by
Anthony M. Ludovici
- The South African Observer 3.12, 1958, pp. 12–13; 4.1, 1958, pp. 12–13; 4.2, 1958, pp. 12–13; 4.3, 1958, pp. 11–12; 4.4, 1958, pp. 12–13; 4.5, 1958, pp. 12–13; 4.6, 1958, pp. 10–12; 4.7, 1958, pp. 10–11; 4.8, 1958, pp. 12–13; 4.9, 1959, pp. 11–12; 4.10, 1959, pp. 12–13; 4.11, 1959, pp. 10–11; 4.12, 1959, pp. 12–13; 5.1, 1959, pp. 12–13; 5.2, 1959, pp. 12–13; 5.3, 1959, pp. 10–11; 5.4, 1959, pp. 12–13; 5.5, 1959, pp. 12–13
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I
The sort of people who at the present time are vociferously advocating miscegenation, or the indiscriminate mixing of all the different races, tribal stocks, and types of mankind, and who are assiduously deluding the ill-informed and sentimental public in England and elsewhere, by declaring pontifically that such mixing does not matter — aye! is actually all to the good, consist of two principal classes, which may be described as follows:
(1) The first class, which includes women of what social rank soever, is made up of people who, wholly ignorant of the scientific, historical and political facts about race, and, when Black falls in love with White (or vice versá), mistake the lump they feel in their throats for an occult signal that the procreation of mongrels is a noble achievement; are inclined to adopt the ultra-Liberal attitude to the question chiefly out of sentimentality or what is popularly called "good nature".
They have a stubborn belief in the democratic virtue and justice of the miscegenist's point of view, and forgetting, as all modern sentimentalists do, the fate of the offspring of racial misalliances, are overwhelmed by their sympathy with the races, whether red, brown, yellow or black, whose connubium the white racialists refuse. They firmly believe moreover that this sympathy denotes the loftiness of their moral sentiments.
(2) The second class consists of those who, although often University graduates and fully aware of the truth about miscegenation and its untoward results, and who are moreover familiar with all the findings which indicate the undesirability of trying to blend disparate types and stocks and even disparate types within the same race; yet have either interested motives, or merely political, religious or moral reasons for deluding the ignorant about the matter and, using their scientific authority to distort or misrepresent the scientific facts in consequence.
Women scientists are prominent in this category, and all the so-called Race "Experts" who worked for UNESCO belong to it. Indeed, it was to the latter that the world owes that mendacious Statement on Race Problems which contains the following wholly fallacious doctrine that "There is no evidence that race mixture as such produces bad results from the biological point of view". (STATEMENT 4 of SUMMARY OF FINDINGS, NEW BIOLOGY, PENGUIN
There are two major and well-established scientific reasons why miscegenation should be avoided, and any layman familiar only with barn fowls knows at least one of them. But, before we discuss these two most serious drawbacks to indiscriminate crossing between different cultivated types of organisms, whether animal or human, we must first get a clear idea of what Race means.
Those people who, like Dr. Ashley Montagu and his followers, argue that, because misguided publicists and politicians have misunderstood the question of Race and, like Stewart Chamberlain and the Nazis, have claimed superior qualities for an alleged "Nordic", "Teuton" or "Blond-Dolichocephalic Aryan" race, and assumed that a certain European nation were of that race — those who argue because of this the whole idea of Race is nonsense and can no longer serve any useful purpose either in science or popular speech, forget that the careful, well-informed and logical thinker is not thus jockeyed out of his claims, his beliefs, or his use of precise terminology, because a few sophists have misused scientific terms.
He very rightly declines to abandon the notion and fact of Race simply because some ignoramuses have thought about it emotionally and incorrectly. To do so would be no more sensible than to abandon the notion and scientific term of Psychology merely because of the spate of English novels — from Charlotte M. Yonge's to Virginia Woolf's — in which an utterly false grasp of human psychology is repeatedly revealed.
Thus, as Professor Clyde Kluckholm justly observes: "Because race prejudice leads to racial and international sickness, there is the temptation to deny without sufficient evidence all validity and significance to the concept of race even in the sense of 'breed' and 'stock'. The fact that current popular notions of 'race' are largely mythological and without scientific underpinning, should not lead us to throw the baby out with the bath." (MIRROR FOR MAN, 1949, Chap. V).
Race, as many interested and none too scrupulous people would have us believe, does not merely suggest a certain kind of popular superstition; it is not just a term standing for an obsolete and exploded assumption. It is a word representing an established natural fact, and means any kind of sub-species, vegetable, animal or human, which has become differentiated from the rest of tile species as the result of prolonged isolation in a more or less stable and peculiar environment, and has thus through artificial or natural selection, endogamy (inbreeding), mutation, and the acquisition of particular habits and diets, developed a distinctive type which has become stabilized and breeds true.
Race is thus a taxonomic or classifying term, meaning a variant of a species which, through protracted segregation in a particular environment and the operation of natural selection (in the case of domestic breeds of animals the selection has of course been artificial) acting on the changes incidental to natural variation, mutation, etc., has acquired distinctive features that have become standardized throughout its members and produced characters that are homogeneous.
When we grasp the significance of this definition, all kinds of examples of "races" occur to our minds. We think of the various races of dogs, from the Poodles, Alsatians, Boxers, Dachshunds, to the Fox- and Bull-Terriers, Pekinese, Spaniels, etc. We may think of the various barn-fowls, from the Rhode Island Reds, the Light Sussex, Orpingtons and Dorkings, to the Leghorns, Wyandottes, etc. And we may also think of the various races of Man, from the Chinese, Japanese, Ainos, Papuans, Australian Bushmen and Negroes, to the Maoris, Red Indians, Hottentots, Mongolians and Dravidians, etc.
As already pointed out, in the case of the dogs and fowls, the selection which by degrees differentiated the variants from their original common stock has been largely artificial and operated through Man's interference. But, in the case of Man, the selection has been natural and has operated ever since Man's original forebears came to be dispersed over the globe and to be settled as isolated communities which, separated by natural or artificial barriers, and mostly by long distances, began to undergo changes independently of each other, through natural selection acting on modifications due to genetic, environmental, habit-forming, climatic, dietetic and other influences.
In this way, just as each race of dog and barn fowl developed peculiarities of pigmentation, size, general build, instinct and ability, so each race of Man, acquired peculiarities of physiognomy, hair-growth, pigmentation and mental and bodily ability, which distinguished it from other races.
To deny, therefore, that Race conveys any clear idea, or that it is a term without validity when applied to Mankind, is neither sound nor altogether sane; and we may safely suspect all those who emphasize and press this denial, of having ulterior and interested motives for doing so. Either they belong to a race which is or has been generally despised, and consequently wish to have the whole question of racial differentiation hushed up, or treated as a foolish daydream, so that they may pass unnoticed, or without provoking comment or criticism, among people different from themselves; or else they wish to induce those who are racially different from themselves, to accept them as social, political, and particularly as biological equals, and hence as possible partners in marriage.
In any case, it is most significant that the whole world-wide propaganda in favour of miscegenation and against racial discrimination, should have become hardly more than 25 years old last January. Let those who see nothing remarkable about this fact continue to wave their international and egalitarian flags and lisp "No Colour or any other Bar!" They will never learn and are beyond help.
Enough damage was done to the human race when, over two thousand years ago, that forbiddingly ugly monster Socrates tried to save his self-esteem by persuading the Athenians that appearance meant nothing. But it is difficult to compute the extent of the damage humanity might suffer if this new teaching, that Race meant nothing, became generally accepted. Let everyone ask himself: "Whose self-esteem is this new teaching saving"?
As I have already remarked, there are two most important and, from the popular point of view, little known, consequences of mixing races, whether of dogs, fowls or men; and I shall explain what these consequences are in the sequel to this article.
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II
Of the two major consequences of race mixture, which I said would be discussed in my second article, the first is reversion; that is, the recession towards a stage of development which each of a mongrel's parents has already surpassed and left far behind. Only people engaged in keeping and breeding animals, or in cultivating trees and plants, are aware of this phenomenon and of its importance as a factor in impairing and ultimately totally obliterating painfully acquired, or cultivated, animal and vegetable characteristics.
For, as I pointed out in my first article, a race is a variant of a species, which has acquired its peculiar features and qualities by becoming differentiated from its primitive ancestral stem through isolation and all that this means in the matter of selection operating as a preserver and eliminator of the genetic and other changes incidental to a segregated existence in a more or less stable environment.
Now, it was very soon discovered that, if there is one thing that Nature abhors, besides a vacuum, it is the confusion of the traits separately acquired by different variants of a species during their isolation; and since race-miscegenation, or the mixing of races, has precisely this effect and causes a hopeless jumble of the characteristics distinguishing one race from another, the result of the indiscriminate crossing of races is that Nature, as it were, throws up her hands in desperation and, refusing to have anything more to do with the muddle, prefers to start afresh from scratch. The half-breeds, quater-breeds and octoroons thus tend insensibly to regress to the primitive and ancestral stock.
This is the scientific truth in a simplified form; but it states all the essentials of the process known as "Degeneration" following miscegenation. For what is Degeneration? At bottom, it is the loss by an individual organism or plant, or by a whole breed of organisms or plants, of some of the painfully acquired qualities or features that have been evolved by a particular race. It means stepping back along the line of development to a stage or even a starting point, long abandoned.
Darwin was one of the earlier biologists to record the nature of this result of race-crossing, which however had long been known to lay breeders. He found, for instance, that if he took a male Nun (a white pigeon with head, tail and primary wing feathers black), a breed established as long as 1600, and crossed it with a red common Tumbler, which variety usually breeds true, could rear several young all of which had the features of the wild rock pigeon, from which all distinct types of pigeons are descended. Although "neither parent had a trace of blue plumage, or of bars on the wing and tail" these cross-breeds had blue in their plumage besides one or two primitive markings.
He also obtained similar results — i.e., similar reversionary characters — from crossing male black Barbs with female red Spots, snow-white Fantails with Trumpeters, and so on. He records kindred findings in respect of ducks, horses, rabbits, cattle and pigs. (See THE VARIATION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS UNDER DOMESTICATION, Ed. 1885, Vol. II, p. 13).
Half a century after Darwin, A. D. Darbishire confirmed these findings by crossing the Japanese waltzing mouse and the Albino, and obtained a mongrel "hardly distinguishable from the house mouse" (BREEDING AND THE MENDELIAN DISCOVERY, 1911, Chaps. VI, VIII, XIV); whilst Archdall Reid records similar phenomena in PRIN-
But, as already suggested, lay cultivators of trees and plants and lay breeders of animals, who may not necessarily have known of Darwin's and his fellow biologists' findings, had long been aware of this process of reversion following race-crosses, and there are many of their records strewn over the literature of biography and travel.
Even England's famous prime minister, David Lloyd George, through his experiences with his apple-trees at Churt, became familiar with the essential facts of regression through race-mixture; and although no one would suspect this famous Liberal of wishing to spread propaganda calculated to vindicate the Cause of Aristocracy, Good Breeding and Sound Lineage, he spoke in the House of Commons on July 13th, 1939 on the subject of bud-pruning and graft-crosses on his own apple trees, as follows:
"You cut off all the bud branches that produce a particular apple and then graft these little bud branches on to other apple trees in order to convert that stem to the production of a particular crop. But I will tell you what happens sometimes. Unless you are very careful . . . the old stock breaks out and if it does it destroys the tree. You do not get either a pippin or a Bramley. All that happens is that the tree is so utterly muddled between the one and the other that it produces only sour desiccated crabs," — i.e. the primitive fruit from which all varieties of apple derive. (The reader will not fail to note Lloyd George's remark about the tree's being "so utterly muddled between the one and the other" race of apple).
Another example is to be found in Edison Marshall's reference to the race-mixture in fowls, belonging to the blacks of Georgia. He writes: "The jungle fowl of southern Asia is the ancestor of all domestic chickens (he refers to the red jungle fowl — gallus ferrugineus — from which all our domestic races are descended). By artificial selection many types have been evolved, from big Rhode Island Reds to little bantams. But selection stops (he means segregation of races stops) when the coloured man of Georgia begins to raise poultry. After a few generations of free and easy mingling of all types of chickens, naturally the birds revert to the original type. In other words, our southern darkies are raising jungle cocks without knowing it. (SHIKAR AND SAFARI, 1950, Chap. III, 5.).
