Part 2

If we now pass to South Africa we find problems of race and of nationality in a more acute and tangled form than anywhere else in the world. Long before the Portuguese had turned the Cape of Good Hope towards the end of the sixteenth century, this land was occupied by a confusion of contending tribal peoples belonging to at least three well-differentiated human stocks. Bantu peoples were pushing southwards, ousting and exterminating Hottentot tribes; these were at the same time exercising a continuous pressure on the Bush people. At the present time this great territory, with a total area of nearly twenty times that of England, is occupied by about six and a quarter millions of people, fully five millions being descendants of the original native tribes, with a slight admixture of Asiatic elements. The masters and owners of this territory, numbering only a little over a million, are of the Nordic or north-west European stock. About one-half of the dominant stock drew its original guiding spirit from Holland, the other half carried to its new home the national spirit of England. These two nationalities, both derived from the same North Sea stock, have been thrown together in South Africa for over a century, and yet a sense of difference in nationality has persisted, even in face of dangers which threaten both alike. Thus South Africa has an acute friction arising from the rubbing of one nationality on another. She has also her racial problems; the more closely they are examined the more do their potential dangers seem to grow. Boer and Briton may differ in speech, habit, and outlook, but both agree that there is an impassable frontier between them and the native races of Africa and Asia. They do not even camouflage the racial barricade which they have erected; they purposely expose it in its nakedness to full view, so that none may fail to see it. The dark natives maintain their tribal and racial frontiers by their inherited organizations, but the surveillance of the social barrier between them and the whites lies with the dominant race. Only those who have come into direct contact with racial antagonisms know how deeply they are situated in the primitive organization of the human brain. Let me cite only one witness on this point--one who would willingly believe, if he could, that racial antagonisms are both superficial and acquired. "That a very real problem exists in the race-consciousness of the white and coloured peoples is evident, is sometimes painfully evident, sometimes dangerously so. There is nothing to be gained by under-estimating its deep-seated nature and the gravity of its issues." This is a quotation from the presidential address given by Dr. W. Flint to the last meeting (1919) of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. The mixture of races in South Africa has roused to activity instincts or subconscious states which lie dormant in members of a uniform population. National and racial frontiers, we shall see, are part of Nature's evolutionary machinery. Meantime we merely note that modern industrial ideals clash with the working of Nature's instinctive mechanisms, and in South Africa the two are in actual collision.

SOME OF THE NATIONAL AND RACIAL PROBLEMS OF EUROPE

As we pass northwards along the African continent, over a welter of tribal peoples, we need merely note the cry for national recognition which ascends to us from the lower valley of the Nile. The descendants of the ancient Egyptians, mixed with a conglomeration of racial stocks drawn from Africa, Asia, and Europe, are agitating for 'national' independence and isolation. It would take us too far afield to consider the national and racial problems of the 300 millions of diverse peoples of India who are linked together by only one bond--the government extended to them by the British Empire. Nor need we stay now to speculate on the nationalities which will arise from the wreckage of Turkey, Austria, or Russia, nor shall we dally with the Balkan jumble of nationalities. We simply note that these instincts or feelings which compel men of like speech, habits, and traditions to group themselves into independent national units are most active and powerful where racial or national boundaries are most confused.

ARE THE JEWS A SEPARATE RACE?

In the strict sense in which the anthropologist uses the term 'Race' there is in Europe no racial problem. Our universal disturbances are those of nationality. There are no two nationalities in Europe, so different in physical appearance, that their hybrid progeny may not pass as a member of either parent nationality. In the anthropologist's sense there are no racial bastards produced by the union of European nationalities. If we except the Lapps and other Mongolian elements in Russia there is only one people in Europe with a legitimate claim to be regarded as racially different from the general population. That exception is the Jewish people. There are seven millions of them forming an archipelago in the sea of European peoples, their main islands lying in the centre of the continent, north and south of the Carpathians. The Jews maintain a racial frontier, such as dominant races surround themselves with; they carry themselves as if racially distinct. Their original stock was clearly eastern in its derivation; the peoples of Europe sprang from another racial source. The outliers of the Jewish racial archipelago are exposed to the cross-currents of the Gentile seas. The smaller islets are too far removed to be sheltered and strengthened by the race sense which is bred and nursed wherever permanent Jewish settlements are established. However much the Jewish racial frontier may be strengthened by the faith which is the standard of the race, raids have been made, are now made, across that frontier and a certain degree of hybridization has occurred. Even thus exposed in the eddying seas of modern civilization, the race spirit of the Jews has preserved the greater part of the original characters carried into Europe by the pioneer Semitic bands. In 90 per cent. of Jews the physical or Semitic characters are apparent to the eye even of the uninitiated Gentile. In the Jewish people we see Nature steering one of her cargoes of differentiated humanity between the Scylla and Charybdis of the modern sea of industrial civilization. And race instinct is her steersman.

