The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Lothrop Stoddard
conquest fell far more heavily upon the Nordic Celts in Gaul and Britain than on the servile strata of the population.
In the same way the Saxon conquest of England destroyed the Nordic Brythons to a greater degree than the pre-Nordic Neolithic Mediterranean element. From that time on all the wars of Europe, other than those against the Asiatics and Saracens, were essentially civil wars fought between peoples or leaders of Nordic blood.
Mediæval Europe was one long welter of Nordic immolation until the Wars of the Roses in England, the Hundred Years’ War in the Lowlands, the religious, revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars in France, and the ghastly Thirty Years’ War in Germany dangerously depleted the ruling Nordic race and paved the way for the emergence from obscurity of the servile races which for ages had been dominated by them.
To what extent the present war has fostered this tendency, time alone will show, but Mr. Stoddard has pointed out some of the immediate and visible results. The backbone of western civilization is racially Nordic, the Alpines and Mediterraneans being effective precisely to the extent in which they have been Nordicized and vitalized.
If this great race, with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should ultimately pass, with it would pass that which we call civilization. It would be succeeded by an unstable and bastardized population, where worth and merit would have no inherent right to leadership and among which a new and darker age would blot out our racial inheritance.
Such a catastrophe cannot threaten if the Nordic race will gather itself together in time, shake off the shackles of an inveterate altruism, discard the vain phantom of internationalism, and reassert the pride of race and the right of merit to rule.
The Nordic race has been driven from many of its lands, but still grasps firmly the control of the world, and it is certainly not at a greater numerical disadvantage than often before in contrast to the teeming population of eastern Asia.
It has repeatedly been confronted with crises where the accident of battle, or the genius of a leader, saved a well-nigh hopeless day. It has survived defeat, it has survived the greater danger of victory, and, if it takes warning in time, it may face the future with assurance. Fight it must, but let that fight be not a civil war against its own blood kindred but against the dangerous foreign races, whether they advance sword in hand or in the more insidious guise of beggars at our gates, pleading for admittance to share our prosperity. If we continue to allow them to enter they will in time drive us out of our own land by mere force of breeding.
The great hope of the future here in America lies in the realization of the working class that competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal, whether the latter be the lowly immigrant from southern or eastern Europe or whether he be the more obviously dangerous Oriental against whose standards of living the white man cannot compete. In this country we must look to such of our people—our farmers and artisans—as are still of American blood to recognize and meet this danger.
Our present condition is the result of following the leadership of idealists and philanthropic doctrinaires, aided and abetted by the perfectly understandable demand of our captains of industry for cheap labor.
To-day the need for statesmanship is great, and greater still is the need for thorough knowledge of history. All over the world the first has been lacking, and in the passions of the Great War the lessons of the past have been forgotten both here and in Europe.
The establishment of a chain of Alpine states from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as a sequel to the war, all of them organized at the expense of the Nordic ruling classes, may bring Europe back to the days when Charlemagne, marching from the Rhine to the Elbe, found the valley of that river inhabited by heathen Wends. Beyond lay Asia, and his successors spent a thousand years pushing eastward the frontiers of Europe.
Now that Asia, in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners, is organizing an assault upon western Europe, the new states—Slavic-Alpine in race, with little Nordic blood—may prove to be not frontier guards of western Europe but vanguards of Asia in central Europe. None of the earlier Alpine states have held firm against Asia, and it is more than doubtful whether Poland, Bohemia, Rumania, Hungary, and Jugo-Slavia can face the danger successfully, now that they have been deprived of the Nordic ruling classes through democratic institutions.
Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with, or intrust his ideals to, brown, yellow, black, or red men.
This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself.
Madison Grant.
New York, March 1, 1920.
PART I
THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD OF COLOR
The man who, on a quiet spring evening of the year 1914, opened his atlas to a political map of the world and pored over its many-tinted patterns probably got one fundamental impression: the overwhelming preponderance of the white race in the ordering of the world’s affairs. Judged by accepted canons of statecraft, the white man towered the indisputable master of the planet. Forth from Europe’s teeming mother-hive the imperious Sons of Japhet had swarmed for centuries to plant their laws, their customs, and their battle-flags at the uttermost ends of the earth. Two whole continents, North America and Australia, had been made virtually as white in blood as the European motherland; two other continents, South America and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while even huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the white man’s abode. Even where white populations had not locked themselves to the soil few regions of the earth had escaped the white man’s imperial sway, and vast areas inhabited by uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed the white man’s will.
Beside the enormous area of white settlement or control, the regions under non-white governance bulked small indeed. In eastern Asia, China, Japan, and Siam; in western Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia; in Africa, Abyssinia, and Liberia; and in America the minute state of Haiti: such was the brief list of lands under non-white rule. In other words, of the 53,000,000 square miles which (excluding the polar regions) constitute the land area of the globe, only 6,000,000 square miles had non-white governments, and nearly two-thirds of this relatively modest remainder was represented by China and its dependencies.
Since 1914 the world has been convulsed by the most terrible war in recorded history. This war was primarily a struggle between the white peoples, who have borne the brunt of the conflict and have suffered most of the losses. Nevertheless, one of the war’s results has been a further whittling down of the areas standing outside white political control. Turkey is to-day practically an Anglo-French condominium, Persia is virtually a protectorate of the British Empire, while the United States has thrown over the endemic anarchy of Haiti the ægis of the Pax Americana. Study of the political map might thus apparently lead one to conclude that white world-predominance is immutable, since the war’s ordeal has still further broadened the territorial basis of its authority.
At this point the reader is perhaps asking himself why this book was ever undertaken. The answer is: the dangerous delusion created by viewing world affairs solely from the angle of politics. The late war has taught many lessons as to the unstable and transitory character of even the most imposing political phenomena, while a better reading of history must bring home the truth that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics, but race. The reader has already encountered this fundamental truth on every page of the Introduction. He will remember, for instance, how west-central Asia, which in the dawn of history was predominantly white man’s country, is to-day