It is thus, in the first place, the phenomenon of reversion that constitutes the danger of miscegenation; because it means the loss of the characteristics, often valuable and rare, which a particular race may have acquired in isolation; and, in this matter Man follows the same laws as the animals and plants. Hence the proverbial disparagement of mongrelized human beings by all those who have learnt to know both pure-bred and hybrid stocks.
The constant complaint against members of the latter groups is that they fall far short of what either of their parent stocks were. This has been stoutly denied; but even when admitted, the cause of the frequently noticed unreliability and general inferiority of half-castes has been persistently ascribed (especially in recent years) to the influence of environment. It has been argued, for instance, that the mongrel human, owing to the contempt he often inspires in the races whose blood is mingled in his veins, suffers rebuffs, slights and discriminatory limitations, which embitter and dehumanize him, and thus deform his character which would otherwise be noble, gentle and praiseworthy.
But those who glibly make these claims are prone to an emotional exaggeration of the potency of environmental influences, which is hardly borne out by the facts. Give them the task of transforming sow's ears into silk purses (which is actually the principal concern of reformatories and special schools for delinquents etc.) and they soon discover how relatively low is the power of environment, alone, compared with the forces of native and inborn traits and propensities; and how feeble and unavailing even constantly repeated lessons may prove against the promptings of a depraved character.
When once we grasp, however, that race-crossing causes the first backward step along the line which has produced the highest members of our race out of our pre-historic, not to say sub-human, ancestors, it is immediately seen why the process means — i.e., apart from a few happy exceptions — regression to a more or less primitive stage of development. And if this is understood, the enormous amount of miscegenation that has occurred since the radical revolution in the means of transport suddenly made the many distinct peoples of the globe unprecedently fluid, may be held to explain to some extent, not only the widespread increase in dishonesty, juvenile delinquency, crimes of violence, and general degeneration, but also the marked decline in stamina, robust health, beauty, strength and diligence. (The latter point can be explained and elaborated only in my next article).
Commenting on his discoveries in the sphere of reversion Darwin said: "We may perhaps infer that the degraded state of so many half-castes is in fact due to reversion to a primitive and savage condition produced by the act of crossing, even if mainly due to the unfavourable moral conditions under which they are generally reared." (Ibid. Vol. II, p. 21). It will be seen that Darwin here tries to be fair and makes a concession to the environmentalists; but in his magnum opus he had already stated, "there are two factors: namely, the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions. The former seems to be much the more important; for nearly similar variations sometimes arise under . . . dissimilar conditions; and, on the other hand, dissimilar variations arise under conditions which appear to be nearly uniform." He repeats this statement later in the book as follows: "In all cases there are two factors, the nature of the organism, which is much the most important of the two, and the nature of the conditions." (ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Introduction and Chap. V).
Since Darwin's time there has been much confirmation of his findings in this respect. Professor E. G. Conklin, for instance, tells us: "There is no satisfactory evidence that good environment will produce improved heredity, or bad environment, bad heredity." (Contribution to HUMAN BIOLOGY AND RACIAL WELFARE, 1930, p. 572) This hardly attributes to environment the power that the environmentalists claim for it. But there are many other witnesses to the same effect. (See, for instance, Mjoen, in an article, in THE EUGENICS REVIEW, VOL. XIV, p. 36; Davenport, quoted in R. Ruggles Gates' HEREDITY AND EUGENICS, 1923, p. 234); and Lundborg: HEREDITAS, Vol. II, R.B.M., p. 79, and DIE RASSENMISCHUNG BEIM MENSCHEN, 1931, p. 163).
So that when Bishop Knight-Bruce remarks, apparently with some approval, that "There is a saying on the Zambesi: 'God made white men: God made black men: but the devil made half-castes'" (GOLD AND THE GOSPEL IN MASHONALAND, 1949, p. 101), we may understand how this saying arose; and though it may not be universally true and exceptions are frequent, fundamentally it expresses the general experience of mankind.
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III
I now come to the second of the two major consequences of race mixture, which, although quite as important and, owing to its often hidden features, certainly as grave as that discussed in my last article, is much less widely known. In fact, it might be justly claimed that the general public are wholly ignorant of it. It appears to have escaped the notice of lay breeders of animals and, in its effects on health and on the smooth functioning of the human organism, has failed to this day to receive adequate attention from Medicine. Even in assessing the worthiness of human hybrids and in explaining their frequently inferior psycho-physical quality, this second major consequence of miscegenation is too rarely taken into account.
Briefly stated, the consequence in question results from a curious freak of the mechanisms of heredity, by which offspring inherit their bodily organs and parts, not as one working outfit patterned on the constitution of either their father or mother, but as a haphazard omnium-gatherum of organs and parts inherited independently from either parent. Thus even different parts of the same feature, such as the nose, may be contributed independently by either parent, so that one or two parts come from the father and the remainder from the mother. (It is this fact that explains the puzzling phenomenon so often seen of a family of ugly children being born to parents, each of whom, is good looking in a different way; or at least of the presence of one or two ugly children from such parents).
If we can imagine motor cars as being able to breed, and propagating their kind after the style in which animals and Man do, their offspring would never be perfect replicas of one of the two parent cars, but made of parts taken independently from either parent car. If both parents were, let us say Ford ANGLIASor Ford CONSULS, this would be all right; for then the independently inherited parts would assemble into either a perfect ANGLIA or CONSUL as the case might be. But suppose the cars were different models, then the fact that the offspring inherited its parts independently from each parent would make the resulting machine quite incapable of functioning.
In the animal and human world, owing to the softness of the tissues and the infinite adaptability of both bones, muscles and organs, things are neither so inflexible nor unaccommodating as in the world of machinery. There is more elasticity and adjustability, and even the most unfavourable conjunction of incompatible parts inherited independently from disparate parents does not prevent life and movement. Functioning of the ill-assorted parts, although imperfect and irregular, occurs all the same.
Nevertheless — and this is the fact not yet sufficiently appreciated by modern Medicine — disharmony and unhappy functioning, however faint or acute they may be, are always the inevitable result; and no matter how heroically and perseveringly the body may for a while wrestle with its difficulties, and how assiduously artificial aids to functioning may be recommended and applied, some untoward effects in the form of obscure malaise and unpaired function (often so obscure as to defy or elude diagnosis), or even actual disease, must occur and, of course, increase in gravity as age adds its share to the agencies causing the morbidity.
In the crossing of races which are conspicuously disparate, the maladjustment of parts independently inherited by the offspring, may be so severe as to prejudice viability. There may be disharmonies so pronounced between teeth and jaws in hybrids as to make mal-occlusion not only a disfigurement but a deformity that impairs speech and makes even mastication difficult. Crowded teeth in children whose jaws have been inherited from a mother with a. V-shaped palate, and whose teeth derive from a father with widely arched jaws, may require to have some of their permanent teeth extracted so as to make for approximately regular spacing.
We have but to imagine the consequences of a similar incompatibility of parts in other areas of the hybrid's body in order at once to understand why obscure cases of dysfunction and even of serious disease, may be the outcome of a radical disproportion or disharmony between the bodily parts of mongrels; and when we hear of cases of heterochromia, of dislocation of the hip-joint, of Hirschprung's disease, or of hepatic insufficiency (due to the hybrid's possession of a liver inherited from a small, and his frame and stature inherited from a tall race) etc., we may be pretty sure that we are probably becoming acquainted with some of the more acute manifestations of the hybrid's psycho-physical disharmony. The fact that these manifestations, though harassing and disabling, may be less acute and probably more plentiful and widespread in their sub-acute than in their acute form, probably accounts for much of present-day morbidity of a mild form.
At all events, from the data available in 1927, Dr. F. A. E. Crew of Edinburgh, was already able to conclude that "the fact that there are inherent differences in the size of organs and parts is of profound significance when it is remembered that it involves the inevitable sequel that racial and other crossings can lead to serious disharmony" (ORGANIC INHERITANCE IN MAN, Chap. VI. The italics are mine, A.M.L., as it seemed to me important that the reader should note Dr. Crew's inclusion of "other crossings" besides those of race in his, generalization).
But over 80 years ago, Herbert Spencer had already stated that "The offspring of two organisms not identical in constitution is a heterogeneous mixture of the two, and not a homogeneous mean between them." (PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY, pp. 397–398). Ninety years ago Darwin called attention to the fact and given many instances of it; his conclusion being that "With hybrids and mongrels it frequently or even generally happens that one part of the body resembles more or less closely one parent and another part the other parent." (THE VARIATION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS UNDER DOMESTICATION, Vol. II, Chap. XV). Since his time, there has been abundant independent confirmation of this finding (See Mjoen: THE EUGENICS REVIEW, Vol. XIV, p. 37; Drs. E. Baur, E. Fisher and F. Lenz: HUMAN HEREDITY, 1931, p. 296; Davenport, quoted in R. Ruggles-Gates' HEREDITY IN MAN, 1929, p. 329; and among the earlier investigators, Dr. E. S. Talbot: DEGENERACY, ITS CAUSES, SIGNS AND RESULTS, 1898).
Davenport says explicitly that grave disharmonies must result from the mating of disparate couples and speaks of large men with small internal organs or inadequate circulatory systems "which conditions tax the organism;" whilst Dr. Ernst Rodenwaldt called attention to morphological anomalies occurring through the independent inheritance of legs, arms and trunks from
Miss R. N. Fleming, who made a study "of some hundreds of children of mixed Anglo-Negro parentage", confirmed all the findings previously recorded — at least "as regards visible and conspicuous disharmonies. (A STUDY OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT, 1933, VII).
The reader has but to ponder a moment on the consequences to health, happiness and looks (for, as we have seen, the independent inheritance from disparate parents of parts of the face may produce hideous results even when both parents are good-looking in their own particular way) of all these possible disharmonies and discordances — for some investigators include even endocrinological disharmonies among the consequences of crossing — (See, for instance Dr. Crew, Op. cit.), in order at once to appreciate the intrepid mendacity of an expensive and pontifical organisation like UNESCO, which can have the effrontery so to trade on the ignorance and gullibility of the general public, as to publish the claim quoted in my first article, that "there is no evidence that race mixture as such produces bad results from the biological point of view."
It may be argued that, after all, race mixture is now a comparatively rare occurrence, at least in Western Europe. But, surprising as the statement may seem to readers unacquainted with the relevant literature, the very same untoward consequences which result from race mixture, also result from what, in Western Europe, is now so common as to be almost universal — namely the miscegenation of different types. For everything that has been said about the consequences of race crosses, naturally also applies to the crossing of disparate types in the same population or nation. And it is in this kind of reckless mixing of disparate people that we have one of the main clues to the reasons for the widespread and increasing morbidity of our present human world.
Yet it is safe to say that hardly one in a million of the population of England, for instance, is aware of the fact. Nay, ask any one of these ill-informed millions whether there is anything odd or questionable about marrying a person utterly unlike oneself in build, size, pigmentation, and endocrine balance, and they would scarcely understand your meaning, let alone suspect that there might be an important truth behind it. Their ignorance of the whole of this side of mating is complete, and it is kept complete by a powerful minority who control publicity and secretly and invisibly mould what is subsequently called "Public Opinion."
The reader has only to open the pages of an illustrated weekly and to look at the couples whose engagements or marriages are announced; he has only to keep his eyes open in buses, trains, restaurants and theatres, in order to satisfy himself that, owing to the prevailing heterogeneity of our present population, the fact that Englishmen marry English women is no guarantee whatsoever that their offspring will not have bodies which are a mosaic of disharmonies and incompatibilities. And while the incidence of divorces and legal separations soars without calling anybody's attention to the probability that this may have some connexion with the psycho-physical incompatibility of modern couples, morbidity, acute and sub-acute, increases annually and is largely helped to increase by the radical unsoundness of generations born to strikingly disparate parents.
So much for false indoctrination by the unscrupulously knowledgeable, and for ignorant sentimentality on the part of the mob whom they influence!
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IV
In England to-day most people mistake a lump in their throats for a thought and as the bigger the lump the deeper the thought is believed to be, fatal errors of judgment are constantly committed which, if the truth were known, have no cerebral provenance whatsoever, but come straight from the adrenal glands.