NATIONAL MOVEMENTS ARE OF TWO KINDS

The processes of nationalization in Europe are of two kinds; on the one hand we see smaller nationalities being compounded into larger units; on the other we see large nationalities being disintegrated. We see fusion taking place and we see disruption. Which is Nature's method? All the great nationalities of Europe have been built up by fusion--Italy, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Germany. As the last named is the most recent and most clearly understood case of fusion we may glance at the means by which it was accomplished. The nationalities and separate states which were united to form the German Empire were derived from at least three stocks, each of which show well-differentiated physical characters. These human stocks were united by a common tongue. By war and conquest the empire surrounded itself--isolated itself--by a ring of enemies. The Germans carried their frontiers beyond the limits of their speech and set out to make Danes, Frenchmen, and Poles members of their own nationality. They sought to strengthen their national frontiers by tariff barricades. They linked themselves together by the multiplication of means of rapid transit and fostered the growth of a national or tribal spirit by active, persistent, and widespread tribal propaganda. The tribal spirit, which is an innate quality of every people, was roused to such a pitch that in the crisis of war the national or tribal bonds held; sixty millions of people acted as if they were members of a Highland clan. Even defeat, if it has loosened, has not broken the national bonds which were forged by the governing classes of Germany.

In all these processes of national fusion, as in the formation of all trusts in the modern commercial world, the anthropologist observes that the operation commences from above and works downwards through the mass of the people. The governing class plays upon and fans into flame the tribal embers of the popular mind. It is altogether a different process which brings about the disruption of a nationality. Disruption has nothing to do with race; the nearer the blood relationship between two adjacent peoples the more likely is disruption to occur. We can find no better illustration of this truth than when we cross the Baltic from Germany to Scandinavia. The people of Norway and Sweden are of the same racial composition; they have many interests in common; union should have given strength. Yet after a partnership which lasted for less than a century, they agreed to separate. In this case the movement came from below; a tribal feeling which swept through the people of Norway compelled a disruption. All the natural inherited forces in a people tend towards disruption. Only when reason takes the helm can these natural disruptive forces be overcome and the process of fusion be effected.

BRITISH NATIONAL PROBLEMS

Having thus made a hurried survey of some of the more instructive, racial, and national problems abroad we now return homewards to apply the knowledge thus gained to the understanding of the national manifestations of our own countrymen. There is no need to remind you that the national spirit of Robert Boyle's native country is always boiling up, often boiling over. Scotland, too, has a national spirit, so has Wales; in both countries this spirit is separatist in its essence, but the national instinctive tendencies are curbed and guided by the higher reasoning centres of the brain. In England itself the sense of nationality is usually dormant; only an insult or a threat from without stirs this gigantic force into life. In Ireland the national kettle is kept always on the boil; in Scotland and Wales it is kept simmering; in England, on the other hand, it dozes quietly on the hob. Nevertheless English nationality is a force which pervades the whole population lying between Berwick-on-Tweed and Land's End. In the course of centuries statesmanship has succeeded in raising up in the minds of all the inhabitants of the British Isles--all save in the greater part of Ireland--a new and wider sense of nationality, a spirit of British nationality. Why we never succeeded in raising that spirit in the whole of Ireland represents the major part of our present quest.

ARE CELTS AND SAXONS OF DIFFERENT RACIAL STOCKS?

