Part 1

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_Nationality and Race_

_From an Anthropologist's Point of View_

BEING THE

ROBERT BOYLE LECTURE

DELIVERED BEFORE THE

_OXFORD UNIVERSITY JUNIOR SCIENTIFIC CLUB_

_On November 17, 1919_

BY

ARTHUR KEITH, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.

HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 1919

PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

NATIONALITY AND RACE

FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGIST'S POINT OF VIEW

NATIONALITY AND RACE IN BOYLE'S TIME

It was during the lifetime of Robert Boyle that our forefathers began to come into close contact with the races and nationalities of the outer world. When he was born in County Cork in the year 1627, small and isolated bands of Englishmen were elbowing Red Indians from the eastern sea-board of North America; before his death in London in 1691, at the age of sixty-four, he had seen these pioneer bands become united into a British fringe stretching almost without a break from Newfoundland to Florida. Neither he nor any one else in England could then have guessed that in less than two centuries the narrow fringe of colonists would have spread from shore to shore, thus carpeting a continent with a new people. It was in his time, too, that English merchants and sailors made a closer acquaintance with the peoples of India, of the Far East, and with the sea-board natives of Africa and of South America. We have only to turn to the six splendid volumes in which his experiments, observations, and writings are preserved to see how he viewed the world which his countrymen were opening up beneath his eyes. In a short paper, drafted some time before his death, he gives the most minute directions to guide navigators in drawing up reports of newly discovered lands. His directions relate to every conceivable property or aspect of a new country--its geography, mineral wealth, natural products, climate--all but its inhabitants. Like many Englishmen of his time, Boyle conceived that his duty by native peoples began and ended when he had seen that they were supplied with copies of the Bible. For him, and for most of his contemporaries, there seem to have been no racial problems; for they did not regard the meeting and mingling of diverse races or of peoples of different nationalities as matters which deserved investigation and explanation. Boyle witnessed the acutest phases of the 'plantation' of Ireland, but the inquiries he set on foot regarding that country were: 'How it cometh to pass that there are not frogs, toads, snakes, moles, nightingales, rarely magpies' within its borders; he inquired, too, concerning the true nature of 'diverse things which the Irish foolishly report of St. Patrick'--especially concerning the 'birds turned into stones for chirping when St. Patrick was preaching'. There were, of course, racial and national problems in Boyle's time, but they had not then presented themselves before the tribunal of the public mind as matters demanding investigation and treatment.

RACE AND NATIONALITY IN RECENT YEARS

We need not blame the statesmen and writers of Boyle's time for failing to recognize the inward significance of national and racial manifestations any more than we condemn his contemporary physicians for failing to separate from the mass of disease such conditions as are known to modern medical men as appendicitis and typhoid fever. Typhoid fever and appendicitis existed in Boyle's time just as did national disturbances and racial antipathies, but their nature and significance passed undiagnosed. It was not until England had laid siege, by means of armies of colonists, to lands inhabited by native races, or had come to guide the destinies of great tropical empires by handfuls of civil servants, that she realized that racial contact gives rise to live and burning antagonisms. Nor are national problems new to England; they have always dogged the footsteps of her statesmen. In Boyle's time a people could make its national spirit heard and felt only by resorting to brute force. In our times there are other means; a people mobilizes its national spirit by means of the daily press; the promulgation of national propaganda has become a fine art; modern statesmen have learned that national feelings, rightly directed, have the force of an avalanche. The problems of Race and of Nationality, then, are by no means new, but in their modern form they are new. The far-flung lines of the British Empire and the mobilization of the popular spirit by means of the press and propaganda have compelled our statesmen, historians, publicists, psychologists, and anthropologists to re-examine the nature of the forces which lie behind racial movements and national agitations. Of the importance of a right understanding of the nature of these forces for the future maintenance and development of the British Empire there cannot be any question. In the guiding of its destinies Oxford men will, in the future as in the past, take a leading part, and much of their success will depend on how far they have grasped the nature of the inward forces which group mankind into races and nations. That is my reason for making the problems of Race and Nationality the subject of this lecture in memory of Robert Boyle.