Thus, in spite of the prodigious increase in demented, neurotic and maladjusted persons, it has so far occurred to lamentably few people to connect this multiplication of the mentally deranged with the wild and reckless miscegenation, whether of races, types, or merely occupational family strains, that has been going on for over three centuries.
Yet readers who have carefully noted the facts given in my last two articles, must have inferred that, if the mixing of constitutional disparates leads to disharmonies and confusion in their progeny, and hence to imperfect functioning, ill-health and ugliness, it is unlikely that the mind and character of such mongrels can have escaped corresponding conflicts and discords. For these must necessarily arise between the instinctive impulses and the passions they inherit from one, and those they inherit from the other, parent. When confronted with alternatives, their will is inevitably divided and they become a weak-willed generation.
It is probably on this account that the ancient Egyptian term for indecision —hèt-snaou — really meant "having two hearts." For will implies the clear consciousness of a particular aim, together with singleminded resolution in its pursuit. If, however, differences in the racial habits and characters of parents lead in their off-spring to an inability to follow a straight line, it is because a complex of minor wills, all pulling different ways, causes crookedness; and individual character goes to pieces — which is the condition of the majority to-day. When Prof. Wilhelm Röpke exclaimed, "Has there ever been so much lack of character and so many weak knees as in our generation?" (CIVITAS HUMANA, 1948, p. 49), he was obviously referring to this state of affairs. Half a century earlier, Dr. A. Reibmayr had already declared that "inbred people have character and half-castes or hybrids are notoriously characterless." (INZUCHT UND VERMISCHUNG, 1897, p. 37).
The very state of obscure and unaccountable anxiety now afflicting millions of moderns, is due chiefly to the subconscious conflicts arising from deep incompatibilities in their inherited impulses, passions and propensities. Extreme random breeding is thus probably connected with the increase in mental instability and, among other authorities, Mjoen lends support to this view when he says of Lapp-Norwegian hybrids that "the main feature of this type was an unbalanced mind." (EUGENICS REV. April, 1922, pp. 36–38). Lundborg agrees. Of random-bred folk he says, "No definite line points the way for them; they waver between disconnected and hereditary tendencies." (RASSENMISCHUNG BEIM MENSCHEN, 1931 p. 163). Mjoen even suspects that "our growing criminality is due to inharmonic race-crossing" (op cit., p. 36). As there are no pure races left in Europe now, he really means the mixing of disparate types, strains and stocks, which, as we have seen, leads to the same psycho-physical confusions. Davenport, also suspects that much modern crime and insanity is due to badly adjusted mental and temperamental differences inherited from disparate parents. (Ruggles-Gates:HEREDITY AND EUGENICS, 1923, p. 234).
Dr. Briffault claims that "the liability for a tendency to nervous disorder, to assume a more pronounced form in the offspring . . . is considerably greater when the parents are dissimilar than when they are similar in their constitution and heredity; for there is then superadded the unstabilizing effect of the clash of two unharmonious heredities." (THE MOTHERS, 1927, Vol. I, Chap. VI).
At present no one questions the increase of neurosis and dementia. Dr. Mannheim acknowledges a "rising tide of neurosis in the individual to-day" (MAN AND SOCIETY, 1940, Part V. Chap. III); Dr. Alexis Carrel agrees (MAN: THE UNKNOWN, 1935, Chap. IV, Sec. 10), and, of conditions in the U.S.A., where about 68,000
To suppose that the vast crowds in the civilized world now requiring psychiatric treatment, owe no feature of their nervous breakdowns to the deep inner clashes due to disharmonies inherited from their disparate parents, is to remain blind to both circumstantial and trustworthy expert evidence. Only obsolete and no longer tenable ideas about such human attributes as Will-power, Strength of Character, Stability, Uprightness and Steadfastness, can obscure the connection between these qualities and that good breeding which is the reverse of what prevails everywhere in our Civilization.
Many who may be ready to grant all this, may yet boggle at accepting the notion that even the mixing of occupational strains may cause volitional and characterological defects; and yet, when once we have grasped the essentials of human inheritance and consider the innate attributes which distinguish — say, the poet from the pawnbroker and the jockey from the journalist; we must concede that peculiar temperamental and other inborn differences must account, at least in part, for the difference in their choice of callings.
If this be so, and their callings are really vocational, it follows that clashes between their hereditary impulses, tastes and propensities, might prove serious if they married outside their professions and had progeny. If, for instance, the great grandson of a capable and successful business man who had transmitted his commercial acumen through three generations, married the daughter of an artist who was himself the last of a long line of gifted painters, it is inconceivable that allthe progeny of the union would be free from doubt, indecision, conflict and weakness when faced with the alternative: Art or Commerce? And this is not to mention the conflicts likely to arise from differences between those attributes which are ancillary to the commercial and the artistic temperaments respectively.
If then we suppose such a generation followed, as countless generations are to-day, by further mixings of occupational skills and propensities, so that a hopeless jumble, not of two or three, but of dozens of occupational strains come to be mingled, it is not surprising that willlessness, listlessness and indecision, let alone neurosis, should be as common as they actually are; and we have the explanation of the high incidence of aimlessness, despair and dereliction among modern men and women.
Nor can it be merely a coincidence that the period of England's greatest sanity and health, which historians tell us culminated in the 16th and early 17th centuries, when her culture reached its zenith, should have been preceded by centuries during which it was customary for all trades and skills to be kept, with but rare breaks, within certain family lines — sons and daughters marrying, whenever and wherever possible, within the trade.
Thus there was a real aristocracy of craftmanship, through which the various gifts and propensities associated with certain skills acquired tremendous latent power, which could find expression in any form of achievement. It was a time when lunacy and mental derangement might be noticeable in Royalty and sometimes too in the Nobility; because of the miscegenation their position often forced upon them; but meanwhile the common people cultivated character in a way of which modern England can have no conception. For what builds up will and character in a nation is enduring and consistent discipline undergone for a particular vital end. Wolsey, Shakespeare and Inigo Jones were the products of this method of garnering strength throughout several generations, ,just as the great minds of ancient Egypt and Athens also were. Knum-ab-ra (B.C. 490), chief Minister of Works for the whole of Egypt, was the twenty-fourth architect of his line, and the famous Greek physician HIPPOCRATES was the seventeeth medical practitioner in his family.
When, therefore, the great Inca, Tupac Jupangi said:. "Il faut que, parmi le peuple chacun apprenne le métier de son père" ("Among the common people every man must follow his father's trade": See Charles Letourneau, L'ÉVOLUTION DE L'ÉDUCATION), he stated the principle on which a great nation and great national achievements depend. It is the converse principle which rules to-day in all civilized countries, together with the unbridled practice of hopelessly mixing up family qualities and virtues, until the whole of a nation's characterological treasures run away into the sands of oblivion.
This extension of the argument in favour of racial integrity into the realm of vocational heredity and segregation, may seen extravagant to some readers. I ventured upon it only in order to emphasize the importance of the former; for, if all that I have claimed is true of vocational disparities, how much more true must it be of the more conspicuous and sharply defined disparities between, races, types and breeds.
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V
The people of the great Democracies are both easily led and easily deluded. They read their newspapers with a faith so touching in the printed word, and listen to their "great" public figures with such meek devotion, that in Western Europe today there is no official or unofficial task more simple than to sway popular opinion by means of propaganda. The crudest slogans, often enough repeated, soon induce millions of English and American people to believe that the ideas these slogans express are the product of their own unaided and independent judgment; and, what is even more staggering, when once such slogans have been well hammered into the skulls of the masses, high and low, and have thereby acquired the likeness of Natural Laws, the men and above all the women who have wholly absorbed them will fight like wild cats to defend and uphold them, exactly as if the ideas they stood for were the children of their own original reflection.
In 1926, R. N. Bradley had the surprising candour to declare that the "English are a gullible people" (RACIAL ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH CHARACTER); yet no people could have boasted more loudly throughout four centuries of the absolute independence and freedom of their judgment and opinions, and of the vigilance with which they safeguard them.
A notorious example of their sequaciousness in matters of the mind is the readiness with which, at the bidding of their Press and Politicians, they will scoff and jeer at other nations when these are reported to have been hoodwinked by some particularly clumsy ruse of official propaganda. Thus, they are constantly led to exult at the spectacle of Russian scientists — just as 20 years ago they exulted at the sight of National-Socialist scientists — for having to make their scientific facts conform with their Government's political outlook. Indeed, it has been a standing joke in our Western democracies for years that the scientists of the Dictatorships are but the thralls of their political bosses. The populations of these countries, we have been assured, are "goose-stepped" into conformity.
Yet, when in the face of Mankind's deepest instincts, against its most hoary traditions, and contrary to the most authoritative recent findings of independent Science, UNESCO had the effrontery to proclaim that "There is no evidence that race mixture as such produces bad results from the biological point of view," the dear docile public
It suited the ruling minorities in England and America that the ill-informed public in both countries should believe that race mixture and racial differences do not matter. But what seemed of the utmost importance to these same powerful minorities was that everybody should henceforth be convinced that racial discrimination was a superstition as benighted and mediaeval as the belief in goblins, witches, sorcery and black magic.
When, therefore, to the astonishment of the few well-informed people, abreast of the discoveries of modern science, this belief was established almost overnight, so that everybody, from the most sentimental Labour M.P. to the least critical reader of a daily illustrated newspaper was soon lisping with a lump in his (more often her) throat that henceforth there should be no Race Discrimination whatsoever, not even a "Colour Bar," the social philosopher who had hardly needed to do more than keep an eye on the minute-hand of his watch to mark the time the transformation had required, could but marvel at the efficiency of Western methods of goose-stepping the multitude and at the obliging submissiveness of the men and women composing it. — No wonder that a shrewd foreign observer like André Siegfried, anticipating Bradley's above-mentioned remark, felt able to declare in 1924 that "L'Anglais est au fond moutonnier" (At bottom, the Englishman is ovine — sheepish." L'ANGLETERRE D'AUJOURD'HUI, 1924, Chap. VI).
This prompt and obsequious popular acquiescence in the governing minority's fiat henceforth to disregard all racial differences, was the more deplorable seeing that the very populace that accepted the ruling is itself riddled with all the defects, disorders and disabilities which inevitably afflict an ill-bred, indiscriminately mixed and mongrelized people.
For in Europe in general, and above all in England, through our having long ago abandoned all idea of a human "thoroughbred"; through our having allowed the very term "thoroughbred", in connexion with humanity, to fall into such total desuetude that today it hardly conveys any meaning whatsoever to anyone; and through our having thus neglected all the elementary principles of sound breeding, on which the production of "creatures of quality" depends, we have sunk to such depths of ignorance and tastelessness concerning desirability in human form that, contrary to the high promise of the 16th Century, when foreign visitors were still writing home about the remarkable beauty of the English people, and contrary to the verdict of observers as recent as those of the first decade of the 19th Century, when the stamina, health and fine dentition of our troops in Spain (who, incidentally, were admitted to be the dregs of the population) excited the wonder and admiration of the natives, we have degenerated into a people among whom beauty is so rare that it has now become "New", and health so extraordinary that there must be very few today who can truthfully claim that they know onethoroughly healthy person.
Indeed, Bernard Shaw, in one of his rare moments of insight and good sense, spoke no more than the bare truth when he said: "We are, on the whole, an ugly, ill-bred race." (GETTING MARRIED, 1908).
Although we are told that our Health Services cost over £600,000,000, and dispense roughly 230,000,0000 prescriptions a year, whilst about 230 million work-days are lost every year through illness (25,000,000 through bronchitis alone), we are still far from being able to form an adequate notion of the total amount of present-day morbidity in the nation, for the simple reason that the figures I have just quoted are officially admitted to be by no means exhaustive.
In a Survey of Sickness, covering the years 1943–1952, recently published by Dr. W. P. D. Logan and Mr. E. M. Brooke, M.Sc., the authors "draw attention to the large amount of ill-health which people suffer but which does not lead them to seek medical advice." And, commenting on another Survey covering the years 1944–47, they remark that it is evident that with less than a quarter of sick persons visiting their doctor in a month, only an incomplete picture of total morbidity can be obtained from medical records." The authors therefore conclude that "these figures cannot be dismissed as unimportant, and represent a problem that requires investigation and a challenge that will in due course have to be met." (STUDIES ON MEDICAL POPULATION SUBJECTS, No. 12: The Survey of Sickness, 1943–52, published in 1957, and Study No. 2, 1949).
