or curliness depends on the shape
of the cross section of the hair itself. This cross section has three distinct forms, corresponding
with the most extreme divergences among human species.
While the three main European races are the subject of this book, and while it is not the.intention
of the author to deal with the other human types, it is necessary at this point to state
that these three European subspecies, are subdivisions of one of the primary groups or
subgenera of the genus Homo which, taken together, we must call the Caucasian for lack of a
better name.
The great mass of the rest of mankind can be roughly divided into the Negroes and Negroids,
and the Mongols and Mongoloids.
The former apparently originated in south Asia and entered Africa from the northeasterly corner
of that continent. Africa south of the Sahara is now the chief home of this race, though remnants
of Negroid aborigines are found throughout south Asia from India to the Philippines, while the
very distinct black Melanesians and the Australoids lie farther to the east and south.
A third subgenus of mankind includes the round skulled Mongols and their derivatives, the
Amerinds, or American Indians. This group is essentially Asiatic, and occupies the centre and
the eastern half of that continent. A description of these Negroid and Mongoloid subgenera and
their derivatives, as well as of certain aberrant species of man, lies outside of the scope of this
work.
In the consideration of this measurement, the cross section of the hair in connection with these
main subgenera, we find that a permanent relation exists, and that each of the three primary
divisions of mankind is, in the shape of the cross section of its hair, differentiated from the
others.
The cross section of the hair of the Negro and Negroid races is a flat ellipse with the result that
all the members of this subgenus have kinky hair.
The cross section of the hair of the Mongols and their derivatives, the Amerinds, is a complete
circle, and the hair of this subgenus is perfectly straight and lank.
The cross section of the hair of the so-called Caucasians, including the Mediterranean, Alpine,
and Nordic subspecies, is an oval ellipse, and consequently is intermediate between the cross
sections of the Negroids and Mongoloids. Hair of this structure is wavy or curly, never either
kinky or absolutely straight, and is characteristic of all the European populations, almost
without exception.
We have confined our discussion to the most important unit characters, but there are many other
valuable aids to classification to be found in the proportions of the body and the relative length
of the limbs. For an example, it is a matter of common knowledge that there occur among white
women two distinct types in this latter respect, the one long legged and short bodied, the other
long bodied and short legged. All such facts have a race value as yet not understood.
Without going into further physical details, it is probable that all relative proportions in the
body, the features, the skeleton, and the skull which are fixed and constant and lie outside of the
range of individual variation represent dim inheritances from the past. Every human being
unites in himself the blood of thousands of ancestors, stretching back through thousands of
years, superimposed upon a prehuman inheritance of still greater antiquity, and the face and
body of every living man offer an intricate mass of hieroglyphs that science will some day learn
to read and interpret.
We shall use the foregoing main unit characters as the basis of our definition of race, and shall
later call attention to such temperamental and spiritual traits as seem to be associated with
distinct physical types.
We shall only discuss European populations and shall not deal with those quarters of the globe
where the races of man are such that other physical characters must be called upon to provide
clear definitions.
A fascinating subject would open up if we were to dwell upon the effect of racial combinations
and disharmonies, as, for instance, where the mixed Nordic and Alpine populations of
Lombardy retain the skull shape, hair color, and stature of the Alpine race, with the light eye
color of the Nordic race, or where the mountain populations along the east coast of the Adriatic
from the Tyrol to Albania have the stature of the Nordic race and an Alpine skull and
coloration.
Continue on to Chapter 3 -
Race and Habitat.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter III
Race and Habitat
THE laws which govern the distribution of the various races of man and their evolution through
selection are substantially the same as those controlling the evolution and distribution of the
larger mammals.
Man, however, with his superior mentality, has freed himself from many of the elements which
impose restraint upon the expansion of animals. In his case selection through disease and social
and economic competition has replaced selection through adjustment to the limitations of food
supply.
Man is the most cosmopolitan of animals, and in one form or another thrives in the tropics and
in the arctics, at sea level and on high plateaux, in the desert and in the reeking forests of the
equator. Nevertheless, the various races of Europe with which we deal in this book have, each
of them, a certain natural habitat in which each achieves its highest development.
THE NORDIC HABITAT
The Nordics appear in their present centre of distribution, the basin of the Baltic, at the close
of the Paleolithic, as soon as the retreating glaciers left habitable land. This race was probably at
that time in possession of its fundamental characters, and its extension in the Teutonic group
from the plains of Russia to Scandinavia was not in the nature of a radical change of
environment. The race in consequence is now and always has been, probably always will be,
adjusted to certain environmental conditions, chief of which is protection from a tropical sun.
The actinic rays of the sun at the same latitude are uniform in strength the world over, and
continuous sunlight affects adversely the delicate nervous organization of the Nordics. The fogs
and long winter nights of the North serve as a protection from too much sun, and from its too
direct rays.
Scarcely less important is the presence of a large amount of moisture, but above all a constant
variety of temperature is needed. Sharp contrast between night and day temperature, and
between summer and winter are necessary to maintain the vigor of the blond race at a high.pitch
Uniform weather, if long continued, lessens its energy. Too great extremes, as in
midwinter or midsummer in New England, are injurious. Limited but constant alternations of
heat and cold, of moisture and dryness, of sun and clouds, of calm and cyclonic storms, offer
the ideal surroundings for the Nordic race.
Men of the Nordic race may not enjoy the fogs and snows of the North, the endless changes of
weather, and the violent fluctuations of the thermometer, and they may seek the sunny southern
isles, but under the former conditions they flourish, do their work, and raise their families. In
the south they grow listless and cease to breed.
In the lower classes the increasing proportion of poor whites and "crackers" are symptoms of
lack of climatic adjustment. The whites in Georgia, the Bahamas, and above all the Barbadoes
are excellent examples of the deleterious effects of residence outside the natural habitat of the
Nordic race.
The poor whites of the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky and Tennessee present a more
difficult problem, because here the altitude, even though small, should modify the effects of
latitude, and the climate of these mountains cannot be particularly unfavorable to men of Nordic
breed. There are probably other hereditary forces at work here as yet little understood.
No doubt bad food and economic conditions, prolonged inbreeding, and the loss through
emigration of the best elements have played a large part in the degeneration of these poor
whites. They represent to a large extent the offspring of bond servants brought over by the rich
planters in early Colonial times. Their names indicate that, many of them are the descendants of
the old borderers along the Scotch and English frontier, and the persistence with which family
feuds are maintained certainly points to such an origin. The physical type is typically Nordic,
for the most part pure Saxon or Anglian, and the whole mountain population show somewhat
aberrant but very pronounced physical, moral, and mental characteristics which would repay
scientific investigation. The problem is too complex to be disposed of by reference to the
hookworm, illiteracy, or competition with negroes.
This type played a very large part in the settlement of the Middle West, by way of Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Missouri. Thence they passed both up the Missouri River and down the Santa
Fe trail, and contributed rather more than their share of the train robbers horse thieves, and bad
men of the West.
Scotland and the Bahamas are inhabited by men of precisely the same race, but the vigor of the
English in the Bahamas is gone, and the beauty of their women has faded. The fact that they
were not in competition with an autochthonous race better adjusted to climatic conditions has
enabled them to survive, but the type could not have persisted, even during the last two hundred
years, if they had been compelled to compete on terms of equality with a native and acclimated
population..Another element entering into racial degeneration on many other islands, and for
that matter in many New England villages, is the loss through emigration of the more vigorous
and energetic individuals, leaving behind the less efficient to continue the race at home.
In subtropical countries, when the energy of the Nordics is at a low ebb, it would appear that the
racial inheritance of physical strength and mental vigor were suppressed and recessive rather
than destroyed. Many individuals who were born in unfavorable climatic surroundings, but who
move back to the original habitat of their race in the north, recover their full quota of energy
and vigor. New York and other Northern cities have many Southerners who are fully as
efficient as pure Northerners.
This blond race can exist outside of its native environment as land owning aristocrats who are
not required to do manual labor in the fields under a blazing sun. As such an aristocracy it
continues to exist under Italian skies, but as a field laborer the man of Nordic blood could not
compete with his Alpine or Mediterranean rival. It is not to be supposed that the Teutonic
armies which for a thousand years after the fall of Rome poured down from the Alps like the
glaciers to melt in the southern sun, were composed solely of knights and gentlemen who
became the landed nobility of Italy. The man in the ranks also took up his land and work in
Italy, but he had to compete directly with the native under climatic conditions which were
unfavorable to his race. In this competition the blue eyed Nordic giant died, and the native
survived. His officer, however, lived in the castle and directed the labor of his bondsmen
without other preoccupation than the chase and war, and he long maintained his vigor.
The same thing happened in our South before the Civil War. There the white men did not work
in the fields or in the factory. The heavy work under the blazing sun was performed by negro
slaves, and the planter was spared exposure to an unfavorable environment. Under these
conditions he was able to retain much of his vigor. When slavery was abolished, and the white
man had to plough his own fields or work in the factory, deterioration began.
The change in the type of men who are now sent by the Southern States to represent them in the
Federal Government from their predecessors in ante-bellum times is partly due to these causes,
but in a greater degree it is to be attributed to the fact that a very large portion of the best racial
strains in the South were killed off during the Civil War. In addition the war shattered the
aristocratic traditions which formerly secured the selection of the best men as rulers. The new
democratic ideals with universal suffrage in free operation among the whites result in the choice
of representatives who lack the distinction and ability of the leaders of the Old South.
A race may be thoroughly adjusted to a certain country at one stage of its development and be at
a disadvantage when an economic change occurs, such as was experienced in England a century
ago when the nation changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing community. The type of
man that flourishes in the fields is not the type of man that thrives in the factory, just as the type
of man required for the crew of a sailing ship is not the type useful as stokers on a modern
steamer..THE HABITAT OF THE ALPINES AND MEDITERRANEANS
The environment of the Alpine race seems to have always been the mountainous country of
central and eastern Europe, as well as western Asia. This type has never flourished in the
deserts of Arabia or the Sahara, nor has it succeeded in maintaining its colonies in the north of
Europe within the domain of the Nordic long heads. It is, however, a sturdy and persistent
stock, and, while much of it may not be overrefined or cultured, undoubtedly possesses great
potentialities for future development.
The Alpines in the west of Europe, especially in Switzerland and the districts immediately
surrounding, have been so thoroughly Nordicized, and so saturated with the culture of the
adjoining nations, that they stand in sharp contrast to backward Alpines of Slavic speech in the
Balkans and east of Europe.
The Mediterranean race, on the other hand, is clearly a southern type with eastern affinities. It is
a type that did not flourish in the north of Europe under old agricultural conditions, nor is it
suitable to the farming districts and frontiers of America and Canada. It is adjusted to
subtropical and tropical countries better than any other European type, and will flourish in our
Southern States and around the coasts of the Spanish Main. In France it is well known that
members of the Mediterranean race are better adapted for colonization in Algeria than are
French Alpines or Nordics. This subspecies of man is notoriously intolerant of extreme cold,
owing to its sensibility to diseases of the lungs, and it shrinks from the blasts of the northern
winter in which the Nordics revel.