INHERITED INSTINCTS AND MODERN IDEALS ARE OUT OF HARMONY

It has scarcely been possible in recent years to open a newspaper without our eye being arrested by head-lines telling us of racial strifes or international contentions. One day we read of race riots; on the next we learn that the inhabitants of a certain area of land demand separation from all surrounding peoples. By a process of 'self-determination' they demand to be recognized as a separate people or nation. These racial and national contentions are not restricted to any particular people or land; we find them in every country. The politician is too near to these racial and national manifestations of the modern world to see them in their proper light; even the historian is not far enough away from them to see them in their right perspective. You cannot explore the secret sources from which they spring unless you have grasped the immensity of man's unwritten history. Let me make my meaning quite clear by an historical example chosen from man's body. Among our modern populations there are no ailments more prevalent than those which arise from a disordered working of the great bowel. Why this part of our bodily machinery should fail us under modern conditions of diet becomes quite apparent when we survey the history of man's distant past. For the anthropologist there are only two well-marked phases in human history. The first phase is that of Natural subsistence--an infinitely long and monotonous chapter, stretching over a million of years or more. The second is the phase of Artificial subsistence--a short chapter covering a period of 10,000 or 12,000 years at the utmost, but a period crowded with events which have a critical bearing on our present and future welfare. In the first or long phase mankind was broken into small and scattered groups which gained as best they could a sparse, uncertain, and coarse sustenance from the natural produce of shore and stream, moorland and woodland. In the second or short phase man conquered nature; by means of cultivation and domestication he forced from the soil a sure and abundant supply of food, thus rendering possible the existence of our modern massed populations. Now the machinery of man's body and the instinctive outfit of his brain, which had been evolved to answer to the conditions of life presented by the first long phase of his history, were also those which had to serve him when he entered the new conditions of the short or modern phase. We need not be surprised to find, then, that part of his ancient outfit is ill adapted to modern conditions of life. Man's great bowel, including the caecum, appendix, and colon, which answered his needs well when his dietary was coarse and uncooked, is ill contrived to deal with foods which are artificially prepared and highly concentrated. A school, which was headed by the late Professor Metchnikoff, even goes so far as to maintain that man would be improved by the complete removal of his great bowel--a doctrine with which I totally disagree. We are all alive to the fact that there is a lack of harmony between the ancient machinery of our bodies and the modern conditions under which we live, but we are only now awakening to the fact that what is true of our bodies is also true of our minds. In that immense first phase of our history an elaborate mental machinery had been evolved for binding small groups of mankind into social units. This subconscious or instinctive mental outfit, we shall see, is part of the machinery which Nature has employed in the evolution of races of mankind. The mental adaptations which modern man has inherited from the immensity of his past we may briefly describe as part of Nature's tribal machinery. The thesis, then, which I propose to expound to you is that in our modern racial strifes and national agitations we see man's inherited tribal instincts at war with his present-day conditions of life. We have broken up, or are attempting to break up, Nature's ancient tribal machinery and at the present time are striving to replace her designs by others evolved in the minds of modern statesmen and politicians. We moderns are like hill sheep turned into fenced fields with all our wandering instincts still grafted on our original nature. As in them, our instincts are at war with our surroundings. It is the most natural thing in the world that we should blame the barriers which have been set round us because we are scarcely conscious of the inherited predispositions with which Nature encompasses her tribal fields. We cannot understand the nature of our modern racial and national problems until we perceive that in these days we are endeavouring to build a new world out of the wreckage of an old.

RACIAL AND NATIONAL PROBLEMS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Having thus laid before you the general lines on which I propose to deal with problems relating to race and nationality, I propose now that we should make a lightning trip round the world and cull, as we go, samples which will illustrate the kind of friction which arises wherever races or nationalities come into close contact. As I have already said, every country can yield us material for our study, but none on such a vast experimental scale as the United States of North America; we shall therefore commence our hurried survey in that country. Within the frontiers of the States is massed a population of 110 millions. When we look closely we see that over ten millions of these inhabitants are marked off from the rest by a frontier, a colour line, as sharply defined and jealously guarded as the frontiers of a kingdom. Across that racial frontier all legitimate social traffic is barred, the custodians of the frontier being those who stand on the white side of the line. Any attempt to cross that racial frontier produces mob war. While these ten millions of segregated citizens abide within their racial fence, they see millions arrive from Europe and pass freely through the national and social gateways--which for them are barred. In the course of a generation they see these new arrivals, men, women, and children born and bred within the diverse nationalities of Europe, differing markedly in appearance and speech from the original colonial stock, become slowly stript of their alien outlook and gradually incorporated within a new national mass. In the States, then, we see a machinery at work which maintains racial frontiers but breaks down all national barriers. The nature of that machinery we shall have to inquire into later, but in the meantime I will briefly define the essential difference between a racial and a national frontier. A marriage across a racial frontier gives rise to an offspring so different from both parent races that it cannot be naturally grouped with either the one or the other. A marriage across a national frontier gives rise to a progeny which may pass as a member of either parent nationality. Further, as I shall attempt to prove later, nationality is the incipient stage in the process which leads on to racial differentiation.