Thus, these two most disturbing studies make it perfectly clear that, shocking though they may be, our official records of ill-health and physical and mental defect, our over-crowded hospitals, asylums and homes for incurables and the incapacitated, and our congested nursing homes, give us but an inadequate notion of the country's prevailing morbidity, crippledom and defect, and those unscrupulous politicians who, taking advantage of English gullibility, have the impudence to pander to popular vanity by publicly extolling "the stubborn health of the English people," add falsehood to their other sins against good leadership.
As the relationship between morbidity and psycho-physical defect to the condition of biological inferiority which may result partly or wholly from mongrelization, is by no means obvious, it will be explained in the sequel. Meanwhile, however, it is important to be reminded of the following important facts:
(1) That, from the point of view of the injury done to psycho-physical quality by miscegenation, there is really little difference between mixing races and mixing types within the same race. For, since all bodily parts are inherited independently from either parent; whether your parents are disparate owing to belonging to different races, or owing to being of different types, the result will be the same — you will be bound to be a creature made up of parts that can be harmonious only by a fluke. So that although both bride and bridegroom may justifiably claim to be English by descent, if they happen to be of quite disparate types, their marriage will be no less an example of miscegenation than if they were of different races.
(2) As the marriage of sharply disparate types has for centuries been tolerated all over Europe, and sometimes actually recommended by romantics ignorant of the pre-requisites of sound breeding, the ease with which modern populations in democratic countries accepted and unmurmuringly began to practise the code of conduct implicit in UNESCO's mendacious pronouncement, quoted above, is to some extent explained and excused. For the step from habitual miscegenation of type to habitual miscegenation of race is both easy and hardly noticeable. This perhaps mitigates somewhat the charges I have brought against the modern English for their obsequious and unquestioning asquiescence in UNESCO's dictatorial falsehood.
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VI
In my last article I pointed out that even as an idea a "human thoroughbred" had so long ago fallen into desuetude that to-day its terms convey no meaning whatsoever to anybody. Besides never being used, they have become so completely severed from any connexion with Man that to speak of a thoroughbred in that connexion sounds facetious. People hearing the term, far from feeling a sudden pang of shame at having utterly forsaken a precious standard and at having sunk too low to be within measurable distance of it, are merely amused and, after the manner of the rest of the modern world, assume that one is only exerting oneself to be humorous.
Browning with his usual quite un-English psychological flair, viewing our society with its obsessional insistence on a sense of humour, declared that "Wanting beauty, we cultivate humour." (A SOUL'S TRAGEDY, Act II). He thus summed up our plight with remarkable shrewdness. But his criticism, to be comprehensive, should have added "health and stamina" to the qualities we want. Had he been alive to-day, this would probably have been done, and he would have been near to stating the essentials of the thoroughbred.
For the thoroughbred, animal or human, is first and foremost a creature of quality. Psycho-physically, his quality manifests itself in the serenity of his mind, the beauty of his form and features, the harmony of all the parts of his organism, and his freedom from hereditary blemishes, taints and impurities.
His functions operate smoothly and uneventfully, just as his mind works without confusion or conflict, because all his bodily parts are perfectly adjusted, and his inheritance of mental traits and emotional capacity includes no incompatible factors. Neither mentally nor physically is he driven by discordant forces, because he is the product of parents who, apart from their sex-differences, exhibit and possess no disparities. Thus, in his case the fact that bodily parts are inherited independently from either parent, has caused no appreciable disharmonies in his organism. He is therefore capable of tasting that joie de vivre, that ecstasy of merely being alive, which, in the spontaneous, wanton and exuberant gambols of a kitten, excites our wonder and, through our present biological inferiority, baffles our understanding.
This is no fanciful description of a fairy prince; no imaginary picture limned at the dictates of a romantic ideal. It is a realistic image based on the latest authoritative findings of the sciences of Heredity and Genetics. The very fact that it is likely to sound fantastic and hyperbolic, in itself betrays our remoteness from the experience of optimal health and well-being.
In 1927, Dr. F. A. E. Crew of Edinburgh, who has done more than anyone else to elucidate the problem of heredity, made this most important statement:
"The fact that there are inherent differences of size of organs and parts is of profound significance when it is remembered that it involves that inevitable sequel that racial and other crossings (my italics, A.M.L.), can lead to serious disharmony." (ORGANIC INHERITANCE IN MAN, Chap. VI. This is confirmed by Prof. H. Lundborg in DIE RASSENMISCHUNG BEIM MENSCHEN, 1931, p. 36).
It is important to note that Dr. Crew is careful to add "and other crossings" after the word "racial"; for by this he implies that even parents of the same race, although disparate in size, type, constitution and pigmentation, may, through the rule of the independent inheritance of bodily parts from either parent, inflict disharmonies on their offspring, much in the same way as if they were of different races.
In view of the immense significance of this finding alone, we can see why the obsequious "scientists" who obediently toed the line marked out by the ruling minority and their agent — UNESCO — concerning
When we are told by an investigator like Miss R. N. Fleming that the characters of eyes, skin, hair and lips may be inherited independently (HEREDITY IN MAN, by R. Ruggles Gates, 1929, p. 356), and that disharmonies between the jaws of hybrids may be so great "as to affect speech" (A STUDY OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT, by R. N. Fleming, 1933, Chap. VII); when we read of the numerous examples of bodily parts which Dr. Talbot found independently inherited in the offspring of Negro-Portuguese-Indian parents (DEGENERACY ITS CAUSES, SIGNS AND RESULTS, 1898, p. 98), and of even the legs and arms of human hybrids in Kisar, inherited independently of their trunks (Dr. Rodenwaldt: DIE MESTIZEN AUF KISAR, 1928, p. 334); when we are assured that race and type crossings may lead to "large men with small internal organs or inadequate circulatory systems or other disharmonies which tax the adjustability of the organism and even lead to early death" (Davenport, quoted by Ruggles Gates, Op. cit. p. 329), and that even disequilibrium in the body's endocrine system may be induced by miscegenation (Prof. H. Lundborg: RASSENMISCHUNG, 1921, p. 79) — when, I say, we are confronted by such data, presented by reputable authorities, we need but little imagination in order to grasp at once how much obscure dysfunction, illness and even disease, may be the outcome of disproportions and incompatibilities of bodily parts independently inherited from disparate parents.
According to Mjoen (VOLK UND RASSE, 2nd Article, p. 74) even diabetes may be caused in this way; for he tells us that "the frequency of diabetes in Lapp and Norwegian hybrids may be due to the bastard's inheriting his pancreas from his smaller, and his stature from his larger parent," there being marked differences in size between the two races. The very fact that certain marked disparities of blood may prove lethal to the offspring of parents incompatible in this respect — a fact only recently made known to all civilized peoples — should have sufficed to compel UNESCO to eat its dishonest words.
To refer again to the human endocrine system, so important for health and sanity, Prof. Lundborg says: "In comparatively pure-bred individuals there appears as a rule a sort of equilibrium between the endocrine glands, a sort of harmonious co-operation, which manifests itself in a harmonious development of the bodily and spiritual characters. But in crosses and mongrels this equilibrium is disturbed — hence probably the physical and psycho-physical disharmonies so frequently produced in bastards." (RASSENMISCHUNG BEIM MENSCHEN, p. 53).
There can surely be no need to labour the point and to support it with more data, though these are plentiful enough. There is, however, one aspect of the matter which sheds too much light on the whole mechanism of human heredity to be omitted, and that is the question of ugliness and its meaning.
When once we have grasped all the implications of the phenomenon I have described as "the independent inheritance of a creature's bodily parts from either of its parents," we can hardly need to be told that, when these parents are disparate, their offspring can with difficulty escape a certain plainness not to say downright ugliness; and the more disparate the features of the parents the greater is the child's ugliness likely to be. And this explains a fact which has not only often puzzled ill-informed observers, but has also led such observers to question the fact of heredity itself. I refer to the frequency with which some parents, though each good-looking in his and her way, will have quite plain or even ugly children, whose faces seem badly drawn, amorphous and sometimes even evil. Nor is this strange when we consider the factors involved; for we need only to be told that different parts of the face and even of the same facial feature may be independently inherited from either parent, in order at once to appreciate the reason of the apparent anomaly.
Thus Lundborg tells us that the chin is inherited independently of the parts of the jaw constituting the jaw's angle (RASSENMISCHUNG BEIM MENSCHEN, p. 90); and Dr. Crew informs us that at least four different parts of the nose may be independently inherited (Op. cit., Chap. VI); whilst we are all familiar with the ugly disproportions caused by children inheriting large teeth from one parent and narrow jaws from the other. This was a result of crossing noticed by Dr. Talbot sixty years ago. (Op. cit. pp. 249–250).
According to Sir Arthur Keith, even myopia must be regarded "as a structural disharmony" (THE NATURE OF MAN'S STRUCTURAL IMPERFECTIONS: Nature, 12. 1928. p. 287); whilst Mjoen, who makes the same claim, adds, "These abnormalities provoke the suspicion that other organs or parts thereof in the mongrel may show disproportions and disharmonies in size and functional capacity, which, though they may not be apparent, may have serious consequences in the creature's life." (VOLK UND RASSE, 2nd. article, p. 173).
In short, the morbidity likely to result from hereditary disproportions is infinite — hence the enormous significance of beauty and ugliness; for, whereas the former, when it is not a mere fluke, indicates an organism most probably harmonious throughout, ugliness, by the very confusion and asymmetry it proclaims, betrays the chaotic constitution of him who displays it. That is why the prevailing ugliness of our present-day English aristocracy is a refutation of their title to rule, and it is by no means a mere coincidence that their political impotence should have accompanied it. Proust noticed the ugliness of the French aristocracy, but without appreciating its significance. (LE COTÉ DE GUERMANTES, I).
Thus, it is by no means irrelevant or gratuitously captious, as many suppose, to deplore the increasing uglification of the English people (of which there is much evidence) ever since the 16th Century. For, from the pre-Socratic Greeks to Herbert Spencer, all profound students of humanity, long before the law of the independent inheritance of bodily parts was first discovered, have believed that beauty was essential to the human thoroughbred. As Herbert Spencer aptly remarks: "The aspects which displease us (in a human being) are the outward correlatives of inward imperfections" (ESSAY ON PERSONAL BEAUTY, 1854).
In my next article I shall deal with the problem of rearing the human thoroughbred.
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VII
The human, like the animal, thoroughbred is always a member of a distinct race. Recalling what has been said about race, the reader will see that this must be so, because one of the most essential attributes of a race is that it breeds true — that is to say, its distinctive features have become so completely standardized throughout all its members that, by producing a people whose characters are uniform, there can be, barring accidents, little chance of any child being the offspring of disparate parents.
Thanks primarily to this standardization of type, temperament, hereditary tendencies and constitution throughout a race, its members are always creatures of quality, in whom all bodily parts, by being optimally adjusted, function smoothly and harmoniously. We would not look for machine-like identity in the members of the same race: because even in the most standardized stocks the hazards of generation, gestation, birth, position in family and age of parents, together with the variety of individual experience, bring about differences, however slight, which prevent the facsimile repetition of the same organism throughout the group. Even in the most carefully bred blood stock, we find these slight individual deviations from the most typical example of the race — a fact which is noticed when one of a litter of puppies, for instance, proves to be a champion of its breed and class, whilst its siblings, although also thoroughbred, are inferior in the quality of their particular points.
In human groups, it is precisely by such deviations from the standard that we see gradually built up within a race, a whole strain which, although clearly related in breed to the rest of the group, is so far superior to them that they constitute a super-thoroughbred class which, as
Then, just as the race has arisen as a sub-species, differentiated from the rest of the species by prolonged isolation in a particular environment, natural selection, mutation, and endogamy, so the super-thoroughbreds within it, ultimately conscious of their qualitative differences, tend from that moment also to segregate in a class apart from the rest of the race, whose connubium they henceforth refuse. This is the usual history of the formation of an Aristocracy. It is also an extensive definition of such a body, and it at once demonstrates that in a society like ours, in which the mass of the people, high and low, have for centuries not been creatures of quality, such a phenomenon as an aristocratic class — i.e., a caste of super-thoroughbreds — could not possibly arise. Because you cannot derive super-thoroughbreds from a population that is not already thoroughbred, just as you would not expect to produce champions of their class from a litter of puppies that were not thoroughbreds. Hence, Disraeli was abundantly right when he maintained that "the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality of aristocracy." — (SYBIL, 1889 Edit. p. 123.)
