Racial Realities in Europe

Abstract

READERS of Dr. Stoddard's “Rising Tide of Color” or his “Revolt against Civilisation” will know what to expect of the essay at present under notice. “More and more we are coming to realise the fundamental importance of race in human affairs”(p. 3); and the superficial similarity of the civilisation of European countries should not obscure the racial differences between their populations. Climate and soil may account for much, but “are not so universal in their effects as race, which subtly but inevitably influences every phase of human existence”(p. 5). Since on Dr. Stoddard's race-map, accepted without change from Madison Grant's “Passing of the Great Race,” “we see a Europe inhabited by three races [Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean], Europe's seemingly tangled history grows much simpler, while present-day conditions become more understandable” (p. 5): especially as “Europe is a striking example of the persistence of race” (p. 8), and “even in those regions where racial mixture has been most prolonged and general we find populations not fused into new intermediate varieties with harmonious, stably blended qualities but composed of obviously mixed individuals”—a rather ambiguous phrase—“most of whom can be classified as belonging mainly to one or other of the ancestral types” (p. 9). The reason given for this is “another law of races—the tendency to breed out alien strains when these are not too numerous, so that such strains ultimately vanish, and never reappear in the stock.” It is argued that since “these three races differ markedly from one another, not merely in physical appearance, but also in intellectual and emotional qualities” (p. 6), circumstances such as war or industrialism, less favourable to one race, or more so to another, produce the profound social effects which we know, by altering the racial composition of the peoples exposed to them; and the citizens and statesmen momentarily concerned with Understanding and alleviating the troubles that ensue, are warned to take account of these anthropological factors, and will disregard them at their peril.

Racial Realities in Europe.

By Dr. Lothrop Stoddard. Pp. v + 252 + 3 maps. (London: C. Scribner's Sons, 1924.) 12s. 6d. net.