The brunet Mediterranean element in the native American seems to be increasing at the expense
of the blond Nordic element generally throughout the Southern States, and probably also in the
large cities. This type of man, however, is scarce on our frontiers. In the Northwest, and in
Alaska in the days of the gold rush, it was in the mining camps a matter of comment if a man
turned up with dark eyes, so universal were blue and gray eyes among the American pioneers.
Continue on to Chapter 4 -
The Competition of Races.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter IV
The Competition of Races
WHERE two races occupy a country side by side, it is not correct to speak of one type as
changing into the other. Even if present in equal numbers one of the two contrasted types will
have some small advantage or capacity which the other lacks toward a perfect adjustment to
surroundings. Those possessing these favorable variations will flourish at the expense of their
rivals, and their offspring will not only be more numerous, but will also tend to inherit such
variations. In this way one type gradually breeds the other out. In this sense, and in this sense
only, do races change.
Man continuously undergoes selection through social environment. Among native Americans of
the Colonial period a large family was an asset, and social pressure and economic advantage
both counselled early marriage and numerous children. Two hundred years of continuous
political expansion and material prosperity changed these conditions and children, instead of
being an asset to till the fields and guard the cattle, became an expensive liability. They now
require support, education, and endowment from their parents, and a large family is regarded by
some as a serious handicap in the social struggle.
These conditions do not obtain at first among immigrants, and large families among the newly
arrived population are still the rule, precisely as they were in Colonial America, and are to-day
in French Canada, where backwoods conditions still prevail.
The result is that one class or type in a population expands more rapidly than another, and
ultimately replaces it. This process of replacement of one type by another does not mean that
the race changes, or is transformed into another. It is a replacement pure and simple and not a
transformation.
The lowering of the birth rate among the most valuable classes, while the birth rate of the lower
classes remains unaffected, is a frequent phenomenon of prosperity. Such a change becomes
extremely injurious to the race if unchecked, unless nature is allowed to maintain by her own
cruel devices the relative numbers of the different classes in their due proportions. To attack
race suicide by encouraging indiscriminate breeding is not only futile, but is dangerous if it
leads to an increase in the undesirable elements. What is needed in the community most of all,
is an increase in the desirable classes, which are of superior type physically, intellectually, and
morally, and not merely an increase in the absolute numbers of the population.
The value and efficiency of a population are not numbered by what the newspapers call souls,
but by the proportion of men of physical and intellectual vigor. The small Colonial population
of America was, man for man, far superior to the average of the present inhabitants, although
the latter are twenty-five times more numerous. The ideal in eugenics toward which
statesmanship should be directed, is, of course, improvement in quality rather than quantity.
This, however, is at present a counsel of perfection, and we must face conditions as they are.
The small birth rate in the upper classes is, to some extent, offset by the care received by such
children as are born, and the better chance they have to become adult and breed in their turn.
The large birth rate of the lower classes is, under normal conditions, offset by a heavy infant
mortality, which eliminates the weaker children.
Where altruism, philanthropy, or sentimentalism intervene with the noblest purpose, and forbid
nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding, the multiplication of inferior
types is encouraged and fostered. Efforts to indiscriminately preserve babies among the lower
classes often result in serious injury to the race.
Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity
of human life, tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of
such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the
obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or
race.
It is highly unjust that a minute minority should be called upon to supply brains for the
unthinking mass of the community, but it is even worse to burden the responsible and larger,
but still overworked, elements in the community with an ever increasing number of moral
perverts, mental defectives, and hereditary cripples.
The church assumes a serious responsibility toward the future of the race whenever it steps in
and preserves a defective strain. The marriage of deaf mutes was hailed a generation ago as a
triumph of humanity. Now it is recognized as an absolute crime against the race. A great injury
is done to the community by the perpetuation of worthless types. These strains are apt to be
meek and lowly, and as such make a strong appeal to the sympathies of the successful. Before
eugenics were understood much could be said from a Christian and humane view-point in favor
of indiscriminate charity for the benefit of the individual. The societies for charity, altruism, or
extension of rights, should have, however, in these days, in their management some small
modicum of brains, otherwise they may continue to do, as they have sometimes done in the
past, more injury to the race than black death or smallpox.
As long as such charitable organizations confine themselves to the relief of suffering.individuals,
no matter how criminal or diseased they may be, no harm is done except to our own
generation, and if modern society recognizes a duty to the humblest malefactors or imbeciles,
that duty can be harmlessly performed in full, provided they be deprived of the capacity to
procreate their defective strain.
Those who read these pages will feel that there is little hope for humanity, but the remedy has
been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the
elimination of those who are weak or unfit-in other words, social failures-would solve the
whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who
crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished,
educated, and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization
must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever
increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and
inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social
discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending
gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately
to worthless race types.
Efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes of the community, while most
desirable, encounter great difficulties. In such efforts we encounter social conditions over which
we have as yet no control. It was tried two thousand years ago by Augustus, and his efforts to
avert race suicide and the extinction of the old Roman breed were singularly prophetic of what
some far seeing men are attempting in order to preserve the race of native Americans of
Colonial descent.
Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement. He can breed from the best, or he can
eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization. The first method was adopted by the
Spartans, who had for their national ideals, military efficiency and the virtues of self control,
and along these lines the results were completely successful. Under modern social conditions it
would be extremely difficult in the first instance to determine which were the most desirable
types, except in the most general way, and even if a satisfactory selection were finally made, it
would be, in a democracy, a virtual impossibility to limit by law the right to breed to a
privileged and chosen few.
Experiments in limiting breeding to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in
mediaeval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome, social conditions
were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life, were compelled to seek refuge from
the violence of the times in monastic institutions, and upon such the church imposed the
obligation of celibacy, and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes.
In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment, and
banishment, the free thinking, progressive, and intellectual elements were persistently
eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal,
.the servile, and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by
these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of
over three centuries, from the year I47I to I78I, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or
imprisonment an average of I,OOO persons annually. During these three centuries no less than
32,000 were burned alive, and 291,OOO were condemned to various terms of imprisonment
and other penalties, and 7,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in
prison or had fled the country.
No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised, and
if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the
superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability
took place in northern Italy and in France, and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of
thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.
Under existing conditions the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is
through the elimination of the least desirable elements in the nation by depriving them of the
power to contribute to future generations. It is well known to stock breeders that the color of a
herd of cattle can be modified by continuous elimination of worthless shades, and of course this
is true of other characters. Black sheep, for instance, have been practically destroyed by cutting
out generation after generation all animals that show this color phase, until in carefully
maintained flocks a black individual only appears as a rare sport.
In mankind it would not be a matter of great difficulty to secure a general consensus of public
opinion as to the least desirable, let us say, ten per cent of the community. When this
unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated, together with the great
mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism, and feeblemindedness associated therewith, it would be
easy to consider the advisability of further restricting the perpetuation of the then remaining
least valuable types. By this method mankind might ultimately become sufficiently intelligent
to deliberately choose the most vital and intellectual strains to carry on the race.
In addition to selection by climatic environment, man is now, and has been for ages, undergoing
selection through disease. He has been decimated throughout the centuries by pestilences such
as the black death and bubonic plague. In our fathers' days yellow fever and smallpox cursed
humanity. These plagues are now under control, but similar diseases, now regarded as mere
nuisances to childhood, such as measles, mumps, and scarlatina, are terrible scourges to native
populations without previous experience with them. Add to these smallpox and other white
men's diseases, and one has the great empire builders of yesterday. It was not the swords in the
hands of Columbus and his followers that decimated the American Indians, it was the germs
that his men and their successors brought over, implanting the white man's maladies in the red
man's world. Long before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, smallpox had flickered up
and down the coast until the natives were but a broken remnant of their former numbers.
At the present time the Nordic race is undergoing selection through alcoholism, a peculiarly
Nordic vice, and through consumption, and both these dread scourges unfortunately attack those
members of the race that are otherwise most desirable, differing in this respect from filth
diseases like typhus, typhoid, or smallpox. One has only to look among the more desirable
classes for the victims of rum and tubercule to realize that death or mental and physical
impairment through these two causes have cost the race many of its most brilliant and attractive
members.
Continue on to Chapter 5 -
Race, Language, and Nationality.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter V
Race, Language, and Nationality
NATIONALITY is an artificial political grouping of population, usually centering around a
single language as an expression of traditions and aspirations. Nationality can, however, exist
independently of language, but states thus formed, such as Belgium or Austria, are far less
stable than those where a uniform language is prevalent, as, for example, France or England.
States without a single national language are constantly exposed to disintegration, especially
where a substantial minority of the inhabitants speak a tongue which is predominant in an
adjoining state with, as a consequence, a tendency to gravitate toward such state.
The history of the last century in Europe has been the record of a long series of struggles to
unite in one political unit all those speaking the same, or closely allied, dialects. With the
exception of internal and social revolutions, every European war since the Napoleonic period
has been caused by the effort to bring about the unification either of Italy or of Germany, or by
the desperate attempts of the Balkan States to struggle out of Turkish chaos into modern
European nations on a basis of community of language. The unification of both Italy and
Germany is as yet incomplete, according to the views held by their more advanced patriots, and
the solution of the Balkan question is still in the future.
Men are keenly aware of their nationality and are very sensitive about their language, but only
in a few cases, notably in Sweden and Germany, does any large section of the population
possess anything analogous to true race consciousness? although the term "race" is everywhere
misused to designate linguistic or political groups.
It sometimes happens that a section of the population of a large nation gathers around language,
reinforced by religion, as an expression of individuality. The struggle between the French-speaking
Alpine Walloons and the Nordic Flemings of Low Dutch tongue in Belgium is an
example of two competing languages in an artificial nation which was formed originally around
religion. On the other hand, the Irish National movement centers chiefly around religion,
reinforced by myths of ancient grandeur. The French Canadians and the Poles use both religion
and language to hold together what they consider a political unit. None of these so-called
nationalities are founded on race.
During the past century alongside of the tendency to form imperial or large national groups,
.such as the Pan-Germanic, Pan-Slavic, Pan-Rumanian or Italia Irredenta movements, there has
appeared a counter movement on the part of small disintegrating " nationalities " to reassert
themselves, such as the Bohemian, Bulgar, Serb, Irish, and Egyptian national revivals. The
upheaval is usually caused, as in the cases of the Irish and the Serbians, by delusions of former
greatness now become national obsessions, but sometimes it means the resistance of a small
group of higher culture to absorption by a lower civilization.
Examples of a high type threatened by a lower culture are afforded by the Finlanders, who are
trying to escape the dire fate of their neighbors across the Gulf of Finland-the Russification of
the Germans and Swedes of the Baltic Provinces-and by the struggle of the Danes of Schleswig
to escape Germanization. The Armenians, too, have resisted stoutly the pressure of Islam to
force them away from their ancient Christian faith. This people really represents the last outpost
of Europe toward the Mohammedan East and constitutes the best remaining medium through
which Western ideals and culture can be introduced into Asia.