Thus, there seems to be throughout Nature and in all her creatures, an instinct to separate and stand aloof when once distinctive features, especially long-garnered qualitative ones, begin to characterize a particular strain. Darwin adduced scores of instances of this in animals, and there are so many examples of it in Man that, in myDEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY, I was able to give only a small and representative selection of them. Just as Nature appears to have implanted in her lower creatures an acute sense of difference and a jealous regard for it, which, while it causes them to avoid those which, whole generations back, were their own kin, enables them to preserve unimpaired and above all unadulterated, what qualities soever their difference implies; so she has inspired Man with an instinct equally strong and sound, though in his case nearer to consciousness, to keep aloof from what is not his like. It was this fact that led Lord Kames a century and a half ago to declare that "there is no propensity in human nature more general that aversion to strangers" (SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY OF MAN, 1819, Vol. I, Prelim. Discourse); and Sir Arthur Keith to speak of "Man's instinctive preference for beings who wore his own livery and spoke as he did." (ETHNOS, 1931, p. 3).
This preference for one's own kind and aversion from people unlike us, is not necessarily a dismissal of the stranger as disreputable or despicable (although in some cases, as in ancient Greece, there was in the dismissal unconcealed disdain); nor is it necessarily total denigration.
It seems to be chiefly a conscious echo of a deeper sub-conscious impulse to protect qualities won and enshrined in the constitution of the race during the course of its gradual emergence from the rest of the species. It is as if the qualitative differences acquired during isolation, which have become the peculiar mark of the race, have themselves suggested a means for their own preservation.
Those, therefore, like our sentimental Liberals, egalitarians and levellers, who, goaded on by unscrupulous and interested propagandists, speak of "xenophobia" as if it were an innovation of yesterday, an invention of the "Fascists", and a crime akin to gangsterism, display not only their ignorant subjection to the wire-pullers of their Age and nation, but themselves really do commit a crime against humanity by bidding it scrap and destroy all the racial qualities that Ages of specialization, isolation, endogamy, selection and mutation, have laboriously and often painfully cultivated in different variants of the human species.
Indeed, the aversion from strangers of which Lord Kames spoke, seen through the optics of the evolutionary process, looks very much like a propensity implanted in animals and Man by that very process itself, which differs hardly at all in strength and universality from the instincts of reproduction and self-preservation.
Sir Arthur Keith, in trying to explain its genesis, says: "If we regard a group as having been separated from other groups in order to inbreed, and so to work out the evolutionary potentialities of its genes, then we can see why it should resent instinctively the intrusion of outsiders bringing with them other genes." (A NEW THEORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION, 1948, p. 41). He also speaks of an innate "group spirit" or "clannishness" as another possible explanation.
But is it plausible to assume that a group separates from other groups and deliberately avoids them, in order to inbreed? What advantage could animals or primitive men, with their total ignorance of what Science has but recently taught us about the advantages of inbreeding, possibly see in wandering off apart in order to inbreed? And even if it were admitted that primitive men could recognize and provide for reaping such an advantage, how could we reasonably expect animals to do so?
The same objection applies to working out "the evolutionary potentialities of its genes." By what association of a behaviour pattern with a survival factor can we suppose such an end to have been deliberately pursued by animals and primitive Man? Surely Keith assumed too much.
Sir Baldwin Spencer, Prof. W. C. Allee and W. H. Thorpe, all concur in regarding as insoluble the origin of this instinct of xenophobia in animals and Man, and in thinking it a mystery. (For Spencer, see p. 142 of Keith's ESSAY ON HUMAN EVOLUTION, 1946; for Prof. Allee, see p. 7 of his ANIMAL AGGREGATIONS, 1931; and for W. H. Thorpe, his Essay on ECOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF SYSTEMATICS, p. 355 of THE NEW SYSTEMATICS, 1940.)
But is it really such a mystery? When we think of what is at stake for a race, is it surprising that those races who secured survival by strictly avoiding the psycho-physical risks incurred through the independent inheritance of bodily parts from disparate parents, should have transmitted to their descendants an instinctive aversion from strangers and especially from the connubium of strangers? For, in the days when the absence of all our repertory of medical aids for bad functioning, made a badly adjusted organism the hopeless victim of his faulty constitution, the behaviour which brought about such a state in one's offspring would inevitably have come to be condemned and avoided — nay, before even such behaviour came to be consciously recognized, those groups who had been guilty of such behaviour, by having been slowly eliminated, would have left behind only those who had throughout eschewed the stranger.
This, alone, would explain the xenophobia of animals; for they could not reason about the matter and consciously avoid a practice which was deleterious to their offspring. So that in both animals and Man it seems safe to assume that the operation of Natural Selection abundantly sufficed to leave only those
For if, as Prof. E. Bugnion maintains, "every action useful for the conservation of the species tends to leave a durable impression on the brain, and accordingly to become hereditary, the genesis of instinctive activity unfolds itself clearly and convincingly before our minds." (THE ORIGIN OF INSTINCTS, 1927, p. 29).
Prof. A. Dendy came nearest to my point of view on this matter when he wrote: "The instinctive aversion to foreigners which lies at the root of national feeling is perhaps not altogether as irrational as it appears at first sight; for it naturally tends to keep apart elements that are incapable of being welded together into a stable organization." (THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIETY, 1924, Chap. III).
If in this context we read "biological disparates" instead of "foreigners", the statement covers the whole of my present claim. Yet it is most strange how the point has been missed by the erudite authorities I have quoted. Perhaps this may afford some excuse for people much less well-informed, like our General Public, who, at the peremptory bidding of a powerful minority, were suddenly called upon to believe that xenophobia and Race Discrimination were modern perversions as shameful as shop-lifting or embezzlement.
The moment we understand both as an instinctive defensive attitude gradually cultivated in all animals and men against the severe penalties incurred through the independent inheritance of bodily parts from disparate parents, we appreciate the shallowness, if not the villainy, of those who, exploiting popular ignorance, have contrived to hoax Western Peoples, let alone the rest of the world, into believing that xenophobia is a wicked deliration of the modern mind.
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VIII
The opponents of the thesis I am presenting are many and various, as are also the reasons for their opposition. The most unexpected among them are perhaps those who happen to be of the Christian Faith; and I say that they are the most unexpected because, apart from the authority given them for upholding race segregation in many a passage in the OLD TESTAMENT (Genesis, Chap. X andDEUTERONOMY, Chap. VII, where the Lord forbids His chosen people all carnal intercourse whatsoever with the Hittites, Gigashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites), one would have thought that the Lord of Creation had indicated to them unmistakably enough by the laws which He has devised for the control of the processes of reproduction and heredity, that the practice of miscegenation, together with the abolition of Racial Discrimination, were abhorrent to Him.
We have but to think of the degenerative changes resulting from race-crossing, which involve the loss of all those painfully cultivated qualities that a sub-species or variant of a species may have acquired in isolation, and we have but to remember the law by which offspring inherit their bodily parts independently from either of their parents — a law which points distinctly to the undesirability of parental disparities — in order at once to appreciate that there is in the Creation itself abundant evidence of a very clear admonition against miscegenation.
There is, moreover, the clear teaching in the NEW TESTAMENT — for instance, in ACTS XVII, 26, — that the existence of separate nations is according to the will and plan of God; and the often quoted words of St. Paul, as in such passages asCORINTHIANS I (Chap. III, 13), GALATIANS (Chap. III, 28) and COLOSSIANS (Chap. III, 11), do not contradict the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, but merely stress the spiritual unity of believers and definitely do not command race mixture.
The next opponents of Racial Discrimination to be considered are those who maintain that the mixing of races is the source of national greatness. They who argue in this way are wont to point to a country like England, which they say has achieved political eminence and high cultural distinction, although its population was racially extremely mixed, or at any rate the converse of inbred.
Unfortunately, the English people, thanks to their habit of saving the labour of original thought and research by eagerly appropriating ready-made ideas which appear to offer short-cut solutions of difficult or thorny problems, quickly accepted this legendary explanation of their national achievements; and to-day one may say that it is one of the most hackneyed of historical falsehoods.
Nor does the Englishman who repeats this travesty of the truth necessarily require to be illiterate; for, strange as it may seem, his rapid and unhesitating adoption and repetition of parrot cries bears little relation to his education.
What then are the facts?
When the earliest inhabitants of Britain, who were probably of Basque or Mediterranean stock, were driven to the extreme west and north of the island by successive waves of invaders from Western Europe, these invaders were of Celtic and Celti-Aryan origin. In the completely conquered areas, overrun by these strangers fairly quickly,
Except in certain districts of Wales and Scotland, however, there had been some mixing of the Celtic invaders with the original inhabitants; and it was this compound mass of pure Celts, mixed Celt-Basques and pure Basques, that is usually designated as "Celtic" when compared with the Teutonic English, or later Celts, who came to England centuries later.
The Roman occupation left little impression on this population. Most of the legionaries were themselves, in any case, a mixture of Mediterranean and Celtic elements; so that even if some did settle in the land their presence had no marked effect. W. Z. Ripley, however, assures us that when the Romans abandoned the islands, "they left them racially as they were before", and most authorities concur. (See THE RACES OF EUROPE, 1900, p. 311.)
The series of invasions that followed on the departure of the Romans, oddly enough, also hardly altered the island's ethnological composition one iota. The Angles and Saxons were what Ripley calls, "Teutonic" or late Celts, and the only change they effected was to turn the balance against the Basque or Mediterranean proportion in the nation. The Northmen (Scandinavians), Jutes and Danes, were of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxons, with dialects of the same Celtic tongue; whilst the Normans or horsemen who supplied the second large contribution of Scandinavian blood to the Mediterranean-Teutonic amalgam, were of the same stock as the preceding invaders. Thus, so far as the proportion of the dark and fair races were concerned, the Normans left Britain much as it was before their arrival.
Hence Stubbs tells us that "not only were the successive invasions of Britain . . . conducted by nations of common extraction . . . but no foreign interference that was not German in origin was admitted at all." (THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1897, Vol. I, p. 11).
This necessarily brief but substantially correct account suffices to show that the alleged highly complex mixture of races in the English people — at least up to the time of the late Renaissance — is but a myth designed to obfuscate ill-informed defenders of Racial Discrimination. At most we must reckon with an original mixture of Mediterranean with Teutonic-Celt, which was never complete, probably never anything more than local, and, thanks to the centuries of inbreeding which their island situation fortunately imposed on the English people at a time when transport facilities were extremely poor, if not actually non-existent for the majority, was soon followed by a state of homogeneity and standardization, in which disparates were confined to those of type alone, and were probably rare even in that form.
England's situation as an island, so eloquently praised by John of Gaunt (KING RICHARD II, Act II. Sc. I), had one great advantage which he, not unnaturally, fails to mention, because, as an advantage, it could not have been known to an uncle of Richard II; and that was the fact that her insularity, by leading her people to inbreed, insensibly converted a population which consisted at most of two racial strains, into a state of comparative uniformity.
Nor can there be much doubt that it was due to this ultimately achieved racial homogeneity, with the individual psycho-physical quality it secured for the people of the nation, that the splendours of the Elizabethan Age came to be possible. Both Sir Arthur Keith and Prof. G. M. Trevelyan speak of this Age as "the heyday of England's civilization" (ESSAYS ON HUMAN EVOLUTION, 1946, p. 75, and ENGLISH SOCIAL HISTORY, 1944, Chaps. V and VI); and this period of cultural richness endured at least a hundred years longer, for Prof. Trevelyan places the "highest mark" attained by English domestic culture in 1634.
But, from then on, as every student of history knows, things began to change rapidly, and for the worse; for, what with the repeated immigration of foreigners from all over Europe, especially after 1649, and later on the enormous advances in the means of transport, which caused all populations boasting of Western Civilization to grow every day more fluid, there set in an Age of indiscriminate miscegenation, the tempo of which has been steadily accelerating ever since.
Its result has naturally been what was only to be expected, and could have been foretold with complete accuracy at the very inception of the period of decline — and this result we see about us to-day in the prevailing ugliness, characterlessness, polymorphousness and extreme individual disparity of the mass of the people, high and low, together with their impaired stamina, ill-health, aggressive vulgarity and anarchy.