At the outset of our inquiry we are met by the ancient belief that the British Isles are divided by a racial frontier which separates the western or Celtic peoples from the eastern inhabitants of Saxon origin. It was my fortune to be born on the border of the Celtic fringe, and no one growing up under these circumstances can fail to realize that the Celtic spirit is a real and live force. Is it a racial antagonism which is elicited when Celt and Saxon are in conflict? What is the physical difference between a Celt and a Saxon? That is a matter to which I have given my attention for some years, and the results of my inquiries I will place before you as briefly as I may. In the audience now before me there are certain to be pure representatives of all our four nationalities; Celts and Saxons as pure as any in the country are sure to be present in any university audience. But except for a trick of speech or a local mannerism, the most expert anthropologist cannot tell Celt from Saxon or an Irishman from a Scotsman. There are, to be sure, certain physical types which prevail in one country more than in another, but I do not know of any feature of the body or any trait of the mind, or of any combination of features or traits which will permit an expert, on surveying groups of university students, to say this group is from Scotland, that from Wales, the third from Ireland, and the fourth from England. In stature and in colouring, in form of skull and of face, elaborate trials have revealed national difference only of the most minor kind. Nay, we know very well the physical features of the Saxon pioneers who became the masters of England and dominated the lowlands of Scotland. Their graveyards have been examined by the score, but it is not by the form of the skulls and the strength of the limb bones that we know we are dealing with the graves of ancient Saxons, but by the implements, ornaments, and utensils which were buried with them. As regards shape of skull or form of bones I do not think a practised craniologist could distinguish the skulls and bones found in an ancient Saxon cemetery in Surrey from the remains of a Celtic grave in Connemara, so much are Celtic and Saxon types alike. Were we to dress one group of fishermen from the coast of Norfolk and another from the shores of Connaught in the same garb, I do not think there is an anthropologist in Europe who by mere inspection could tell the Irish from the English group. From a physical point of view the Celt and Saxon are one; whatever be the source of their mutual antagonism, it does not lie in a difference of race. It is often said that we British are a mixed and mongrel collection of types and breeds; the truth is that as regards physical type the inhabitants of the British Isles are the most uniform of all the large nationalities of Europe.

ALL BRITISH NATIONALITIES ARE OF THE NORTH SEA STOCK

The statement which I have just made, that Britons are really a uniform folk, seems altogether at variance with the teaching of history. What I am to say now will explain a discrepancy which, in its essence, is only superficial. Our written history opens with the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain; it was an 'occupation' or 'plantation', not a true colonization. On the other hand, the Saxon and Danish invasions ended in widely spread and true colonizations of Britain. The Norman invasion, on the other hand, was of the nature of a plantation. I will make the difference between the various forms of invasion apparent presently. There have been, too, flocks of immigrant refugees at various times. We have the most positive evidence that long before the dawn of written history the processes of invasion and colonization had been going on in Britain. In all these invasions, historic and prehistoric, with one important exception, no strange or new racial stock was added to the British Isles; all were apparently branches of the human stock which still occupy the north-west of Europe--men of the Nordic type--or as I should prefer to call them, the North Sea breed. We are only now beginning to realize that even at the dawn of the present period, a period marked by the retreat of the ice sheet from the Baltic basin, the seashore and the sea itself were the high roads along which primitive peoples migrated and spread. They were people of the same human type who spread themselves along the shores of the Mediterranean and occupied its coastal lands. The distribution of the Mediterranean breed was determined by the limits of their sea. Apparently the shores of the North Sea were settled in a similar way. We have but scanty remains from the midden heaps along its ancient shores to tell us about the kind of folk these early settlers were, but so far as the evidence goes it supports the supposition that the Nordic type was already in possession of north-west Europe before the dawn of the Neolithic period. We can only explain the distribution of the Nordic type along the shorelands of the North Sea, of the Baltic, and of the British seas, on the supposition of a primitive and ancient North Sea stock--made up of men of the Nordic type. The earliest cave dwellers of England were of this type. It was this North Sea stock which gave Britain not only her original population but also her succession of colonists. It is certain that there were also invasions of Britain from the Mediterranean stock, but we have only to compare a sample of our modern population with one drawn from a Mediterranean people to see how little our blood has been affected by a southern mixture. In all these invasions and colonizations there is only one which was not drawn from the North Sea stock. That invasion took place in the second millenium before Christ, when the round-headed stock of Central Europe broke through the Nordic belt, reached the shores of the North Sea, and invaded Britain on a scale which has never been equalled before or since save in Saxon times. That invasion of round-heads broke first on England and Scotland, but Wales and particularly Ireland received in time a full share of the fresh arrivals. With this one exception all the invaders and settlers of the British Isles were waves derived from the same prolific source--the North Sea breed. We see, then, why there should be little physical difference between Celt and Saxon. The one was an earlier wave, the other a much later wave of the same stock. But each wave brought its own mode of speech and its own tribal spirit. Of all the inhabitants of the British Isles the Irish may be regarded as the purest representatives of the North Sea or Nordic stock.