In these as in other cases, the process of absorption from the view-point of the world at large is
good or evil exactly in proportion to the relative value of the culture and race of the two groups.
The world would be no richer in civilization with an independent Bohemia or an enlarged
Rumania, but, on the contrary, an independent Hungarian nation or an enlarged Greece would
add greatly to the forces that make for good government and progress. An independent Ireland
worked out on a Tammany model is not a pleasing prospect. A free Poland, apart from its value
as a buffer state, would be actually a step backward. Poland was once great, but the elements
that made it so are dead and gone, and to-day Poland is a geographical expression and nothing
more.
The prevailing lack of true race consciousness is probably due to the fact that every important
nation in Europe, as at present organized, with the sole exception of the Iberian and
Scandinavian states, possesses in large proportions representatives of at least two of the
fundamental European subspecies of man and of all manner of crosses between them. In France
to-day, as in Caesar's Gaul, the three races divide the nation in almost equal proportions.
In the future, however, with an increased knowledge of the correct definition of true human
species and types, and with a recognition of the immutability of fundamental racial characters,
and of the results of mixed breeding, far more value will be attached to racial in contrast to
national or linguistic affinities. In marital relations the con- sciousness of race will also play a
much larger part than at present, although in the social sphere we shall have to contend with a
certain strange attraction for contrasted types. When it becomes thoroughly understood that the
children of mixed marriages between contrasted races belong to the lower type, the importance
of transmitting in unimpaired purity the blood inheritance of ages will be appreciated at its full
value, and to bring halfbreeds into the world will be regarded as a social and racial crime of the
first magnitude. The laws against miscegenation must be greatly extended if the higher races are
to be maintained..The language that a man speaks may be nothing more than evidence that at
some time in the past his race has been in contact, either as conqueror or as conquered, with
the originalpossessors of such language. One has only to consider the spread of the language
of Rome over the vast extent of her empire, to realize how few of those who to-day speak
Romance languages derive any portion of their blood from the pure Latin stock, and the error of
talking about a "Latin race" becomes evident.
There is, however, such a thing as a large group of nations which have a mutual understanding
and sympathy, based on the possession of a common or closely related group of languages and
the culture of which it is the medium. This group may be called the "Latin nations," but never
the "Latin race."
"Latin America" is a still greater misnomer as the great mass of the populations of South and
Central America is not even European, and still less "Latin," being overwhelmingly of
Amerindian blood.
In the Teutonic group a large majority of those who speak Teutonic languages, as the English,
Flemings, Dutch, North Germans, and Scandinavians, are descended from the Nordic race, and
the dominant class in Europe is everywhere of that blood.
As to the so-called "Celtic race," the fantastic inapplicability of the term is at once apparent
when we consider that those populations on the borders of the Atlantic Ocean, who to-day
speak Celtic dialects, are divided into three groups, each one showing in great purity the
characters of one of the three entirely distinct human subspecies found in Europe. To class
together the Breton peasant with his round Alpine skull; the little, long skull, brunet Welshman
of the Mediterranean race, and the tall, blond, light eyed Scottish Highlander of pure Nordic
race, in a single group labelled "Celtic," is obviously impossible. These peoples have neither
physical, mental, nor cultural characteristics in common. If one be "Celtic" blood the other two
clearly are not.
There was a people who were the original users of the Celtic language, and they formed the
western vanguard of the Nordic race, which was spread all over central and western Europe,
prior to the irruption of the Teutonic tribes. The descendants of these "Celts" must be sought to-day
among those having the characters of the Nordic race and not elsewhere.
In England the little, dark Mediterranean Welshman talks about being Celtic quite unconscious
that he is the residuum of Pre-Nordic races of immense antiquity. If the Celts are Mediterranean
in race, then they are absent from central Europe, and we must regard as "Celts" all the Berbers
and Egyptians, as well as many Persians and Hindus.
In France some enthusiasts regard the Breton of Alpine blood in the same light, and ignore his
Asiatic origin. If these Alpine Bretons are " Celts " then there is not in the British Isles any
substantial trace of their blood, as round skulls are practically absent there, and all the blond
elements in England, Scotland, and Ireland must be attributed to the historic Teutonic invasions.
Furthermore we must call all the continental Alpines "Celts," and must also include all Slavs,
Armenians, and other brachycephs of western Asia within that designation, which would be
obviously grotesque. The fact that the original Celts left behind their speech on the tongues of
Mediterraneans in Wales, and of Alpines in Brittany, must not mislead us, as it indicates
nothing more than that Celtic speech antedates the Teutons in England and the Romans in
France. We must once and for all time discard the name "Celt" for any existing race whatever,
and speak only of " Celtic" language and culture.
In Ireland the big, blond Nordic Danes, claim the honor of the name of "Celt," if honor it be, but
the Irish are fully as Nordic as the English, the great mass of them being of Danish, Norse, and
Anglo-Norman blood, in addition to earlier and Pre-Teutonic elements. We are all familiar with
the blond and the brunet type of Irishman. These represent precisely the same racial elements as
those which enter into the composition of the English, namely, the tall Nordic blond and the
little Mediterranean brunet. The Irish are consequently not entitled to independent national
existence on the ground of race, but if there is any ground for a political separation from
England, it must rest, like that of Belgium, on religion, a basis for political combinations now
happily obsolete in communities well advanced in culture.
In the case of the so-called "Slavic race," there is much more unity between racial type and
language. It is true that in most Slavic-speaking countries the predominant race is clearly
Alpine, except perhaps in Russia where there is a very large substratum of Nordic type the so-called
Finnic element, which may be considered as Proto- Nordic. The objection which is made
to the identification of the Slavic race with the Alpine type rests chiefly on the fact that a very
large portion of the Alpine race is German-speaking in Germany, Italian-speaking in Italy, and
French-speaking in central France. Moreover, large portions of Rumania are of exactly the same
racial complexion.
Many of the Greeks are also Alpines; in fact, are little more than Byzantinized Slavs. It was
through the Byzantine Empire, that the Slavs first came in contact with the Mediterranean
world, and through this Greek medium the Russians, the Serbians, the Rumanians, and the
Bulgars received their Christianity.
Situated on the eastern marches of Europe the Slavs were submerged during long periods in the
Middle Ages by Mongolian hordes, and were checked in development and warped in culture.
Definite traces remain of the blood of the Mongols in both isolated and compact groups in south
Russia, and scattered throughout the whole country as far west as the German boundary. The
high tide of the Mongol invasion was during the thirteenth century. Three hundred years later
the great Muscovite expansion began, first over the steppes to the Urals, and then across
Siberian tundras and forests to the waters of the Pacific, taking up in its course much Mongolian
blood, especially during the early stages of its advance.
The term "Caucasian race" has ceased to have any meaning except where it is used, in the
United States, to contrast white populations with negroes or Indians, or, in the Old World, with
Mongols. It is, however, a convenient term to include the three European subspecies when
considered as divisions of one of the primary branches or subgenera of mankind. At best it is a
cumbersome and archaic designation. The name "Caucasian" arose a century ago from a false
assumption that the cradle of the blond Europeans was in the Caucasus, where there are now
found no traces of any such race, except a small and decreasing minority of blond traits among
the Ossetes, a tribe whose Aryan speech is related to that of the Armenians, and who, while
mainly brachycephalic, still retain some blond and dolichocephalic elements which are
apparently fading fast. The Ossetes have now about thirty per cent fair eyes and ten per cent fair
hair. They are supposed to be, to some extent, a remnant of the Alans, a Teutonic tribe closely
related to the Goths. Both Alans and Goths very early in our era occupied southern Russia, and
were the latest known Nordics in the vicinity of the Caucasus Mountains. If these Ossetes are
not partly of Alan origin they may possibly represent the last lingering trace of early Scythian
dolichocephalic blondness.
The phrase " Indo-European race " is also of little use. If it has any meaning at all it must
include all the three European races as well as members of the Mediterranean race in Persia and
India. The use of this name also involves a false assumption of blood relationship between the
main European populations and the Hindus, because of their possession in common of Aryan
speech.
The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is to-day
purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original
Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now,
and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands
of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past. If used in a
racial sense other than as above it should be limited to the Nordic invaders of Hindustan now
long extinct. The great lapse of time since the disappearance of the ancient Aryan race as such,
is measured by the extreme disintegration of the various groups of Aryan languages. These
linguistic divergences are chiefly due to the imposition by conquest of Aryan speech upon
several unrelated subspecies of man throughout western Asia and Europe.
Continue on to Chapter 6 - Race and Language.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter VI
Race and Language
WHEN a country is invaded and conquered by a race speaking a foreign language, one of
several things may happen, replacement of both population and language, as in the case of
eastern England when conquered by the Saxons; or adoption of the language of the victors by
the natives, as happened in Roman Gaul, where the invaders imposed their Latin tongue
throughout the land, without substantially altering the race.
In England and Scotland later conquerors, Danes and Normans, failed to change the Saxon
speech of the country, and in Gaul the German tongue of the Franks, Burgundians, and
Northmen could not displace the language of Rome.
Autochthonous inhabitants frequently impose upon their invaders their own language and
customs. In Normandy the conquering Norse pirates accepted the language, religion, and
customs of the natives, and in a century they vanish from history as Scandinavian heathen and
appear as the foremost representatives of the speech and religion of Rome.
In Hindustan the blond Nordic invaders forced their Aryan language on the aborigines, but their
blood was quickly and utterly absorbed in the darker strains of the original owners of the land.
A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity
of their blood persists until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes. In our
Southern States Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose and
justification.
The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language, but there remains not one
recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the
Northwest. The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is
entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed
grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic
conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship. The dim and uncertain traces of Nordic
blood in northern India only serve to emphasize the utter swamping of the white man in the
burning South.
The power of racial resistance of a dense and thoroughly acclimated population to an incoming
army, is very great. No ethnic conquest can be complete unless the natives are exterminated and
the invaders bring their own women with them. If the conquerors are obliged to depend upon
the women of the vanquished to carry on the race, the intrusive blood strain in a short time
becomes diluted beyond recognition.
It sometimes happens that an infiltration of population takes place either in the guise of
unwilling slaves, or of willing immigrants, filling up waste places and taking to the lowly tasks
which the lords of the land despise, gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out
their former masters.
The former catastrophe happened in the declining days of Rome, and the south Italians of to-day
are very largely descendants of nondescript slaves of all races, chiefly from the southern
and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, who were imported by the Romans under the Empire
to work their vast estates. The latter is occurring to-day in many parts of America, especially in
New England.
The eastern half of Germany has a Slavic Alpine substratum which now represents the
descendants of the Wends, who by the sixth century had filtered in as far west as the Elbe,
occupying the lands left vacant by the Teutonic tribes which had migrated southward. These
Wends in turn were Teutonized by a return wave of military conquest from the tenth century
onward, and to-day their descendants are considered Germans in good standing. Having
adopted the German as their sole tongue they are now in religious, political, and cultural
sympathy with the pure Teutons; in fact, they are quite unconscious of any racial distinction.