The claim made here is confirmed by an investigator such as Reibmayr, who, with others equally qualified, has shown most illuminatingly that it was in islands (Crete, Japan), peninsulas (Greece, India, Italy), and in naturally or artificially enclosed or isolated areas (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Peru), where conditions forced inbreeding and hence homogeneity on the inhabitants, that the highest civilizations, if not Civilization itself, arose. (DIE ENTWICKLUNGSGESCHICHTE DES TALENTS UND GENIES, 1908, Vol. I p. 9). Even the famous, early and very high civilization of Mycenae should be included here; for the Argive Plain on which Mycenae and its neighbouring town, Tiryns, stood, was a naturally hemmed in area. On three sides it was enclosed by steep mountains, and on the fourth by the narrow pass leading from Argos to Corinth. The two great towns were no doubt the fortified strongholds of a single race, whose isolation helped to make them what they were. Indeed, all the earliest civilizations, from 4000 to 480 B.C. were the creation of people of this kind. Since, however, the areas they once inhabited have become the scenes of indiscriminate miscegenation, they have produced neither great men nor great cultures.
But, to return to the subject of England, it is clear from the foregoing that they who, in their ill-informed distortions of history, would have us believe that the high cultural achievements of the English up to the middle of the 17th century, were due to their very mixed blood, must stake on our ignorance of the facts. For although it may be inaccurate to claim that, from Roman times to the death of Charles I, the English were ever as inbred and standardized as were, for instance, the people of Egypt or early Greece, there is no doubt that they were once very much more uniform in type, better-looking and healthier than they are to-day; whilst we have evidence even in their mediaeval laws that they took steps calculated to keep them so. (See Chap. III of my DEFENCE OF CONSERVATISM, 1926).
Before examining other objections to my thesis, raised by the opponents of Racial Discrimination, certain facts relating to "Raciation" (the process of race-formation) will need to be discussed, and this I propose to do in my next article.
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Certain facts about "Raciation" (race formation) must now be briefly stated in order to shed necessary light on the views already advanced and, above all, to equip those members of the public, who favour Race Discrimination, with the knowledge that will enable them to resist false indoctrination.
I have repeatedly stressed the importance and advantages of inbreeding and, as present-day propaganda is everywhere deliberately aimed at popularizing the belief that inbreeding is always to be avoided, it is essential that some explanation should be given of its implications and effects. That it is an indispensable pro-requisite of race formation is generally admitted, and the fact is a commonplace of genetics. Thus, the process by which a sub-species, or variant of a species, comes to be formed, and the circumstances attending it, may be described as follows:
(1). A portion of the main body of a species must split off and, from what causes soever, become isolated, exposed to more or less new conditions, and prevented from receiving any addition to its numbers from the world outside.
(2). Endogamy (inbreeding) being thus imposed on the group, all the mutations occurring within it, which may impart distinctive new features to its members and thus ultimately lead to the development of a new type, are preserved and spread throughout the group, causing it in time to become differentiated in one or more characters from the stock to which it originally belonged. Add to this genetic influence, that of probably altered habits and living conditions — diet, climate, soil, altitude, flora, etc. — and a compound of modifying forces operate which, in due course, will combine to establish a recognizable variant of the species to which the group originally belonged.
(3). As inbreeding unites two similar streams of hereditary tendencies, it is a process which besides magnifying the good points of a stock, may also create havoc by joining in the offspring all the harmful taints carried by so-called "recessive genes", which hitherto have by chance been kept apart only because indiscriminate and reckless miscegenation has not brought together like with like inbreeding couples.
It is, however, this very process of quickly and infallibly uniting harmful taints in the stock and, by the gravity of the afflictions thus caused, eliminating their bearers, that makes inbreeding a radical means of cleansing a group's blood. But supporters of Race Discrimination should carefully bear in mind that the severe casualties that may attend close inbreeding in a seriously tainted population, are not the result of the inbreeding, but of the harmful recessive genes in the endogamic group.For inbreeding never creates harmful elements, it only brings them to the surface. Thus, E. M. East and D. F. Jones observe that "If undesirable characters are shown after inbreeding, it is only because they already existed in the stock. If evil is brought to light, inbreeding is no more to be blamed than the detective who unearths a crime. Instead of being condemned it should be commended." (INBREEDING AND OUTBREEDING, 1919, p. 139).
"If inbreeding exposes the undesirable," says Dr. Crew, "it equally thoroughly emphasises the desirable, and the desirable will breed true when complete homozygosis (i.e. perfect uniformity between the germ-plasms and, therefore, between the hereditary tendencies, of parents) in
All that we succeed in doing in our modern societies, is to cover up our corruption — our taints and hereditary defects — and by practising indiscriminate miscegenation, we spread it more and more. Riddled as we are with harmful recessive genes, if we started inbreeding, our present already high morbidity would increase by leaps and bounds and cause a spectacular reduction in our numbers. As it is, by merely relying on a haphazard difference in the morbid contribution made by each parent to the constitution of their child, we precariously try to escape (though not always with success) a 100 per cent. dose of the lethal ailments and defects latent in our stock.
For example, a man afflicted with hereditary myopia, diabetes and hepatic insufficiency, may marry a woman with recessive genes for retinitis pigmentosa, deaf-mutism and albuminaria, so that their offspring inherits only a 50 per cent. tendency to all these six afflictions. But, although such offspring may just escape the fulminating forms of these defects, they nevertheless become bearers of them, so that their miscegenated stock grows more and more polluted. Thus, Professor Castle concludes, "Continued cross-breeding only tends to hide inherent defects, not to exterminate them; and inbreeding only tends to bring them to the surface, not to create them." (GENETICS AND EUGENICS, 1916, p. 224). But what inbreeding also does, as we have already seen, is, by bringing latent defects to the surface, to cleanse a stock of impurities.
(4). A group does not need to be homozygous in the first place in order to attain to complete homozygosis under the conditions imposed by isolation and inbreeding. In other words, a group composed, let us say, of offshoots from as many as three different strains of human beings, would ultimately achieve standardization and the stabilization of their germ-plasm — which means that as a group with acquired distinctive features they would henceforth breed true — provided that, after having become isolated, they ceased to admit newcomers and became a close inbreeding community.
Even of our highly mixed and mongrel population this is true; and Prof. F. H. Hankins goes so far as to claim for modern English people that "If isolation could be enforced for another 1,000 years or more, it might then be possible to speak of them as the British race." (THE RACIAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION, 1926, p. 281). Ruth Benedict herself, the well-known opponent of Racial Discrimination, feels bound to acknowledge this fact, for she says, "If every man's life were safe only within the walls of Britain or London, if this persisted for generations, then heterogeneous populations of the moment would, in course of time, become homogeneous, that is, something that would warrant the name of a stable race." (RACE AND RACISM, 1942, p. 42).
It is well for us to remember this, because when we who favour Race Discrimination, speak of races — as for instance, the Ainos, Papuans, Bushmen, Maoris, Bantus, Dravidians, or early Egyptians — our opponents invariably try to confuse and confute us by claiming that the very people we speak of were originally mixed or mongrel. Often, this may be true. But it is really irrelevant; for Raciation, or race-formation, is, as I have shown, a process depending on isolation and inbreeding, and it need not necessarily start with a wholly homozygous or homogeneous group. Given the necessary time and the persistence of the essential conditions of isolation and inbreeding, any heterogeneous group will ultimately reach race purity, and when our opponents question the original purity of any races to which we may refer, in order to try to embarrass us, they simply hope to abuse our ignorance or catch us off our guard.
(5). As to the duration of the condition of isolation and inbreeding before a pure race emerges from an amalgam of different strains, opinions differ. They must differ; because the speed of raciation depends on a number of factors, all of which may vary. When, therefore, Ruth Benedict says seventeen generations would be required before "a strain which satisfied genetic requirements of purity were produced" (Op. cit., p. 39), it is a mere guess.
This, however, is certain — that, during the process of raciation in a group composed of different strains, particularly in the early stages, the psycho-physical confusion caused by the mating of disparates, being severe, precludes greatness, whether in members of the group or in the group's achievements. Thus it says a good deal for Prof. Flinders Petrie's profound understanding of the problem that, when describing the periodical ebb of the civilizations of antiquity, he should have said, "In every case in which we examine history sufficiently, we find that there was a fresh race coming in to the country when the wave was at its lowest." And later on, when discussing the pre-requisites of a high civilization, he adds, "What seems to be needed is an ancestry of all the elements of two different races completely intermingled;" and, for this to happen, he argues that "seven or eight centuries of mixture of two races ensures that, in any ordinary-sized country, the full maximum number of different ancestors are blended and every strain of the one race has crossed with every strain of the other." When this state is reached, it "is the period of greatest ability". (REVOLUTIONS OF CIVILIZATION, 1912, Chap. VI, 29 and 33).
Most extraordinary is the fact that Voltaire, without our scientific knowledge and without even our greater command of the history of civilization, shrewdly anticipated Petrie's conclusions! for, in his HISTOIRE DE L'EMPIRE DE RUSSIE SOUS PIERRE LE GRAND, 1759–63 (Chap. 1), he wrote:— "Quand les nations se sont mêlées, elles sont longtemps á se civiliser etc." ("When nations have become mixed, they take a long time to become civilized.").
Against Petrie's estimate, we have Ruth Benedict's above-mentioned 500, and Ruggles Gates' 1,000 years (HEREDITY AND EUGENICS, 1923, Chap. VI). Thus, it seems as if, as already suggested, the time needed were contingent on, (a) the size of the area where the strains blend; (b) their numbers; and, (c) the extent of their disparity; for we have evidence that in some cases the blending process has taken much less time than Ruth Benedict allows.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note of England that, if we take Ruth Benedict's figure of 500 years from the date of the century in which, according to reliable historians, England reached the zenith of her cultural development, we light exactly on the date of the last invasion of the country. For, even if the Normans introduced no strange blood, they brought at least fresh blood and new ways of life, and must, therefore, have disturbed the nation. The fact that England reached the heyday of her civilization only 500 years later, indicates that it was only then that relative harmony and homogeneity had been attained by her people.
In my next article I shall return to the examination of the reasons advanced by the opponents of Race Discrimination for contesting my thesis.
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Returning now to the objections raised to Race Discrimination by the opponents of the present thesis, we come to one which, in its mischievous effects, has probably done more than anything else to recruit disciples for the doctrine of reckless miscegenation. I refer to the claim that the mixing of races cannot matter "because all the races of Man are equal."
This statement which, in our modern emotional world, instantly strikes a chord of sympathy in everybody's breast, is usually supported by the specious argument that, as all human races can interbreed, they cannot be as distinct as the race-discriminators suppose, and must be, in fact, equal.
On hearing this, the average ill-informed member of the mob, high and low, feels so much enlightened that, from that moment he or she becames a stiff-necked abolitionist of all "colour" and racial "bars." For the average member of the general public does not know that biologists have never claimed that races, whether of animals or men, were infertile when crossed; and yet how the fact that their makings can be fertile necessarily makes them "equal" is by no means clear; because their inequality is contingent on differences that have little to do with reproduction, as we may readily appreciate when we think of fowls, or dogs of different races. All that biologists have claimed is that species are infertile when crossed. So that this reason for racial equality, advanced by our modern school of miscegenists, is a trap only for the ignorant, or merely thoughtless.
Nor when, in our minds, we recapitulate the process of raciation as already described, and consider its ultimate outcome — the pure-breeding variant of a species, long separated from its original stock and, through this separation, possessed of qualities, features and a heritage of genes, often painfully acquired during centuries, if not millenniums (as we shall see), of isolation, endogamy and mutation — how can equality be postulated of different races?
We have but to glance at the representatives of some of the world's most distinct races of Man in order at once to see that, unless there can be no relation whatsoever between appearance and character — i.e., between physical and psychological traits — it is impossible to the point of absurdity to speak of their equality.