PROBLEMS OF CANADA

When we cross the line which separates the United States from Canada we find a national mechanism at work which converts immigrants of alien nationalities into loyal Canadians. In Canada, however, our attention is arrested by an example which illustrates the persistence and the strength of the force which perpetuates a national spirit. The ancestors of the French Canadians began to settle in the province of Quebec early in the seventeenth century, 150 years before the Canadian national mill was set agoing by Englishmen. The French settlers never passed through that mill. They came, for the greater part, from the north-west of France, and although speaking a different tongue, adopting a different religion, and following different customs, they were yet in point of race not essentially different from the English founders of Canada. Yet the descendants of these early French settlers, now numbering well over a million and a half, and although forming but a small island in the midst of an English-speaking ocean for more than a century and a half, have maintained their sense of separateness--their national frontiers--intact. There is no question here of a racial frontier as yet, but were this national isolation of French Canadians to become permanent, then in course of time a racial differentiation would be produced within their territory.

When we turn our faces westward and cross the Rocky Mountains we find the minds of the white inhabitants, along the whole stretch of the Pacific coast, occupied with a racial problem. They have erected a racial barrier to keep out the native peoples of Asia. The native of India is excluded just as strictly as the Chinaman or Japanese. They are not excluded because of their speech or of their civilization, but because the people of the United States and of Canada are conscious of a certain feeling of difference--call it race prejudice, race antipathy, or what you will. It is a conscious or subconscious state of feeling which rebels against racial fusion.

RACIAL PROBLEMS OF SPANISH AMERICA

When we pass from the United States to Mexico we cross the boundary line which separates the two most immense experiments in human breeding the world has ever seen. North of this experimental Rubicon, as we have just seen, the basal stock, which is north-west European or Nordic in origin, has been ruled by a sense of race-caste and has consequently maintained its racial characters. But south of our Rubicon the result of racial contact has been absolutely different. The south-west European or Iberian stock broke down the natural barrier which Nature had set up between them and the natives of Mexico and South America and solved their racial antagonisms by the fusion of blood. The results of these two experiments, carried out on such an immense scale, we can see to-day. The northern experiment, which is now three centuries old, has given the world two of her most virile peoples destined to hold their place whether humanity becomes planted out on a vast, peaceful, and uniform cabbage-patch or still remains, as now, broken up into national and racial factions. These northern peoples are as effective, so far at least as concerns their chances of survival, as the original Nordic stock. The southern experiment, which began four centuries ago, has given the world a jangling series of small peoples, not any one of which is equal, either in body or in mind, to the pioneer Iberian stock. From the anthropologist's point of view the northern experiment is the successful one.

We have been glancing at the national and racial problems of the American continent and we ought now to pass on to note the form in which they are presented to us by Australasia. Before passing on, however, there is one very important aspect of the southern or Iberian experiment which we must consider now because it throws light on the path along which I want to lead you. Why did the racial barrier between Iberian and Indian break down? Was it because the Iberian did not possess--was not influenced by--a sense of race-caste such as we have seen to dominate the Nordic colonist? I believe that race-caste or race-prejudice is and has been a more potent force in the Nordic than in the Iberian stock. The Iberian people are near neighbours of the African races; in physique they are differentiated from the African stocks in a somewhat less degree than the Nordic stocks which represent the utmost point in the physical specialization of all European peoples. If the Iberian pioneer carried with him to America a lesser degree of race-caste, the process of hybridization would begin the more easily. The great north and south experiments differed, however, in another important circumstance. The Nordic encountered a scattered, nomadic, proud race; the Iberian a settled people living in dense communities. The Iberian was thus exposed to conditions in which a racial barrier was harder to maintain.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN RACE AND SEX IMPULSES