This historic fact underlies the ferocious controversy which has been raised over the ethnic
origin of the Prussians, the issue being whether the populations in Brandenburg, Silesia, Posen,
and other districts in eastern Germany, are Alpine Wends or true Nordic Germans. The truth is
that the dominant half of the population is purely Teutonic and the lower half of the population
are merely Teutonized Wends and Poles of Alpine affinities. Of course these territories must
also retain some of their early Teutonic population, and the blood of the Goth, Burgund,
Vandal, and Lombard, who were at the commencement of our era located there, as well as the
later Saxon element, must enter largely into the composition of the Prussian of to-day.
The most important communities in continental Europe of pure German type are to be found in
old Saxony, the country around Hanover, and this element prevails generally in the
northwestern part of the German Empire among the Low Dutch-speaking population, while the
High German-speaking population is largely composed of Teutonized Alpines.
All the states involved in the present world war have sent to the front their fighting Nordic
element, and the loss of life now going on in Europe will fall much more heavily on the blond
giant than on the little brunet.
As in all wars since Roman times, from a breeding point of view, the little dark man is the final
winner. No one who saw one of our regiments march on its way to the Spanish War could fail
to be impressed with the size and blondness of the men in the ranks as contrasted with the
complacent citizen, who from his safe stand on the gutter curb gave his applause to the fighting
man, and then stayed home to perpetuate his own brunet type.
This same Nordic element, everywhere the type of the sailor, the soldier, the adventurer, and the
pioneer, was ever the type to migrate to new countries, until the ease of transportation and the
desire to escape military service in the last forty years reversed the immigrant tide.
In consequence of this change our immigrants now largely represent lowly refugees from
"persecution" and other social discards.
In most cases the blood of pioneers has been lost to their race. They did not take their women
with them. They either died childless or left halfbreeds behind them. The virile blood of the
Spanish conquistadores, who are now little more than a memory in Central and South America,
died out from these causes.
This was also true in the early days of our Western frontiersmen, who individually were a far
finer type than the settlers who followed them.
Continue on to Chapter 7 -
The European Races in Colonies.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part I - Race, Language, And Nationality
Chapter VII
The European Races in the Colonies
FOR reasons already set forth there are few communities outside of Europe of pure European
blood. The racial destiny of Mexico and of the islands and coasts of the Spanish Main is clear.
The white man is being rapidly bred out by negroes on the islands and by Indians on the
mainland. It is quite evident that the West Indies, the coast region of our Gulf States, and
perhaps the black belt of the lower Mississippi Valley, must be abandoned to negroes. This
transformation is already complete in Haiti, and is going rapidly forward in Cuba and Jamaica.
Mexico and the northern part of South America must also be given over to native Indians with
an ever thinning veneer of white culture of the "Latin" type.
In Venezuela the pure whites number about one per cent of the whole population, the balance
being Indians and various crosses between Indians, negroes, and whites. In Jamaica the whites
number not more than two per cent, while the remainder are negroes or mulattoes. In Mexico
the proportion is larger, but the unmixed whites number not more than twenty per cent of the
whole, the others being Indians pure or mixed. These latter are the "greasers" of the American
frontiersman.
Whenever the incentive to imitate the dominant race is removed, the negro, or for that matter,
the Indian, reverts shortly to his ancestral grade of culture. In other words, it is the individual
and not the race that is affected by religion, education, and example. Negroes have
demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species, and that they do not
possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must
not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure, or
by the slavers' lash.
Where two distinct species are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two
things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the
Indians, or as the negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else
they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately
preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists, but
nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of
the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable
facts, if such facts appear cruel..In Argentine and south Brazil white blood of the various
European races is pouring in so rapidly that a community preponderantly white, but of the
Mediterranean type, may grow up, but such limited opportunities as the writer has had to
observe Argentine types leads him to question the probability of such a result even there.
In Asia, with the sole exception of the Russian settlements in Siberia, there can be and will be
no ethnic conquest, and all the white men in India, the East Indies, the Philippines, and China
will leave not the slightest trace behind them in the blood of the native population. After several
centuries of contact and settlement the pure Spanish in the Philippines are about half of one per
cent. The Dutch in their East Indian islands are even less; while the resident whites in
Hindustan amount to about one-tenth of one per cent. Such numbers are infinitesimal and of no
force in a democracy, but in a monarchy, if kept free from contamination, they suffice for a
ruling caste or a military aristocracy.
Australia and New Zealand, where the natives have been exterminated by the whites, are
developing into communities of pure Nordic blood, and will for that reason play a large part in
the future history of the Pacific. The bitter opposition of the Australians and Californians to the
admission of Chinese coolies and Japanese farmers is due primarily to a blind but absolutely
justified determination to keep those lands as white man's countries.
In Africa, south of the Sahara, the density of the native population will prevent the
establishment of any purely white communities, except at the southern extremity of the
continent and possibly on portions of the plateaux of eastern Africa. The stoppage of famines
and wars and the abolition of the slave trade, while dictated by the noblest impulses of
humanity, are suicidal to the white man. Upon the removal of these natural checks negroes
multiply so rapidly that there will not be standing room on the continent for white men, unless,
perchance, the lethal sleeping sickness, far more fatal to blacks than to whites, should run its
course unchecked.
In South Africa a community of Dutch and English extraction is developing. Here the only
difference is one of language. English, being a world tongue, will inevitably prevail over the
Dutch patois called "Taal." This Frisian dialect, as a matter of fact, is closer to old Saxon, or
rather Kentish, than any living continental tongue, and the blood of the North Hollander is
extremely close to that of the Anglo-Saxon of England. The English and the Dutch will merge
in a common type just as they did two hundred years ago in the colony of New York. They must
stand together if they are to maintain any part of Africa as a white man's country, because they
are confronted with the menace of a large black Bantu population which will drive out the
whites unless the problem is bravely faced.
The only possible solution is to establish large colonies for the negroes
and to allow them outside of them only as laborers, and not as settlers.
There must be ultimately a black South Africa and a white South Africa
side by side, or else a pure black Africa from the Cape to the cataracts
of the Nile..
In upper Canada, as in the United States up to the time of our Civil War,
the white population was purely Nordic.
The Dominion is, of course, handicapped by the presence of an indigestible
mass of French-Canadians, largely from Brittany and of Alpine origin, although the habitant
patois is an archaic Norman of the time of Louis XIV. These Frenchmen were granted freedom
of language and religion by their conquerors, and are now using these privileges to form
separatist groups in antagonism to the English population. The Quebec Frenchmen will succeed
in seriously impeding the progress of Canada and will succeed even better in keeping
themselves a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than
are the negroes in the South. The selfishness of the Quebec Frenchmen is measured by the fact
that in the present war they will not fight for the British Empire, or for France, or even for
clerical Belgium, and they are now endeavoring to make use of the military crisis to secure a
further extension of their "nationalistic ideals."
Personally the writer believes that the finest and purest type of a Nordic community outside of
Europe will develop in northwest Canada. Most of the other countries in which the Nordic race
is now settling lie outside of the special environment in which alone it can flourish.
The negroes of the United States, while stationary, were not a serious drag on civilization until,
in the last century, they were given the rights of citizenship and were incorporated in the body
politic. These negroes brought with them no language or religion or customs of their own which
persisted, but adopted all these elements of environment from the dominant race, taking the
names of their masters just as to-day the German and Polish Jews are assuming American
names. They came for the most part from the coasts of the Bight of Benin, but some of the later
ones came from the southeast coast of Africa by way of Zanzibar. They were of various black
tribes, but have been from the beginning saturated with white blood.
Looking at any group of negroes in America, it is easy to see that while they are all essentially
negroes, whether coal black, brown, or yellow, the great majority of them have varying amounts
of Nordic blood in them, which has modified their physical structure without transforming them
in any way into white men. This miscegenation was, of course, a frightful disgrace to the
dominant race, but its effect on the Nordics has been negligible, for the simple reason that it
was confined to white men crossing with negro women, and not the reverse process, which
would, of course, have resulted in the infusion of negro blood into the American stock.
The United States of America must be regarded racially as a European colony, and owing to
current ignorance of the physical bases of race, one often hears the statement made that native
Americans of Colonial ancestry are of mixed ethnic origin. This is not true. At the time of the
Revolutionary War the settlers in the thirteen Colonies were not only purely Nordic, but also
purely Teutonic, a very large majority being Anglo-Saxon in the most limited meaning of that
term. The New England settlers in particular came from those counties of England where the
blood was almost purely Saxon, Anglian, and Dane.
New England, during Colonial times and long afterward, was far more Teutonic than old.England;
that is, it contained a smaller percentage of small, Pre-Nordic brunets. Any one
familiar with the native New Englander knows the clean cut face, the high stature and the
prevalence of gray and blue eyes and light brown hair, and recognizes that the brunet element is
less noticeable there than in the South.
The Southern States were populated also by Englishmen of the purest Nordic type, but there is
to-day, except among the mountains, an appreciably larger amount of brunet types than in the
North. Virginia is in the same latitude as North Africa, and south of this line no blonds have
ever been able to survive in full vigor, chiefly because the actinic rays of the sun are the same
regardless of other climatic conditions. These rays beat heavily on the Nordic race and disturb
their nervous system, wherever the white man ventures too far from the cold and foggy North.
The remaining Colonial elements, the Holland Dutch, the Palatine Germans, who came over in
small numbers to New York and Pennsylvania, were also purely Teutonic, while the French
Huguenots who escaped to America were drawn much more largely from the Nordic than from
the Alpine or Mediterranean elements of France. The Scotch-Irish, who were numerous on the
frontier of the middle Colonies were, of course, of pure Scotch and English blood, although
they had resided in Ireland two or three generations. They were quite free from admixture with
the earlier Irish from whom they were cut off socially by bitter religious antagonism, and they
are not to be considered as "Irish" in any sense.
There was no important immigration of other elements until the middle of the nineteenth
century, when Irish Catholic and German immigrants appear for the first time upon the scene.
The Nordic blood was kept pure in the Colonies, because at that time among Protestant peoples
there was a strong race feeling, as a result of which half-breeds between the white man and any
native type were regarded as natives and not as white men.
There was plenty of mixture with the negroes as the light color of most negroes abundantly
testifies, but these mulattoes, quadroons, or octoroons were then and are now universally
regarded as negroes.
There was also abundant cross breeding along the frontiers between the white frontiersman and
the Indian squaw, but the half-breed was everywhere regarded as a member of the inferior race.
In the Catholic colonies, however, of New France and New Spain, if the half-breed were a good
Catholic he was regarded as a Frenchman or a Spaniard, as the case might be. This fact alone
gives the clew to many of our colonial wars where the Indians, other than the Iroquois, were
persuaded to join the French against the Americans by half-breeds who considered themselves
Frenchmen. The Church of Rome has everywhere used its influence to break down racial
distinctions. It disregards origins and only requires obedience to the mandates of the universal
church. In that lies the secret of the opposition of Rome to all national movements. It is the
imperial as contrasted with the nationalistic ideal, and in that respect the inheritance is direct
from the Empire.