Only if we are not abreast of the more recent and authoritative findings of Science, and are still bogged in the deplorable superstition concerning the complete in-
As Prof. V. H. Mottram says, "Personality is grounded upon physical make-up" (THE PHYSICAL, BASIS OF PERSONALITY, 1944, Chap. I); and this view is confirmed by most of the enlightened scientists of modern times. "Personality," says Prof. Raymond B. Cattell, "can definitely be shown to be related to physique" (AN INTRODUCTION TO PERSONALITY, 1950, Chap. IX, 6). "A soul distinct from body" says Dr. J. S. Haldane, F.R.S., "is as unreal as a body distinct from soul. What we call psychological phenomena are quite clearly correlated with what we call bodily structure" (THE PHILOSOPHY OF A BIOLOGIST, 1935, Chap. III).
Many similar testimonies from modern men of science could be quoted. See, for instance, Prof. G. A. Dorsey's CIVILIZATION, 1931, Part II. Chap. XIII, i; A. E. Taylor's THE PROBLEM OF CONDUCT, 1901, Chap. IV; F. H. Bradley'sAPPEARANCE AND REALITY, 1893, Chap. XXIII; Dr. Ernst Kretschmer's PHYSIQUE AND CHARACTER, 1925, pp. 38–39; and Dr. G. Draper's DISEASE AND THE MAN, 1930, p. x.
It has taken a long time, even for enlightened scientists, to arrive at the sane conclusion that body and mind are inextricably entangled; because the hold the converse doctrine had on the white man has been steadily maintained for over two thousand years by means of almost daily inculcation — so much so that, to-day, the belief in the independence of body and mind (appearance and character), among the populations of the West, may be said to be still a matter of something not unlike instinct. Nevertheless, to persist nowadays in believing that the structure, quality, appearance and general condition of a person's body and features, bear no relation to his character, gifts, propensities and temperament, argues a naïveté, not to say, an innocence, which, thank goodness, is rapidly becoming a proof of Boeotian denseness; and he who still subscribes to Socrates' menacious assault on Mankind's ancient and sane belief in this relation, may be suspected of having Socrates' own low motives for doing so.
Even Dr. Frans Boas, the well-known miscegenist leader of the Columbian School of anthropology of America, supported the modern enlightened view of the matter; for, probably in an unguarded moment, he said: "There is no doubt in my mind that there is a definite association between the biological make-up of the individual and the physiological and psychological functioning of his body . . . There are organic reasons why individuals differ in their mental behaviour." (RACE, LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, 1912, p. 8).
Prof. Frank H. Hankins takes a similar view. "One must beware," he says, "of unconsciously assuming that because all men are human that, therefore, their differences are negligible . . . If there are physical differences one seems on safe ground in inferring that there must be mental differences also. Mental powers represent the functioning of brain and nerve tissue, and it is not to be supposed that these would have remained identical from race to race while other physical traits were undergoing evolutionary changes." (THE RACIAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION, 1926, pp. 264 and 291).
Dr. Alexander Goldenweiser concurs. "I do not say," he observes, "that the races are all psychologically identical. I think, in fact, that it would be strange if this proved to be so . . . from the physical standpoint the races became differentiated after their dispersion over the surface of the globe, and these differentiations, if not immutable were deep-rooted To assume that no psychological changes accompanied these physical changes would be, to say the least unreasonable" (HISTORY, PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE, 1933, p. 392).
Prof. Roland B. Dixon, in the RACIAL HISTORY OF MAN, 1923, p. 518, comes to the same conclusion.
To the intelligent and thoughtful few, these testimonies to the inseparability and interdependence of body and mind ("soul"), may seem painfully obvious, if not actually platitudinous. But such is the false indoctrination concerning these matters which has been inculcated upon the masses, high and low, throughout our era, that no national service is more urgently needed to-day than one which would spread enlightenment on this question alone, among the people of the West. Because a major part of the tragic errors daily committed, whether in mating, estimating the worth of individual men and women, or in the choice of statesmen, politicians and administrators, are due wholly to the belief still deeply rooted in most people's minds, that a man's physical, bear no relation to his psychological, attributes.
For this reason, if there were to-day in England such an unlikely phenomenon as a wise man, a sage, his time could not be better employed than by wandering through our cities, towns and villages, and doing nothing else than stating the palpably obvious about the simplest matters; because modern civilized humanity has fallen into a condition of such complicated and consistent error in regard to every subject under the sun, that long before he would be called upon to propound a New Wisdom, he would have to reiterate truths which a Greek of the early 5th century B.C. would have regarded as little short of platitudes.
We have but to think of this belief in the equality of races, in order to be persuaded that an incapacity for sound judgment, amounting almost to dementia, must be afflicting our generation.
For, when we remember that, according to "informed scholars," as Prof. Hankins says, several hundred thousands of years are supposed to have elapsed since "the separation of the original humanoid stem into those branches which evolved the existing types of men" (op. cit. p. 291); and when we think of all the different qualities of both physique and psyche which these millenniums of isolation, inbreeding and mutation, must have cultivated in the variants thus formed; even if we had no mental image of some of the more disparate races of Man, we could hardly believe that any quality originally belonging to the humanoid stem in question could possibly have survived those aeons of different conditions and remained the same in all the variants evolved.
Or, if we could believe such a thing, this belief alone, without any further evidence, should suffice to convince a board of examiners of our inability to judge anything whatsoever.
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In the fourth article of this series I hinted at a strange fact connected with national breeding which, far from being generally known, has been overlooked even by our greatest historians. I refer to the conspicuous difference which endured throughout European history right up to the 18th Century, between the mating methods of the common people and those of their rulers. For, whereas the former, owing among other things to the primitive and difficult means of transport, were always more or less rooted to their native soil, if not actually to their native town or village, and therefore bound to choose their mates from among their neighbours and certainly from among their compatriots, so that, as I have already shown, local endogamy was everywhere maintained; the unfortunate ruling families in most nations, owing to a mistaken view of the exigencies of their rank, felt compelled in every fresh generation, anxiously to scan the European horizon for a mate of blood sufficiently "blue" to sustain their offspring's right to royal powers and privileges.
There is no doubt about this strange fact. European history confirms it at every point. Even that inveterate opponent of Racial Discrimination, Dr. Franz Boas, assures us that "the long stability of European populations which set in with the beginning of the Middle Ages and continued, at least in rural districts, until very recent times, has brought about a large amount of inbreeding in every limited district" (RACE, LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, 1940, pp. 313). But whilst this applies to the common people alone, we know from the dynastic history of the various national rulers, that they were always subjected to the most reckless cross-breeding.
Thus, whilst the very stocks to whom the preservation of their lineal qualities of physique and character was of the most vital importance, were abandoned to all the biological havoc of constant miscegenation, and thereby to the squandering of their patrimony of virtue, ability and will, their subject peoples, thanks to the circumstances of their Age and position, were everywhere enjoying all the benefits of inbreeding, of character and virtue conservation, and consequently husbanding and concentrating their psycho-physical endowments, and protecting them from dilution and adulteration.
Nor is it insignificant as a reflexion on the culpable levity and indifference with which Europeans, ever since the decline of ancient Greece, have constantly faced and solved biological problems, that for those families honoured with the lofty task of ruling and safeguarding their
To a people as wise and prescient as the ancient Egyptians of — say, B.C. 3000, such methods of mating practised by ruling families would have seemed hardly credible. What then had happened since their day to bury in oblivion their wise measures for character and virtue conservation in human beings?
For it was not only the princely houses who indulged in this squandermania of hereditary qualities through the practice of miscegenation. Many of the aristocratic families followed suit; and the search for "blue blood" thus became among Europe's leading strains, a prescription for — nay, a guarantee of, family deterioration.
Even if the method of royal and aristocratic mate-selection had really been a means of securing "blue blood" in the true sense of the term, it would still have fallen short of the practice required to prevent the dilution and adulteration of stock qualities, which inevitably follow race, type and vocational crosses. For what the Spanish sangre azul was understood to stand for, was only the blood of those proudest families of Castile who could justly claim that they had allowed no contamination of their stock through Moorish, Jewish or other foreign admixture (for that is the origin of the term "blue blood").
But in the majority of the royal and aristocratic houses of Europe, "blue blood" meant something very different, and too often criteria were applied in determining it, which had very little to do with either purity or the conservation of virtue, character, capacity and will. If, for instance, a large dowry were urgently needed to replenish a depleted treasury, or the religion of a prospective royal bride happened to be suitable, or the political purposes of the moment happened to favour one royal mate rather than another, the marriage contract was quickly settled, and the nation's destinies left to the mercy of the mongrel progeny that might eventually follow from a match wholly destitute of any biological considerations.
Can one wonder that, with the all too rare exceptions of a few outstanding examples of royal competence, ability and general greatness, Europe, during the last millennium at least, has been shockingly ruled by her royal and aristocratic families?
Can one wonder that, whilst in most areas, sanity, health and beauty were retained by the common people, debility, dementia and ugliness soon appeared in most of Europe's royal families, and became noticeable to historians even as early as the fourteenth century? At all events, by the middle of the eighteenth century, insanity, or at least imbecility, had already assailed the English House of (Lancaster (Henry VI, 1421–1471) and later on the Hanoverians (George III, 1738–1820; even of Victoria herself (1819–1901) Prof. A. N. Whitehead says, in ESSAYS IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY, 1948, Part I, Chap. II, that in 1870 "her sanity was doubted"); the French Valois (Charles VI, 1368–1422 and Henri III, 1551–1589); the Holy Roman Emperors (Rudolph II, 1552–1612), and the Romanoffs of Russia (Peter III, 1728–1762). These are some of the more extreme examples; but in other European Royal Houses border-line cases were plentiful. Ludwig II of Bavaria is one of them. His brother Otto was quite mad, and their blood, in the veins of the later Habsburgs, may account for some of the strange behaviour of which they were guilty.
Dr. J. A. Williamson claims that in England, at least, decline in royal ability began with Edward II (1307–1327), who was, as every school historian does his best to conceal, a most abnormal character, and both a pervert and a debauchee (THE EVOLUTION OF ENGLAND, 1931, Chap. IV, vi). Schopenhauer deplores his hideously cruel death, devised and ordered by his own wife, Isabella of France, who, Schopenhauer hints, inherited her brutality from her father Philip IV. But, unpardonable as the obscenely inhuman murder of her husband was, it must be said in mitigation of her crime that he was the sort of man who might well exasperate a wife to the point of unreasoning frenzy. In any case, apart from the various crossings in his remote ancestry, he was the product of two recent crosses; for his father had married a Spanish woman, Eleanor of Castile, and his grandfather, a French woman who was herself of mixed French and Savoyan blood. We can hardly wonder, therefore, that mental instability and insanity were soon to break out in an acute form in his line.
Edward III's mind is known to have become deranged in later life, whilst his grandson, Henry IV, was an epileptic, who, worn out by fits, died at the early age of 46; and his great-grandson, Henry VI, became hopelessly insane. It would, however, have been a miracle if Henry VI had escaped this fate; for, in addition to his much confused ancestry — in itself a cause of aberrations which, as we have seen, afflicted his forebears — there was actually grave mental disease in his maternal grandfather and maternal great-grandmother. Although the son of a man who, had he long survived his 35th year, might have proved one of England's greatest monarchs, his mother, Catherine of France, was the daughter of the mad king, Charles VI, and the granddaughter of Jeanne de Bourbon who herself suffered from repeated attacks of insanity and had, according to Funck-Brentano, transmitted her infirmity to her son. (THE MIDDLE AGES, 1922, Chap. XIX). The fact that, although the French king's and his mother's insanity was well known, Henry V never wavered in his determination to win the hand of Catherine of Valois, by his marriage with whom he appears to have hoped to strengthen his claim to the French throne, is one more indication, if such were needed, of the frivolous disregard of biological considerations, which has characterized European history ever since Socrates. Nor should it be forgotten by those aware of the inexorable severity of the laws of heredity, that the positive taint of insanity which entered the Lancastrian dynasty through Henry V's marriage and came to its full expression in his son Henry VI, re-entered the royal line with Henry VII who, through Catherine's second marriage, was this King's grandmother.
In view of his ancestors' record, the relative excellence of Henry V may, occasion some astonishment. But here we obviously have a case of a most lucky chance escape from the effects of villainously bad breeding, rather than the result of wise and careful breeding. It just happened, as may sometimes be the case, that Henry collected in his being all the best, rather than the worst, hereditary factors in his immediate ancestry.
