Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

carry on progress when begun; probably it is even more necessary: and in the most progressive races we find it. I have spoken already of the Jewish prophets, the life of that nation and the principle of all its growth; but a still more progressive race— that by which secular civilization was once created, by which it is now mainly administered-had a still better instrument of progression.

"In the very earliest glimpses," says Mr. Freeman, "of Teutonic political life, we find the monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic elements already clearly marked. There are leaders with or without the royal title, there are men of noble birth, whose noble birth (in whatever the original nobility may have consisted) entitles them to a pre-eminence in every way; but beyond these there is a free and armed people, in whom it is clear that the ultimate sovereignty resides. Small matters are decided by the chiefs alone; great matters are submitted by the chiefs to the assembled nation. Such a system is far more than Teutonic: it is a common Aryan possession; it is the constitution of the Homeric Achaians on earth and of the Homeric gods on Olympus." Perhaps, and indeed probably, this constitution may be that of the primitive tribe which Romans left to go one way and Greeks to go another and Teutons to go a third, the tribe took it with them as the English take the common law with them, because it was the one kind of polity which they could conceive and act upon; or it may be that the emigrants from the primitive Aryan stock only took with them a good aptitude,- an excellent political nature, which similar circumstances in distant countries were afterwards to develop into like forms. But anyhow it is impossible not to trace the supremacy of Teutons, Greeks, and Romans in part to their common form of government. The contests of the assembly cherished the principle of change; the influence of the

[ocr errors]

elders insured sedateness and preserved the mold of thought; and in the best cases, military discipline was not impaired by freedom, though military intelligence was enhanced with the general intelligence. A Roman army was a free body, at its own choice governed by a peremptory despotism.

The mixture of races was often an advantage too. Much as the old world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most historic nations conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many they did not massacre all; they enslaved the subject men and they married the subject women. No doubt the whole bond of early society was the bond of descent; no doubt it was essential to the notions of a new nation that it should have had common ancestors: the modern idea that vicinity of habitation is the natural cement of civil union would have been repelled as an impiety if it could have been conceived as an idea. But by one of those legal fictions which Sir Henry Maine describes so well, primitive nations contrived to do what they found convenient as well as to adhere to what they fancied to be right; when they did not beget they adopted, they solemnly made believe that new persons were descended from the old stock, though everybody knew that in flesh and blood they were not. They made an artificial unity in default of a real unity, and what it is not easy to understand now - the sacred sentiment requiring unity of race was somehow satisfied; what was made did as well as what was born. Nations with this sort of maxims are not likely to have unity of race in the modern sense, and as a physiologist understands it. What sorts of unions improve the breed, and which are worse than both the father race and the mother, it is not very easy to say. The subject was reviewed by M. Quatrefages in an elaborate report upon the occasion of the French Exhibition, of all things in the world. M. Quatrefages quotes from another writer the phrase that South America is a

[ocr errors]

:

great laboratory of experiments in the mixture of races, and reviews the different results which different cases have shown. In South Carolina the mulatto race is not very prolific, whereas in Louisiana and Florida it decidedly is so. In Jamaica and in Java the mulatto cannot reproduce itself after the third generation; but on the continent of America, as everybody knows, the mixed race is now most numerous, and spreads generation after generation without impediment. Equally various likewise in various cases has been the fate of the mixed race between the white man and the native American sometimes it prospers, sometimes it fails. And M. Quatrefages concludes his description thus:-"En acceptant comme vraies toutes les observations qui tendent à faire admettre qu'il en sera autrement dans les localités dont j'ai parlé plus haut, quelle est la conclusion à tirer de faits aussi peu semblables? Evidemment, on est obligé de reconnaître que le développement de la race mulâtre est favorisé, retardé, ou empêché par des circonstances locales; en d'autres termes, qu'il dépend des influences exercées par l'ensemble des conditions d'existence,- par le milieu."* By which I understand him to mean that the mixture of race sometimes brings out a form of character better suited than either parent form to the place and time; that in such cases, by a kind of natural selection, it dominates over both parents and perhaps supplants both; whereas in other cases the mixed race is not as good then and there as other parent forms, and then it passes away soon and of itself.

Early in history the continual mixtures by conquest were just so many experiments in mixing races

"Accepting as true all the observations which tend to compel the admission that it may be otherwise in the localities of which I have spoken above, what is the conclusion to draw from facts so little similiar? Evidently we are obliged to recognize that the development of the mulatto race is favored, retarded, or prevented by local circumstances; in other words, that it depends on the influence exercised by the whole of the conditions of existence,- by the milieu,"

as are going on in South America now; new races wandered into new districts, and half killed, half mixed with the old races: and the result was doubtless as various and as difficult to account for then as now, sometimes the crossing answered, sometimes it failed. But when the mixture was at its best, it must have excelled both parents in that of which so much has been said,- that is, variability, and consequently progressiveness: there is more life in mixed nations. France, for instance, is justly said to be the mean term between the Latin and the German races. A Norman, as you may see by looking at him, is of the North; a Provençal is of the South, of all that there is most southern. You have in France Latin, Celtic, German, compounded in an infinite number of proportions one as she is in feeling, she is various not only in the past history of her various provinces, but in their present temperaments. Like the Irish element and the Scotch element in the English House of Commons, the variety of French races contributes to the play of the polity; it gives a chance for fitting new things which otherwise there would not be. And early races must have wanted mixing more than modern races. It is said, in answer to the Jewish boast that "their race still prospers, though it is scattered and breeds in-and-in," "You prosper because you are so scattered: by acclimatization in various regions your nation has acquired singular elements of variety; it contains within itself the principle of variability which other nations must seek by intermarriage." In the beginning of things there was certainly no cosmopolitan race like the Jews: each race was a sort of "parish race," narrow in thought and bounded in range, and it wanted mixing accordingly.

But the mixture of races has a singular danger as well as a singular advantage in the early world. We know now the Anglo-Indian suspicion or contempt for "half-castes" the union of the Englishman and the Hindoo produces something not only between

races, but between moralities,-they have no inherited creed or plain place in the world, they have none of the fixed traditional sentiments which are the stays of human nature. In the early world many mixtures must have wrought many ruins; they must have destroyed what they could not replace, - an inbred principle of discipline and of order. But if these unions of races did not work thus,-if for example the two races were so near akin that their morals united as well as their breeds, if one race by its great numbers and prepotent organization so presided over the other as to take it up and assimilate it and leave no separate remains of it, then the admixture was invaluable: it added to the probability of variability and therefore of improvement; and if that improvement even in part took the military line, it might give the mixed and ameliorated state a steady advantage in the battle of nations and a greater chance of lasting in the world.

Another mode in which one state acquires a superiority over competing states is by provisional institutions, if I may so call them. The most important of these, slavery, arises out of the same early conquest as the mixture of races. A slave is an unassimilated, an undigested atom; something which is in the body politic, but yet is hardly part of it. Slavery, too, has a bad name in the later world, and very justly we connect it with gangs in chains, with laws which keep men ignorant, with laws that hinder families. But the evils which we have endured from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to or make us forget the great services that slavery rendered in early ages. There is a wonderful presumption in its favor: it is one of the institutions which at a certain stage of growth all nations in all countries choose and cleave to. "Slavery," says Aristotle, "exists by the law of nature;' " meaning that it was everywhere to be found, was a rudimentary universal point of polity. There are very many

"Politica," Book i. et seq.

« AnteriorContinuar »