Race consciousness in the Colonies and in the United States, down to and including the
Mexican War, seems to have been very strongly developed among native Americans, and it still
remains in full vigor to-day in the South, where the presence of a large negro population forces
this question upon the daily attention of the whites.
In New England, however, whether through the decline of Calvinism or the growth of altruism,
there appeared early in the last century a wave of sentimentalism, which at that time took up the
cause of the negro, and in so doing apparently destroyed, to a large extent, pride and
consciousness of race in the North. The agitation over slavery was inimical to the Nordic race,
because it thrust aside all national opposition to the intrusion of hordes of immigrants of inferior
racial value, and prevented the fixing of a definite American type, such as was clearly appearing
in the middle of the century.
The Civil War was fought almost entirely by unalloyed native Americans. The German and
Irish immigrants were at that time confined to a few States, and were chiefly mere day laborers
and of no social importance. They played no part whatever in the development or policies of the
nation, although in the war they contributed a certain number of soldiers to the Northern armies.
These Irish and German elements were of Nordic race, and while they did not in the least
strengthen the nation either morally or intellectually, they did not impair its physique.
There has been little or no Indian blood taken into the veins of the native American, except in
States like Oklahoma and in some isolated families scattered here and there in the Northwest.
This particular mixture will play no very important role in future combinations of race on this
continent, except in the north of Canada.
The native American has always found, and finds now, in the black men, willing followers who
ask only to obey and to further the ideals and wishes of the master race, without trying to inject
into the body politic their own views, whether racial, religious, or social. Negroes are never
socialists or labor unionists, and as long as the dominant imposes its will on the servient race,
and as long as they remain in the same relation to the whites as in the past, the negroes will be a
valuable element in the community, but once raised to social equality their influence will be
destructive to themselves and to the whites. If the purity of the two races is to be maintained,
they cannot continue to live side by side, and this is a problem from which there can be no
escape.
The native American by the middle of the nineteenth century was rapidly becoming a distinct
type. Derived from the Teutonic part of the British Isles, and being almost purely Nordic, he
was on the point of developing physical peculiarities of his own, slightly variant from those of
his English forefathers, and corresponding rather with the idealistic Elizabethan than with the
materialistic Hanoverian Englishman. The Civil War, however, put a severe, perhaps fatal,
check to the development and expansion of this splendid type, by destroying great numbers of
the best breeding stock on both sides, and by breaking up the home ties of many more. If the
war had not occurred these same men with their descendants would have populated the Western
States instead of the racial nondescripts who are now flocking there.
The prosperity that followed the war attracted hordes of newcomers who were welcomed by the
native Americans to operate factories, build railroads, and fill up the waste spaces - "developing
the country" it was called.
These new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the
earlier ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions. The
transportation lines advertised America as a land flowing with milk and honey, and the
European governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy, and hospitable
America the sweepings of their jails and asylums. The result was that the new immigration,
while it still included many strong elements from the north of Europe, contained a large and
increasing number of the weak, the broken, and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from
the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the
wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos.
With a pathetic and fatuous belief in the efficacy of American institutions and environment to
reverse or obliterate immemorial hereditary tendencies, these newcomers were welcomed and
given a share in our land and prosperity. The American taxed himself to sanitate and educate
these poor helots, and as soon as they could speak English, encouraged them to enter into the
political life, first of municipalities, and then of the nation.
The result is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because
the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world
to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew. The native
American is too proud to mix socially with them, and is gradually withdrawing from the scene,
abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old
stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is to-day
being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These
immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his
name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or
understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks
calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.
As to what the future mixture will be it is evident that in large sections of the country the native
American will entirely disappear. He will not intermarry with inferior races, and he cannot
compete in the sweat shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the
days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races,
but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium which will produce many amazing racial hybrids
and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel..
One thing is certain: in any such mixture, the surviving traits will be determined by competition
between the lowest and most primitive elements and the specialized traits of Nordic man; his
stature, his light colored eyes, his fair skin and blond hair, his straight nose, and his splendid
fighting and moral qualities, will have little part in the resultant mixture.
The "survival of the fittest" means the survival of the type best adapted to existing conditions of
environment, to-day the tenement and factory, as in Colonial times they were the clearing of
forests, fighting Indians, farming the fields, and sailing the Seven Seas. From the point of view
of race it were better described as the "survival of the unfit."
This review of the colonies of Europe would be discouraging were it not that thus far little
attention has been paid to the suitability of a new country for the particular colonists who
migrate there. The process of sending out colonists is as old as mankind itself, and probably in
the last analysis most of the chief races of the world, certainly most of the inhabitants of
Europe, represent the descendants of successful colonists.
Success in colonization depends on the selection of new lands and climatic conditions in
harmony with the immemorial requirements of the incoming race. The adjustment of each race
to its own peculiar habitat is based on thousands of years of rigid selection which cannot be
safely ignored. A certain isolation and freedom from competition with other races, for some
centuries at least, is also important, so that the colonists may become habituated to their new
surroundings.
Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 1 - Eolithic Man.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part II - European Races In History
Chapter 1
Eolithic Man
BEFORE considering the living populations of Europe, we must give consideration to the
extinct peoples that preceded them.
The science of anthropology is very recent-in its present form less than fifty years old-but it has
already revolutionized our knowledge of the past and extended prehistory so that it is now
measured not by thousands but by tens of thousands of years.
The history of man prior to the period of metals has been divided into ten or more subdivisions,
many of them longer than the time covered by written records. Man has struggled up through
the ages, to revert again and again into savagery and barbarism, but apparently retaining each
time something gained by the travail of his ancestors.
So long as there is in the world a freely breeding stock or race that has in it an inherent capacity
for development and growth, mankind will continue to ascend until, possibly through the
selection and regulation of breeding as intelligently applied as in the case of domestic animals,
he will control his own destiny and attain moral heights as yet unimagined.
The impulse upward, however, is supplied by a very small number of nations, and by a very
small portion of the population in such nations. The section of any community that produces
leaders or genius of any sort is only a minute percentage. To invent new processes, to establish
new principles, to elucidate and unravel the laws of nature, calls for genius. To imitate or to
adopt what others have invented is not genius but mimicry.
This something which we call "genius" is not a matter of family, but of stock or strain, and is
inherited in precisely the same manner as are the purely physical characters. It may be latent
through several generations of obscurity, and then flare up when the opportunity comes. Of this
we have many examples in America. This is what education or opportunity does for a
community; it permits in these rare cases fair play for development, but it is race, always race,
that produces genius.
This genius producing type is slow breeding, and there is real danger of its loss
to mankind. Some idea of the value of these small strains can be gained from
the recent statistics which demonstrate that Massachusetts produces more than
fifty times as much genius per hundred thousand whites as does Georgia, Alabama,
or Mississippi, although apparently the race, religion, and environment, other than
climatic conditions, are much the same, except for the numbing presence in the
South of a large stationary negro population.
The more thorough the study of European prehistory becomes, the more we realize how many
advances of culture have been made and then lost. Our parents were accustomed to regard the
overthrow of ancient civilization in the Dark Ages as the greatest catastrophe of mankind, but
we now know that the classic period of Greece was preceded by similar dark ages caused by the
Dorian invasions, which overthrew the Homeric-Mycenaean culture, which in its turn had
flourished after the destruction of its parent, the Minoan culture of Crete. Still earlier, some
twelve thousand years ago, the Azilian period of poverty and retrogression succeeded the
wonderful achievements of the hunter-artists of the Upper Paleolithic.
The progress of civilization becomes evident only when immense periods are studied and
compared, but the lesson is always the same, namely, that race is everything. Without race there
can be nothing except the slave wearing his master's clothes, stealing his master's proud name,
adopting his master's tongue, and living in the crumbling ruins of his master's palace.
Everywhere on the sites of ancient civilization the Turk, the Kurd, and the Bedouin camp; and
Americans might well pause and consider the fate of this country which they, and they alone,
founded and nourished with their blood. The immigrant ditch diggers and the railroad navvies
were to our fathers what their slaves were to the Romans, and the same transfer of political
power from master to servant is taking place to-day.
Man's place of origin was undoubtedly Asia. Europe is only a peninsula of the Eurasiatic
continent, and although the extent of its land area during the Pleistocene was much greater than
at present, it is certain, from the distribution of the various species of man, that the main races
evolved in Asia long before the centre of that continent was reduced to deserts by progressive
desiccation.
Evidence of the location of the early evolution of man in Asia and the geologically recent
submerged area toward the southeast is afforded by the fossil deposits in the Siwalik hills of
northern India, where have been found the remains of primates which were either ancestral or
closely related to the four genera of living anthropoids; and by the discovery in Java, which in
Pliocene times was connected with the mainland over what is now the South China Sea, of the
earliest known form of erect primate, the Pithecanthropus. This apelike man is practically the
"missing link," being intermediate between man and the anthropoids. Pithecanthropus is
generally believed to have been contemporary with the Gunz glaciation of some 500,000 years
ago, the first of the four great glacial advances in Europe.
One or two forms of fossil anthropoid apes have been discovered in the Miocene of Europe
which may possibly have been remotely related to the ancestors of man, but when the
archaeological exploration of Asia shall be as complete and intensive as that of Europe, it is
probable that more forms of fossil anthropoids and new species of man will be found there..
Man existed in Europe during the second and third interglacial periods, if not earlier.
We have his artifacts in the form of eoliths, at least as early as the second interglacial stage,
the Mindel-Riss,of some 300,000 years ago. A single jaw found near Heidelberg is referred
to this period and is the earliest skeletal evidence of man in Europe. From certain remarkable
characters in this jaw, it has been assigned to a new species, Homo heidelbergensis.
Then follows a long period of scanty industrial relics and no known skeletal remains. Man was
slowly and painfully struggling up from an eolithic culture phase, where chance flints served his
temporary purpose. This in turn was succeeded by a stage of human development where slight
chipping and retouching of flints for man's increasing needs led, after vast intervals of time, to
the deliberate manufacture of tools. This period is known as the Eolithic, and is necessarily
extremely hazy and uncertain. Whether or not certain chipped or broken flints, called eoliths, or
dawn stones, were really human artifacts or were the products of natural forces is really
immaterial because man must have passed through such an eolithic stage.
The further back we go toward the commencement of such an eolithic culture, the more and
more unrecognizable the flints necessarily become until they finally cannot be distinguished
from natural stone fragments, because at the beginning the earliest man merely picked up a
convenient stone, used it once and flung it away, precisely as an anthropoid ape would act to-day
if he wanted to break in the shell of a tortoise or crack an ostrich egg.
Man must have experienced the following phases of development in the transition from the
prehuman to the human stage: first, the utilization of chance stones and sticks; second, the
casual adaptation of flints by a minimum amount of chipping; third, the deliberate manufacture
of the simplest implements from flint nodules; and fourth, the invention of new forms of
weapons and tools in ever increasing variety.
Of the last two stages we have an extensive and clear record. Of the second stage we have in the
eoliths intermediate forms ranging from flints that are evidently results of natural causes to
flints that are clearly artifacts. The first and earliest stage, of course, could leave behind it no
definite record and must always rest on hypothesis.
Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 2 - Paleolithic Man.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part II - European Races In History
Chapter 2
Paleolithic Man
WITH the deliberate manufacture of implements from flint nodules, we enter the beginning of
Paleolithic time, and from here on our way is relatively clear. The successive stages of the
Paleolithic were of great length, but are each characterized by some improvement in the
manufacture of tools. During long ages man was merely a tool making and tool using animal,
and, after all is said, that is about as good a definition as we can find to-day for the primate we
call human.
The Paleolithic Period, or Old Stone Age, lasted from the somewhat indefinite termination of
the Eolithic, some I50,000 years ago, to the Neolithic or New Stone Age, which began about
7,000 B. C.
The Paleolithic falls naturally into three great subdivisions. The Lower Paleolithic includes the
whole of the last interglacial stage with the subdivisions of the Pre-Chellean, Chellean, and
Acheulean; the Middle Paleolithic covers the whole of the last glaciation, and is co-extensive
with the Mousterian Period and the dominance of the Neanderthal species of man. The Upper
Paleolithic covers all the postglacial stages down to the Neolithic, and includes the subdivisions
of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and Azilian. During the entire Upper Paleolithic,
except the short closing phase, the Cro-Magnon race flourished.
It is not until after the third severe period of great cold, known as the Riss glaciation, and until
we enter, some 150,000 years ago, the third and last interglacial stage of temperate climate,
known as the Riss-Wurm, that we begin a definite and ascending series of culture. The Pre-Chellean,
Chellean and Acheulean divisions of the Lower Paleolithic occupied the whole of this
warm or rather temperate interglacial phase, which lasted nearly 1OO,OOO years.
A shattered skull, a jaw, and some teeth have been discovered recently in Sussex, England.
These remains were all attributed to the same individual, who was named the Piltdown Man.
Owing to the extraordinary thickness of the skull and the simian character of the jaw, a new
genus, Eoanthropus, the "dawn man, " was created and assigned to PreChellean times. Further
study and comparison with the jaws of other primates demonstrated that the jaw belonged to a
chimpanzee, so that the genus Eoanthropus must now be abandoned, and the Piltdown Man
must be included in the genus Homo as at present constituted. Future discoveries of the
Piltdown type and for that matter of Heidelberg Man may, however, raise either or both of them
to generic rank.
Some of the tentative restorations of the fragmentary bones make this skull altogether too
modern and too capacious for a Pre-Chellean or even a Chellean. In any event the Piltdown
Man is highly aberrant and, so far as our present knowledge goes, does not appear to be related
to any other species of man found during the Lower Paleolithic.
In later, Acheulean, times a new species of man, very likely descended from the early
Heidelberg Man of Eolithic times, appears on the scene, and is known as the Neanderthal race.
Many fossil remains of this type have been found.
The Neanderthaloids occupied the European stage exclusively, with the possible exception of
the Piltdown Man, so far as our information extends, from the first appearance of man in
Europe to the end of the Middle Paleolithic. The Neanderthals flourished throughout the entire
duration of the last glacial advance known as the Wurm glaciation. This period, known as the
Mousterian, began about 50,000 years ago, and lasted some 25,000 years.
The Neanderthal species disappears suddenly and completely with the advent of postglacial
times, when, about 25,000 years ago, he was apparently exterminated by a new and far higher
race, the famous Cro-Magnons.
There may well have been, and probably were, during Mousterian times, races of man in
Europe other than the Neanderthaloids, but of them we have no record. Among the numerous
remains of Neanderthals, however, we do find traces of distinct types showing that this race in
Europe was undergoing evolution and was developing marked variations in characters.
Neanderthal Man was a purely meat eating hunter, living in caves, or rather in their entrances.
He was dolichocephalic and not unlike existing Australoids, although not necessarily of black
skin, and was, of course, in no sense a negro.
The skull was characterized by heavy superorbital ridges, a low, receding forehead, protruding
and chinless under jaw, and the posture was imperfectly erect. This race was widely spread and
rather numerous. Some of its blood has trickled down to the present time, and occasionally one
sees a skull of the Neanderthal type. The best skull of this type ever seen by the writer belonged
to an old and very intellectual professor in London, who was quite innocent of his value as a
museum specimen. In the old black breed of Scotland the overhanging brow and deep-set eyes
are suggestive of this race.
Along with other ancient and primitive racial remnants, ferocious gorilla like living specimens
of the Neanderthal man are found not infrequently on the west coast of Ireland, and are easily
recognized by the great upper lip, bridgeless nose, beetling brow and low growing hair, and
wild and savage aspect. The proportions of the skull which give rise to this large upper lip, the
low forehead, and the superorbital ridges are clearly Neanderthal characters. The other traits of
this Irish type are common to many primitive races. This is the Irishman of caricature, and the
type was very frequent in America when the first Irish immigrants came in 1846 and the
following years. It seems, however, to have almost disappeared in this country.
In the Upper Paleolithic, which began after the close of the fourth and last glaciation, about
25,000 years ago, the Neanderthal race was succeeded by men of very modern aspect, known as
Cro-Magnons. The date of the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic is the first we can fix with
accuracy, and its correctness can be relied on within narrow limits. The Cro-Magnon race first
appears in the Aurignacian subdivision of the Upper Paleolithic. Like the Neanderthals, they
were dolichocephalic, with a cranial capacity superior to the average in existing European
populations, and a stature of very remarkable size.
It is quite astonishing to find that the predominant race in Europe 25,000 years ago, or more,
was not only much taller, but had an absolute cranial capacity in excess of the average of the
present population. The low cranial average of existing populations in Europe can be best
explained by the presence of large numbers of individuals of inferior mentality. These
defectives have been carefully preserved by modern charity, whereas in the savage state of
society the backward members are allowed to perish and the race is carried on by the vigorous
and not by the weaklings.
The high brain capacity of the Cro-Magnons is paralleled by that of the ancient Greeks, who in
a single century gave to the world out of their small population very much more genius than all
the other races of mankind have since succeeded in producing in a similar length of time.
Athens between 530 and 430 B. C. had an average population of about 90,000 freemen, and yet
from these small numbers there were born no less than fourteen geniuses of the very highest
rank. This would indicate a general intellectual status as much above that of the Anglo-Saxons
as the latter are above the negroes. The existence at these early dates of a very high cranial
capacity and its later decline shows that there is no upward tendency inherent in mankind of
sufficient strength to overcome obstacles placed in its way by stupid social customs.
All historians are familiar with the phenomenon of a rise and decline in civilization such as has
occurred time and again in the history of the world, but we have here in the disappearance of
the Cro-Magnon race the earliest example of the replacement of a very superior race by an
inferior one. There is great danger of a similar replacement of a higher by a lower type here in
America unless the native American uses his superior intelligence to protect himself and his
children from competition with intrusive peoples drained from the lowest races of eastern
Europe and western Asia.
While the skull of the Cro-Magnon was long, the cheek bones were very broad, and this
combination of broad face with long skull constitutes a peculiar disharmonic type which occurs
to-day only among the very highly specialized Esquimaux and one or two other unimportant
groups.
Skulls of this particular type, however, are found in small numbers among existing populations
in central France, precisely in the district where the fossil remains of this race were first
discovered These isolated Frenchmen probably represent the last lingering remnant of this
splendid race of hunting savages.
The Cro-Magnon culture is found all around the basin of the Mediterranean, and this fact,
together with the conspicuous absence in eastern Europe of its earliest phases, the lower
Aurignacian, indicates that it entered Europe by way of north Africa, precisely as did, in
Neolithic times, its successors, the Mediterranean race. There is little doubt that the Cro-Magnons
originally developed in Asia and were in their highest stage of physical development
at the time of their first appearance in Europe. Whatever change took place in their stature
during their residence there seems to have been in the nature of a decline rather than of a further
development.
There is nothing whatever of the negroid in the Cro-Magnons, and they are not in any way
related to the Neanderthals, who represent a distinct and extinct species of man.
The Cro-Magnon race persisted through the entire Upper Paleolithic, during the periods known
as the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian, from 25,000 to 1O,OOO B. C. While it is
possible that the blood of this race enters somewhat into the composition of the peoples of
western Europe, its influence cannot be great, and the Cro-Magnons disappear from view with
the advent of the warmer climate of recent times.
It has been suggested that, following the fading ice edge north and eastward through Asia into
North America, they became the ancestors of the Esquimaux, but certain anatomical objections
are fatal to this interesting theory. No one, however, who is familiar with the culture of the
Esquimaux, and especially with their wonderful skill in bonecarving, can fail to be struck with
the similarity of their technique to that of the Cro-Magnons.
To the Cro-Magnon race the world owes the birth of art. Caverns and shelters are yearly
uncovered in France and Spain, where the walls and ceilings are covered with polychrome
paintings or with incised bas-reliefs of animals of the chase. A few clay models, sometimes of
the human form, are also found together with abundant remains of their chipped but unpolished
stone weapons and tools. Certain facts stand out clearly, namely, that they were pure hunters
and clothed themselves in furs and skins. They knew nothing of agriculture or of domestic
animals, even the dog being as yet untamed, and the horse was regarded merely as an object of
chase.
The question of their knowledge of the principle of the bow and arrow during the Aurignacian
and Solutrean is an open one, but there are definite indications of the use of the arrow, or at
least the barbed dart, in early Magdalenian times, and this weapon was well known in the
succeeding Azilian Period.
The presence toward the end of this last period of quantities of very small flints, called.microliths,
has given rise to much controversy. It is possible that these microliths represent the
tips of small poisoned arrows such as are now in very general use among primitive hunting
tribes the world over. Certain grooves in some of the flint weapons of the Upper Paleolithic
may well have been also used for the reception of poison. It is highly probable that these skilful
savages, the Cro-Magnons, perhaps the greatest hunters that ever lived, not only used poisoned
darts, but were adepts in trapping game by means of pitfalls and snares, precisely as do some of
the hunting tribes of Africa to-day. Barbed arrowheads of flint or bone, such as were commonly
used by the North American Indians, have not been found in Paleolithic deposits.
In the next period, the Solutrean, the Cro-Magnons shared Europe with a new race known as the
Brunn-Pwredmost, found in central Europe. This race is characterized by a long face as well as
a long skull, and was, therefore, harmonic. This Brunn-Pwredmost race would appear to have
been well settled in the Danubian and Hungarian plains, and this location indicates an eastern
rather than a southern origin.
Good anatomists have seen in this race the last lingering traces of the Neanderthaloids, but it is
more probable that we have here the first advance wave of the primitive forerunners of one of
the modern European dolichocephalic races.
This new race was not artistic, but had great skill in fashioning weapons. It is possibly
associated with the peculiarities of Solutrean culture and the decline of art which characterizes
that period. The artistic impulse of the Cro-Magnons which flourished so vigorously during the
Aurignacian, seems to be quite suspended during this Solutrean period, but reappears in the
succeeding Magdalenian times. This Magdalenian art is clearly the direct descendant of
Aurignacian models, and in this closing age of the Cro-Magnons all forms of Paleolithic art,
carving, engraving, painting, and the manufacture of weapons, reach their highest and final
culmination.