But neither of these two circumstances--a lesser developed sense of race-caste in the Iberian, nor the massing of the southern Indians in settled communities--explain the disappearance of a racial frontier. The true explanation lies in the fact that Nature has grafted in the human mind instinctive impulses which are far stronger than those designated as race-prejudice. Nature has spent her most painstaking efforts in establishing within the human organization a mechanism to ensure, above all other ends, that the individual shall continue. The instinct to propagate is the strongest of the instinctive impulses with which mankind has been fitted. It dominates and conquers the race instinct on all occasions save one. Sex impulse is the battery which breaks down race-barriers. Race instinct becomes the master of sexual impulse only when a pure stock has established itself as a complete and growing community in a new country. Sexual impulses are the endowments of individual men and women; they dominate and are manifested by individuals, whereas race antipathies are manifestations not of the individual, but of the mass. Race instinct comes into play only when men, women, and children of the same stock are organized into communities. Until such a community is organized sex instinct traffics freely across racial barriers; once organized, race instinct conquers or restrains hybridization. It is a right understanding of the conditions under which human instincts work that gives us the true key to the hybridization of Spaniard and American Indian. The Iberian pioneers exposed themselves to racial contact in Mexico and Peru under conditions which were bound to give their sex impulses a victory over their race instinct. No _Mayflower_ reached the Spanish coasts of America; only bands of adventurers, who established no independent home-like settlements to form the cradles of race-feeling. The sex instinct was left dominant, and by this force the racial barriers south of the Mexican rubicon were broken down. North of this Rubicon the American continent was colonized; south of it, there was not a colonization but a plantation. From an anthropologist's point of view, as we shall note later, colonization and plantation are totally different processes.

RACE PROBLEMS IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

When we cross the Pacific to Australia we see the same racial and national factors at work as in Saxon America. It has taken only a little over a century for a British or Nordic stock, now numbering five millions, to establish itself as occupant and owner of a great continent. The Australians have had to face both national and racial problems. The continent was colonized from separate centres, and there was a tendency on the part of each colony to isolate itself from its neighbours and grow up into a separate state or nationality. These separate states or incipient nationalities were united at the commencement of the present century by the craft of statesmanship which made the shores of the new continent the frontiers of a national commonwealth. The British communities in Australia bred and exhibited the usual Saxon sense of race discrimination; almost from the first they drew a racial frontier between themselves and the native blacks, and so strictly has this frontier been maintained that there is no trace of the vanishing aboriginal blood in the veins of the new nationality. The 50,000 survivors of the original owners of the continent now present a philanthropic rather than a racial problem. But it is otherwise as regards the millions of native peoples occupying the countries which flank the Indian and China seas. Seas are the highways along which modern peoples spread and invade accessible lands. Hence round their shores the Australians have erected a racial barrier, admitting the entrance of peoples of European descent but excluding all others.

The student of racial and national problems cannot afford to pass New Zealand by. In these two islands English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh immigrants have, in the course of the last eighty years, built up a new nation, now numbering well over a million souls. Here and there in the islands there has been a tendency for the immigrants to group themselves according to their inherited nationality, but such separate groupings tend to disappear as the new national spirit becomes dominant. Herein we see exhibited a law with which herdsmen are familiar. A herd of cattle which has occupied a field for some time will resist the intrusion of a second or strange herd; but turn both herds together into a strange pasture and mutual antipathies cease almost at once. The arrival in a new land of immigrants from diverse countries breaks down the national barriers within which they were born and bred. A national spirit breeds true only on its native soil; when transplanted to a new land it becomes plastic and mouldable. A new country dissolves ancient nationalities; no country illustrates this truth more emphatically than New Zealand.

The relationship which exists between the new nationality of New Zealand and the ancient owners of the country--the Maori, now numbering about 50,000--is one of a unique kind. The physical differences which separate the British and Maori types are such in degree that there can be no question of the distinctness of their racial stocks. In former cases we have seen that it was the Saxon who drew and guarded the racial frontier; but in New Zealand each of the contending human stocks has drawn its racial line, and each regards the other's delimitation with respect. Such respect is rendered possible because the territorial frontiers of Maoriland have been clearly defined. Thus wise statesmanship keeps racial problems in a latent condition in New Zealand.

NATIONAL AND RACIAL PROBLEMS IN SOUTH AFRICA