THERE ARE KINDS OF COLONIZATION--SPONTANEOUS AND FORCED

The refusal of the Irish to merge their sense of nationality in a common British whole cannot be explained by any difference in blood or race. We shall get nearer to the heart of the problem if we can discover why the people on the north-east of Ireland, particularly in counties Antrim and Down, in contrast with the rest of Ireland, are sharers in the common British spirit. It is true that, even in ancient times, there was a community of feeling between Ulstermen and the West Scotch. Even in Neolithic times their cultures show a free intercourse. Before the plantation of Ireland by lowland folk in the seventeenth century, Ulster was frequented by bands of Highland Scots. Neither of these circumstances explain the unionist spirit of Ulster. Nor is the spirit of north-east Ulster a matter of British admixture. A careful examination of all the available data relating to the plantation of Ireland between 1560 and 1660 will show that an even greater proportion of British blood was poured into Leinster and Munster than into Ulster. At the end of the plantation period probably one Irishman out of every three in the provinces of Leinster and Munster had blood of British colonists in his veins. In this reckoning no count is made of the people who landed and settled in Ireland in the five centuries which preceded 1560--Danes, Normans, Welsh, and English. It is not the number of British colonists which has made north-east Ulster separatist in spirit, so far as the rest of Ireland is concerned--and unionist, so far as Great Britain is concerned. The north-east region of Ireland was the only part which was truly colonized; only a real or spontaneous colonization can carry a tribal or national spirit to a new land.

For the anthropologist a true or spontaneous colonization is a totally different process from one which is false or forced. At the very time at which the English Government was settling or planting colonists on Irish soil and among Irish people, a spontaneous exodus set in among the North Sea peoples. This exodus--a people's movement--established a Saxon fringe along the eastern sea-board of North America. The exodus, which began in the seventeenth century, has continued to the present time--three full centuries. Thus fed, the fringe extended until it reached the Pacific shore. The original fringe represented a true tribal settlement; within the pioneer communities grew up the consciousness of nationality and of race-antagonism, which we have already noted in the Saxon peoples of North America. The break-away--the natural process of disintegration, represented by the War of Independence--is usually explained as a result of bad government. The disputes between the British Government and the colonists were certainly the circumstances which determined the disruption, but the forces which impelled the colonists to action were those subconscious impulses which Nature has planted deep in the human mind as part of her evolutionary machinery.

THE SAXON SETTLEMENT OF BRITAIN

The colonization of North America, which took place in the full light of history, gives us the means of understanding the Saxon colonization of England, which otherwise lies obscure in the twilight of our written records. In both cases we have to deal with a spontaneous or popular movement. One was across the wide Atlantic, the other across an almost land-locked sea. Both commenced by the formation of a fringe of true settlement wherein inherited tribal traditions and organizations were nursed and strengthened; in both cases the original fringe was fed by a stream of immigrants continuing over several centuries. The chief difference between the two movements lies in this: the American colonists encountered a people who were so physically unlike themselves as to raise a racial frontier, whereas the Saxon people pushed their way into a land inhabited by people of their own stock. The progeny of the captured British native could be reared so as to become a true Saxon. The Saxon colonization, as it spread over the land, engulfed--when it did not exterminate--the natives and their tribal organizations in their agricultural village communities. The Saxon settlement of England held and prospered because it was a true colonization.

THE PLANTATION AND COLONIZATION OF IRELAND