Nine thousand or ten thousand years may be assigned for the Aurignacian and Solutrean
Periods, and we may with considerable certainty give the minimum date of 16,000 B. C. for the
beginning of Magdalenian time. Its entire duration can be safely set down at 6,000 years, thus
bringing the final termination of the Magdalenian to 1O,OOO B. C. All these dates are
extremely conservative, and the error, if any, would be in assigning too late and not too early a
period to the end of Magdalenian times.
At the close of the Magdalenian we enter upon the last period of Paleolithic times, the Azilian,
which lasted from about 1O,OOO to 7,000 B. C., when the Upper Paleolithic, the age of
chipped flints, definitely and finally ends. This period takes its name from the Mas d'Azil or
"House of Refuge," a huge cavern in the eastern Pyrenees, where the local Protestants took
shelter during the persecutions. In this cave the extensive deposits are typical of this epoch, and
here certain marked pebbles show the earliest known traces of the alphabet.
With the advent of this closing Azilian Period art entirely disappears, and the splendid physical
specimens of the Cro-Magnons are succeeded by what appear to have been degraded savages,
who had lost the force and vigor necessary for the strenuous chase of large game, and had
turned to the easier life of fishermen.
The bow and arrow in the Azilian are in common use in Spain, and it is well within the
possibilities that the introduction of this new weapon from the south may have played its part in
the destruction of the Cro-Magnons; otherwise it is hard to account for the disappearance of this
race of large stature and great brain power.
The Azilian, also called the Tardenoisian in the north of France, was evidently a period of racial
disturbance, and at its close the beginnings of the existing races are found.
>From the first appearance of man in Europe, and for many tens of thousands of years down to
some ten or twelve thousand years ago, all known human remains are of dolichocephalic type.
In the Azilian Period there appears the first round skull race. It comes clearly from the east.
Later we shall find that this invasion of the forerunners of the existing Alpine race came from
southwestern Asia by way of the Iranian plateaux, Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the valley of
the Danube, and spread over nearly all of Europe. The earlier round skull invasions may as well
have been infiltrations as armed conquests, since apparently from that day to this the round
skulls have occupied the poorer mountain districts and have seldom ventured down to the rich
and fertile plains.
This new brachycephalic race is known as the Furfooz or Grenelle race, so called from the
localities in Belgium and France where it was first discovered. Members of this round skull race
have also been found at Ofnet, in Bavaria, where they occur in association with a
dolichocephalic race, our first historic evidence of the mixture of contrasted races. The
descendants of this Furfooz-Grenelle race and of the succeeding waves of invaders of the same
brachycephalic type now occupy central Europe as Alpines and form the predominant peasant
type in central and eastern Europe.
In this same Azilian Period there appear, coming this time from the south, the first forerunners
of the Mediterranean race. The descendants of this earliest wave of Mediterraneans and their
later reinforcements occupy all the coast and islands of the Mediterranean, and are spread
widely over western Europe. They can everywhere be identified by their short stature, long
skull, and brunet hair and eyes.
While during this Azilian-Tardenoisian Period these ancestors of two of the existing European
races are appearing in central and southern Europe, a new culture phase, also distinctly Pre-Neolithic,
was developing along the shores of the Baltic. It is known as Maglemose from its
type locality in Denmark. It is probably the work of the first wave of the Nordic subspecies,
possibly the Proto-Teutons, who had followed the retreating glaciers north over the old land
connections between Denmark and Sweden to occupy the Scandinavian Peninsula. In the
remains of this culture we find for the first time definite evidence of the domesticated dog. As
yet, however, no skeletal remains have been discovered.
With the appearance of the Mediterranean race the Azilian-Tardenoisian draws to its close, and
with it the entire Paleolithic Period. It is safe to assign for the end of the Paleolithic and the
beginning of the Neolithic or Polished Stone Age, the date of 7000 or 8000 B. C.
The races of the Paleolithic Period arrived successively on the scene with all their characters
fully developed. The evolution of all these subspecies and races took place somewhere in Asia
or eastern Europe. None of these races appear to be ancestral one to another, although the
scanty re-mains of the Heidelberg Man would indicate that he may have given rise to the later
Neanderthals. Other than this possible affinity, the various races of Paleolithic times are not
related one to another.
Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 3 - The Neolithic and Bronze Ages.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part II - European Races In History
Chapter 3
The Neolithic and Bronze Ages
ABOUT 7000 B.C. we enter an entirely new period in the history of man, the Neolithic or New
Stone Age, when the flint implements were polished and not merely chipped. Early as is this
date in European culture, we are not far from the beginnings of an elaborate civilization in parts
of Asia. The earliest organized states, so far as our present knowledge goes, were the
Mesopotamian empires of Accad and Sumer-though they may have been preceded by the
Chinese civilization, whose origin remains a mystery, nor can we trace any connection between
it and western Asia. Balkh, the ancient Bactra, the mother of cities, is located where the trade
routes between China, India, and Mesopotamia converged, and it is in this neighborhood that
careful and thorough excavations will probably find their greatest rewards.
However, we are not dealing with Asia, but with Europe only, and our knowledge is confined to
the fact that the various cultural advances at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the
Neolithic correspond with the arrival of new races.
The transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic was formerly considered as revolutionary, an
abrupt change of both race and culture, but a period more or less transitory, known as the
Campignian, now appears to bridge over this gap. This is but what should be expected, since in
human archaeology as in geology the more detailed our knowledge becomes, the more
gradually we find one period or horizon merges into its successor.
For a long time after the opening of the Neolithic the old fashioned chipped weapons and
implements remain the predominant type, and the polished flints so characteristic of the
Neolithic appear at first only sporadically, then increase in number, until finally they entirely
replace the rougher designs of the preceding Old Stone Age.
So in turn these Neolithic polished stone implements which ultimately became both varied and
effective as weapons and tools continued in use long after metallurgy developed. In the Bronze
Period, of course, metal armor and weapons were for ages of the greatest value. So they were
necessarily in the possession of the military and ruling classes only, while the unfortunate serf
or common soldier who followed his master to war did the best he could with leather shield and
stone weapons. In the ring that clustered around Harold for the last stand on Senlac Hill many
of the English thanes died with their Saxon king, armed solely with the stone battle-axes of their
ancestors..In Italy also there was a long period known to the Italian archaeologists as the Eneolithic
Period, when good flint tools existed side by side with very poor copper and bronze
implements; so that, while the Neolithic lasted in western Europe four or five thousand years, it
is, at its commencement, without clear definition from the preceding Paleolithic, and at its end it
merged gradually into the succeeding ages of metals.
After the opening Campignian phase there followed a long period typical of the Neolithic,
known as the Robenhausian, or Age of the Swiss Lake Dwellers, which reached its height about
5000 B. C. The lake dwellings seem to have been the work exclusively of the round skull
Alpine races and are found in numbers throughout the region of the Alps and their foothills and
along the Danube valley.
These Robenhausian pile built villages were in Europe the earliest known form of fixed
habitation, and the culture found in association with them was a great advance on that of the
preceding Paleolithic. This type of permanent habitation flourished through the entire Upper
Neolithic and the succeeding Bronze Age. Pile villages end in Switzerland with the first
appearance of iron, but elsewhere, as in the upper Danube, they still existed in the days of
Herodotus.
Domesticated animals and agriculture, as well as rough pottery, appear during the
Robenhausian for the first time. The chase, supplemented by trapping and fishing, was still
common, but it probably was more for clothing than for food. Of course, a permanent site is the
basis of an agricultural community, and involves at least a partial abandonment of the chase,
because only nomads can follow the game in its seasonal migrations, and hunted animals soon
leave the neighborhood of settlements.
The Terramara Period of northern Italy was a later phase of culture contemporaneous with the
Upper Robenhausian, and was typical of the Bronze Age. During the Terramara Period fortified
and moated stations in swamps or close to the banks of rivers became the favorite resorts
instead of pile villages built in lakes. The first traces of copper are found during this period. The
earliest human remains in the Terramara deposits are long skulled, but round skulls soon appear
in association with bronze implements. This indicates an original population of Mediterranean
affinities swamped later by Alpines.
Neolithic culture also Nourished in the north of Europe and particularly in Scandinavia, now
free from ice. The coasts of the Baltic were apparently occupied for the first time at the very
beginning of this period, as no trace of Paleolithic industry has been found there, other than the
Maglemose, which represents only the very latest phase of the Old Stone Age. The kitchen
middens, or refuse heaps, of Sweden, and more particularly of Denmark, date from the early
Neolithic, and thus are somewhat earlier than the lake dwellers. No trace of agriculture has been
found in them, and the dog seems to have been the only domesticated animal..>From these
two centres, the Alps and the North, an elaborate and variegated Neolithic culture
spread through western Europe, and an autochthonous development took place little influenced
by trade intercourse with Asia after the first immigrations of the new races.
We may assume that the distribution of races during the Neolithic was roughly as follows: The
Mediterranean basin and western Europe, including Spain, Italy, Gaul, Britain, and the western
portions of Germany, populated by Mediterranean long heads; the Alps and the territories
immediately surrounding, except the valley of the Po, together with much of the Balkans,
inhabited by Alpine types. These Alpines extended northward until they came in touch in
eastern Germany and Poland with the southernmost Nordics, but as the Carpathians at a much
later date, namely from the fourth to the eighth century A. D., were the centre of radiation of the
Alpine Slavs, it is very possible that during the Neolithic the early Nordics lay farther north and
east.
North of the Alpines and occupying the shores of the Baltic and Scandinavia, together with
eastern Germany, Poland, and Russia, were located the Nordics. At the very base of the
Neolithic, and perhaps still earlier, this race occupied Scandinavia, and Sweden became the
nursery of the Teutonic subdivision of the Nordic race. It was in that country that the peculiar
characters of stature and blondness became most accentuated, and it is there that we find them
to-day in their greatest purity. During the Neolithic the remnants of early Paleolithic man must
have been numerous, but later they were either exterminated or absorbed by the existing
European races.
During all this Neolithic Period Mesopotamia and Egypt were thousands of years in advance of
Europe, but only a small amount of culture from these sources seems to have trickled westward
up the valley of the Danube, then and long afterward the main route of intercourse between
western Asia and the heart of Europe. Some trade also passed from the Black Sea up the
Russian rivers to the Baltic coasts. Along these latter routes there came from the north to the
Mediterranean world the amber of the Baltic, a fossil resin greatly prized by early man for its
magic electrical qualities.
Gold was probably the first metal to attract the attention of primitive man, but, of course, could
only be used for purposes of ornamentation. Copper, which is often found in a pure state, was
also one of the earliest metals known, and probably came first either from the mines of Cyprus
or of the Sinai Peninsula. These latter mines are known to have been worked before 3800 B. C.
by systematic mining operations, and much earlier the metal must have been obtained by
primitive methods from surface ore. It is, therefore, probable that copper was known and used,
at first for ornament and later for implements, in Egypt before 5000 B. C., and probably even
earlier in the Mesopotamian regions.
With the use of copper the Neolithic fades to its end and the Bronze Age commences soon
thereafter. This next step in advance was made apparently about 4000 B. C., when some
unknown genius discovered that an amalgam of nine parts of copper to one part of tin would
produce the metal we now call bronze, which has a texture and strength suitable for weapons
and tools. The discovery revolutionized the world. The new knowledge was a long time
spreading and weapons of this material were of fabulous value, especially in countries where
there were no native mines, and where spears and swords could only be obtained through trade
or conquest. The esteem in which these bronze weapons, and still more the later weapons of
iron, were held, is indicated by the innumerable legends and myths concerning magic swords
and armor, the possession of which made the owner well-nigh invulnerable and invincible.
The necessity of obtaining tin for this amalgam led to the early voyages of the Phoenicians, who
from the cities of Tyre and Sidon, and their daughter, Carthage, traversed the entire length of
the Mediterranean, founded colonies in Spain to work the Spanish tin mines, passed the Pillars
of Hercules, and finally voyaged through the stormy Atlantic to the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles of
Ultima Thule. There, on the coasts of Cornwall, they traded with the native British, of kindred
Mediterranean race, for the precious tin. These dangerous and costly voyages become
explicable only if the value of this metal for the composition of bronze be taken into
consideration.
After these bronze weapons were elaborated in Egypt, the knowledge of their manufacture and
use was extended through conquest into Palestine, and about 3000 B. C. northward into Asia
Minor.
The effect of the possession of these new weapons on the Alpine populations of western Asia
was magical, and resulted in an intensive and final expansion of round skulls into Europe. This
invasion came through Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the valley of the Danube, poured into Italy
from the north, introduced bronze among the earlier Alpine lake dwellers of Switzerland, and
among the Mediterraneans of the Terramara stations of the valley of the Po, and at a later date
reached as far west as Britain and as far north as Holland and Norway.
The simultaneous appearance of bronze about 3000 or 2800 B.C. in the south as well as in the
north of Italy can probably be attributed to a wave of this same invasion which reached Tunis
and Sicily, passing through Egypt, where it left behind the so-called Giza round skulls. With the
first knowledge of metals begins the Eneolithic Period of the Italians.
The introduction into England and into Scandinavia of bronze may be safely dated about one
thousand years later, around 1800 B.C. The fact that the Alpines only barely reached Ireland,
and that the invasion of Britain itself was not sufficiently intensive to leave any substantial
record of its passing in the skulls of the existing population, indicates that at this time Ireland
was severed from England, and that the land connection between England and France had been
broken. The computation of the foregoing dates, of course, is somewhat hypothetical, but the
fixed fact remains that this last expansion of the Alpines brought the knowledge of bronze to
western and northern Europe and to the Mediterranean and Nordic peoples living there.
The effect of the introduction of bronze in the areas occupied chiefly by the Mediterranean race
along the Atlantic coast and in Britain, as well as in North Africa from Tunis to Morocco, is
seen in the wide distribution of the megalithic funeral monuments, which appear to have been
erected, not by Alpines, but by the dolichocephs. The occurrence of bronze tools and weapons
in the interments shows clearly that the megaliths date from this Bronze Age. But their
construction and use continued at least until the very earliest trace of iron appeared, and in fact
mound burials among the Vikings were common until the introduction of Christianity.
The knowledge of iron as well as bronze in Europe, centres around the area occupied by the
Alpines in the eastern Alps and its earliest phase is known as the Hallstatt culture, from a little
town in the Tyrol where it was first discovered. This Hallstatt iron culture flourished about 1500
B. C. Whether or not the Alpines introduced from Asia or invented in Europe the smelting of
iron, it was the Nordics who benefited by its use. Bronze weapons and the later iron ones
proved in the hands of these northern barbarians to be of terrible effectiveness, and were first of
all turned against their Alpine teachers. With these metal swords in their grasp, the Nordics first
conquered the Alpines of central Europe and then suddenly entered the ancient world as raiders
and destroyers of cities, and the classic civilizations of the north coasts of the Mediterranean
Sea fell, one after another, before the "Furor Normanorum," just as two thousand years later the
provinces of Rome were devastated by the last wave of the men of the north, the Teutonic
tribes.
The first Nordics to appear in European history are tribes speaking Aryan tongues, in the form
of the various Celtic and related dialects in the west, of Umbrian in Italy and of Thracian in the
Balkans, and these tribes, pouring down from the north, swept with them large numbers of
Alpines, whom they had already thoroughly Nordicized. The process of conquering and
assimilating these Alpines must have gone on for long centuries before our first historic records,
and the work was so thoroughly done that the very existence of this Alpine race as a separate
subspecies of man was actually forgotten for thousands of years by themselves and by the world
at large, until it was revealed in our own day by the science of skull measurements.
The Hallstatt iron culture did not extend into western Europe, and the smelting and extensive
use of iron in south Britain and northwest Europe are of much later date and occur in what is
known as the La Tene Period, usually assigned to the fifth and fourth century B. C. Iron
weapons were known in England much earlier, perhaps as far back as 800 or 1OOO B.C., but
were very rare and were probably importations from the Continent.
The spread of this La Tene culture is associated with the Cymry, who constituted the last wave
of Celtic-speaking invaders into western Europe, while the earlier Nordic Gauls and Goidels
had arrived in Gaul and Britain equipped with bronze only.
In Roman times, which follow the La Tene Period, the three main races of Europe occupied the
relative positions which they had held during the whole Neolithic Period and which they hold
today, with the exception that the Nordic species was less extensively represented in western
Europe than when, a few hundred years later, the Teutonic tribes flooded these countries;
but on the other hand, the Nordics occupied large areas in eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, and
Russia now occupied by the Slavs of Alpine race, and many countries also in central Europe
were in Roman times inhabited by fair haired, blue eyed barbarians, where now the population
is preponderantly brunet and becoming yearly more so.
Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 4 - The Alpine Race.
The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part II - European Races In History
Chapter 4
THE ALPINE RACE
THE Alpine race is clearly of Eastern and Asiatic origin. It forms the westernmost extension of
a widespread subspecies which, outside of Europe, occupies Asia Minor, Iran, the Pamirs, and
the Hindu Kush. In fact the western Himalayas were probably its centre of original evolution
and radiation, and its Asiatic members constitute a distinct subdivision, the Armenoids.
The Alpine race is distinguished by a round face and correspondingly round skull which in the
true Armenians has a peculiar, sugarloaf shape, a character which can be easily recognized. The
Alpines must not be confounded with the sliteyed Mongols who centre around Thibet and the
steppes of north Asia. The fact that both these races are round skulled does not involve identity
of origin any more than the long skulls of the Nordics and of the Mediterraneans require that
they be both considered of the same subspecies, although good anthropologists have been
misled by this parallelism. The Alpines are of stocky build and moderately short stature, except
where they have been crossed with
Nordic elements. This race is also characterized by dark hair, tending to a dark brown color, and
in Europe at the present time the eye is usually dark but sometimes grayish. The ancestral Proto-Alpines
from the highlands of western Asia must, of course, have had brunet eyes, and very
dark, probably black, hair. Whether we are justified in considering gray eyes peculiar to
populations of mixed Alpine and Nordic blood is difficult to determine, but one thing is certain,
the combination of blue eyes and flaxen hair is never Alpine.
The European Alpines retain very little of their Asiatic origin, except the skull, and have been in
contact with the Nordic race so long that in central and western Europe they are everywhere
saturated with the blood of that race. Many populations now considered good Germans, such as
the majority of the Wurtembergers, Bavarians, Austrians Swiss, and Tyrolese, are merely
Teutonized Alpines.
The first appearance in Europe of the Alpines, dates from the Azilian Period when it is
represented by the Furfooz-Grenelle race. There were, later, several invasions of this race which
entered Europe during Neolithic times from the Asia Minor plateaux, by way of the Balkans
and the valley of the Danube. It appears also to have passed north of the Black Sea, as some
slight traces have been discovered there of round skulls which long ante-date the existing
population, but the Russian brachycephaly of to-day is of much later origin.
This race in its final expansion far to the northwest, ultimately reached Norway, Denmark, and
Holland, and planted among the dolichocephalic natives small colonies of round skulls, which
still exist. When this invasion reached the extreme northwest of Europe its energy was spent,
and the invaders were soon forced back into central Europe by the Nordics. The Alpines at this
time of maximum extension, about 1800 B.C., crossed into Britain, and a few reached Ireland
and introduced bronze into both these islands. As the metal appears about the same time in
Sweden, it is safe to assume that it was introduced by this same invasion, a record of which
persists to this day in the existence of a colony of round skulls in southwest Norway.
Bronze culture everywhere antedates the earliest appearance of the Celtic-speaking Nordics in
western Europe.
The men of the Round Barrows in England were Alpines, but their numbers were so scanty that
they have not left behind them in the skulls of the living population any demonstrable evidence
of their conquest. If we are ever able to accurately dissect out the various strains that enter, in
more or less minute quantities, into the blood of the British Isles, we shall find traces of these
Round Barrow men as well as other interesting and ancient remnants, especially in the western
isles and peninsulas.
In the study of European populations the great and fundamental fact about the British Isles is
the absence there to-day of Alpine round skulls. It is the only important state in Europe in which
the round skulls play no part, and the only nation of any rank composed solely of Nordic and
Mediterranean races in approximately equal numbers. To this fact is undoubtedly due many of
the individualities of the English nation.
The invasion of central Europe by Alpines, which occurred in the Neolithic, following in the
wake of the Azilian forerunners of the same type- the Furfooz-Grenelle race - represented a
very great advance in culture. They brought with them from Asia the art of domesticating
animals and the first knowledge of the cereals and of pottery, and were an agricultural race in
sharp contrast to the flesh eating hunters who preceded them.
The Neolithic populations of the lake dwellings in Switzerland and the extreme north of Italy,
which flourished about 5000 B.C., all belonged to this Alpine race. A comparison of the scanty
physical remains of these lake dwellers with the inhabitants of the existing villages on the lake
shores demonstrates that the skull shape has changed little or not at all during the last seven
thousand years, and affords us another proof of the persistency of unit characters.
This Alpine race in Europe is now so thoroughly acclimated that it is no longer Asiatic in any
respect, and has nothing in common with the Mongols except its round skulls. Such Mongolian
elements as exist to-day in scattered groups throughout eastern Europe are remnants of the later
invasions of Tatar hordes which, beginning with Attila in the fifth century, ravaged eastern.Europe
for hundreds of years.
In western and central Europe the present distribution of the Alpine race is a substantial
recession from its original extent, and it has been everywhere conquered and completely
swamped by Celtic and Teutonic speaking Nordics. Beginning with the first appearance of the
Celtic-speaking Nordics in western Europe, this race has been obliged to give ground, but has
mingled its blood everywhere with the conquerors, and now after centuries of obscurity it
appears to be increasing again at the expense of the master race.
The Alpines reached Spain, as they reached Britain, in small numbers and with spent force, but
they still exist along the Cantabrian Alps as well as on the