But, in the long line of English sovereigns, the examples of failure, misrule, disease, and mental aberration, which may justly be ascribed in some measure to the consistent miscegenation to which European rulers have been addicted, are so numerous that many articles of the size of this one would be needed to cover the whole ground. I have therefore decided to conclude this series with the attempt to explain, in the spirit of the principles the present series of articles has outlined, how, as a descendant of his great ancestor Henry IV of France, Louis XVI, executed on Jan. 21st, 1793, came to be such a will-less, feckless and incapable ruler. As a concrete illustration of much that has been claimed in these articles, it will, I hope, prove both interesting and instructive.
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Of Louis XVI's forebears we need consider only sixteen people in his immediate ancestry in order to form an adequate idea of the hereditary influences which, by making him what he was, combined with the actions of his predecessors to determine his own, France's and, in fact, Europe's fate.
The eight men are: Antoine de Bourbon (1518–1562), Henry IV (1553–1610), Louis XIII (1601–1643), Louis XIV (1638–1715), Louis, the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), Louis, Duke of Burgundy (1682–1712), Louis XV (1710–1774), and the Dauphin, father to Louis XVI (1724–1765).
The wives of the above-mentioned royalties were respectively, Jeanne d'Albret (1528–1572), Marie de Médicis (1573–1642), Anne d'Autriche (1601–1666), Marie Thérèse (1638–1683), Marie-Anne de Bavière (1660–1690), Marie-Adelaide de Savoie (1685–1712), Marie Leszczynska (1703–1768), and Marie-Josephe de Saxe (1731–1767). In the light of the present thesis it is important to note that the only one among these women who did not bring some foreign blood into the Bourbon dynasty was Jeanne d'Albret; and she and her son Henry IV happen to be without a doubt the most gifted and in every respect the best of the sixteen people with whom we are concerned.
Henry IV's outstanding merits and great achievements are to be ascribed chiefly, if not wholly, to the qualities he inherited from his mother and the care and wisdom she lavished on his upbringing. At all events, both memorialists and historians are unanimous in regarding him as France's greatest monarch and as the highest example of her national type. Fontenay de Mareuil, his contemporary, speaks of him as the greatest French ruler since Charlemagne (MÉMOIRES, Vol. I, p. 46). Du Plessis Mornay, also a contemporary, says he was the greatest monarch Christendom had seen for 500 years (MÉMOIRES ET CORRESPONDANCE, Ed. 1824, Vol. XI); a modern authority, Louis Batiffol, says, Henry IV "may be regarded as the most remarkable of all French Kings" (LA VIE INTIME D'UNE REINE DE FRANCE, 1906, Chap. IV); whilst all modern English historians, from Dr. Mandell Creighton (THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, 1896, Book VI, Chap. III) to Stanley Leathes (CAMB. MOB. HIST. 1907, Vol. III, Chap. XX) agree in acknowledging his greatness as a ruler and attractiveness as a man.
Unfortunately, Henry IVs parents were by no means equally endowed and although by favouring his mother's side he became a ruler of remarkable ability, latent within him there were undoubtedly tendencies inherited from his insignificant father, which were anything but distinguished. For Antoine de Bourbon, although very brave, "was weak, inconstant, a lover of flattery, a libertine and an easy dupe of diplomatists." (Quentin Hurst, HENRY OF NAVARRE, 1937, Chap. II). But, except for his passionate temperament, Henry IV contrived to escape most of his father's least admirable traits. The fact that he probably carried them in his blood, however, should not be overlooked.
As a late 16th century man, he was singularly free from cruelty, vanity, ostentation, unscrupulousness and duplicity. He was moreover a delightful personality whose only two weaknesses were his body odour which caused him to be loathed by his wife and other women, and the tendency for which he transmitted to his son and grandson; and his sitomania, which he appears to have transmitted to all his descendants right down the line as far as the ill-fated Louis XVI; though only one of them, Louis XIV, could have advanced any plausible excuse for it. He as it happened was afflicted all his life with tapeworm, an infestation of which his doctors, with their imperfect knowledge of helminthics, were never able to rid him.
Nor is it without interest as a reflection on the principle that our fate is not in our stars but in ourselves, that, just as poor Henry IV had to suffer a wounding affront at the hands of his mistress, Henriette d'Entragues (Marquise de Verneuil), who told him that "it was as well for him that he was a king, otherwise no one would ever have put up with him, because he stank like carrion" (Tallemant des Réaux: LES HISTORIETTES, Ed. 1862, Vol. I "bien luy prenoit d'être roy, que sans cela on ne le pourroit souffrir, et qu'il puoit comme la charogne"); so
These two weaknesses apart, however, Henry IV was in every sense a great personality and, had he married a woman as gifted as his own mother, or even of average ability and character, there is no doubt that the destiny of both France and England — not to speak of Europe — would have been much better than it has turned out to be.
Unfortunately, besides introducing into the dynasty the blood of her Florentine family at a time in their history when they had become a mongrel stock and were already in full decline, Marie de Médicis was a person of no merit whatsoever. She was in fact a complete nitwit with the stubbornness of a mule. St. Simon describes her as "imperious, jealous, stupid to a degree." (MÉMOIRES.) Jacques Boulenger says she was "a grossly stupid lady" (LE GRAND SIÈCLE, 1911, Chap. I). Louis Batiffol thought her principal trait was stupidity and says that she inherited it from her mother, Jeanne d'Autriche. He adds that one had to be with her only for five minutes in order to discover that she was both "bornée et têtue" ("benighted and stubborn"; LA VIE INTIME D'UNE REINE DE FRANCE, 1906, Chap. I). Henry IV himself is said to have "had the lowest opinion of her ability" (Quentin Hurst, op. cit. Chap. VIII.) When he married her she was already 26 years old and both "fat and unattractive", and Batiffol adds that she had "un tempérament froid" ("was temperamentally cold", op. cit., Chap. III).
The only laudable action ever recorded of her was her rejection of Matthias, brother of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, as a suitor, because he was deformed and violent ("homme difforme et violent") — a decision which at least indicated good taste; for at the time she was growing desperate about her protracted spinsterhood.
The fact that, in her own person, she already bore stigmata of her mongrel stock, is noted by Batiffol, who tells us that "her face betrayed her dual origin: her mother an Austrian, the father a Medici. From her mother she inherited the lower part of her face and the prognathism of the Habsburgs, with everted lips, lacking in distinction; and from her father she inherited her large brow and steady gaze." (Op. cit., Chap. I. "Sa figure trahissait sa double origine etc.").
Why then did Henry IV marry her?
As poor Europe's luck would have it, because he thought he must; and, because he thought he must, he probably sealed the fate of both France and England as we now it today, if not of all Europe and the rest of world.
He was heavily indebted to "the Médicis and was moreover in urgent need of further financial help, if not from them, certainly from some other quarter. "France's indebtedness to the Médicis," says Batiffol, "had grown by leaps and bounds," and they were getting restive and disinclined to grant more aid. At the time when Henry most reluctantly acquiesced in the plan of making Marie his royal bride, his debt to her family amounted to no less than one and a quarter million golden crowns (êcus). Yet, even if he had done no more than cast his mind back to the sinister brood a former Medici queen, Catherine de Médicis, had given to her husband, he would have had grounds enough for shrinking from a union which State policy seemed to recommend; for he knew them well, those last Valois kings, and he must also have known that their father, Henry II, who was by no means contemptible either as a monarch or a man, could hardly have been held responsible for the thoroughly unpleasant and, on the whole, despicable character of his offspring.
But, in addition to Henry IV's financial straits, there were considerable political advantages to be gained from this second royal union with the Florentine family. For it was highly important that France should acquire some influence in Italy, then under Spanish and Austrian domination; and an alliance with Tuscany was also advisable as it promised to bring Savoy over to the French side.
For these reasons of State, based wholly on considerations of temporary expediency, the long-term and biological aspects of Henry's marriage were disregarded, and thus, from its very inception, the Bourbon dynasty suffered irreparable injury by the introduction into its line of rulers of a woman who besides being a vulgar alien, was also an utter numskull, bearing in her genes many of the least respectable attributes of her family. The fact that, subsequently, by allowing herself after Henry's death to be dominated by the lowest of her favourites, she went a long way towards destroying most of his great achievements, and was even suspected by many of having conspired to bring about his assassination, need hardly surprise us when we know the character of her immediate forebears; and if in the end her son was driven to the desperate course of exiling her from his kingdom, we may feel assured that the bad name history has given her was on the whole deserved.
By adulterating the blood of France's greatest monarch, she proved a bane both to her adopted country and, through her relationship to the later Stuarts, also to England. Finally, by contributing her share to the many undesirable traits which thenceforth, through further mongrelization, began to accumulate in the Bourbon strain, there can be little doubt that she is to be regarded as one of the principal factors which ultimately caused the downfall of the monarchy, together with all its disastrous repercussions, both in England and the rest of the world.
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Louis XIII who succeeded his father Henry IV, was thus the offspring of parents who were so distinctly disparate that, apart from the disadvantages both mental and physical he necessary suffered as the child of an incompatible couple, only a miracle could have made him as gifted and generally admirable as his father. He is described as "unattractive", as "certainly not an intellectual", for he never opened a book, and as afflicted with "an habitual stammer", which in itself might indicate some disturbance of his nervous organisation. (Jacques Boulenger: LE GRAND SIÈCLE, 1911, Chap. II). Voltaire seems to point to a similar and not surprising defect of his constitution, for he speaks of him as a "prince whose spirit was enervated by a feeble and sickly physique." (SIÈCLE DE LOUIS XIV, Chap. VII, "ce prince dont un corps faible et malade énervait l'âme.")
Although one of the most virtuous monarchs of France (Boulenger, Chap. II), Tallemant des Réaux says that "like the majority of sly and heartless people" he was "rather cruel" (HISTORIETTES, Vol. II, 87.) "Il estoit un peu cruél comme sont la, pluspart des sournois et des gens qui n'ont guères de coeur"). Tallemant also adduces much curious evidence of his excessive prudery and coldness, including the fact that he rarely cohabited with
At all events, Anne's first child, who became Louis XIV, was born 23 years after her marriage to Louis, and no one acquainted with Louis XIII's life can doubt that the alleged purity of his morals, his platonic relationships with the various women whom admittedly he loved at different times, and his reputation as a strict monogamist, were due less to his high principles and rigid piety than to the fact that he had inherited his mother's exceptionally cold temperament and, for a 17th century man, was therefore unusually chaste. This should be remembered in connection with Louis XVI, who neglected Marie Antoinette very much as his ancestor had neglected Anne of Austria.
But Louis XIII evidently inherited more of his mother's shortcomings than merely her frigidity; for he was on the whole a weak, incapable sovereign, the brilliant achievements of whose reign were due chiefly to Richelieu. In any case, the following couplet, written after his death, is probably a fair summing up of his character:—
"II eut cent vertus de valet
"Et pas une vertu de maistre."
("He had any number of servile qualities, but none of a master").
Boulenger says of him: "son premier aspect n'était pas réjouissant . . . sa bouche toujours ouverte sous son grand nez bourbonnien, sa lèvre inférieure légèrement pendante ne contribuaient pas plus à donner de l'esprit à sa longue figure, que son bégayement de la vivacité à sa conversation." (Chap. II, "At first sight his appearance was not pleasing . . . his mouth always open under his huge Bourbon nose and his slightly pendulous under-lip imparted as little intelligence to the expression of his long face, as his stammer lent liveliness to his conversation.")
It is moreover probable that his lack of passion, by preserving him from, extra-marital liaisons, was alone responsible for sparing him at a mistress's hands the kind of affront to which both his father and his son were subjected; for he suffered from the same body odour as they did and Tallemant says that he often boasted about it. "Je tiens de mon père moi; je sens le gousset" — "I take after my father, I do. I have the same axillary smell." (op. cit. I).
Louis XIII's consort was of the same age as her husband and the daughter of Philippe III of Spain and Marguerite of Austria. Thus, she also brought some strange blood into the dynasty. A contemporary, Mdme de Motteville, describes her as "good-looking, healthy, fresh and buxom" (Boulenger, Chap. II).
As we have seen, she was so much neglected by Louis XIII that it cannot surprise us to learn that, being coquettish and fond of admiration — traits she probably imparted with compound interest to her eldest son — she tolerated and enjoyed the attentions of many of the more attractive of her courtiers, and also of two Englishmen, the Earl of Holland and the Duke of Buckingham. She was, however, too virtuous and scrupulous to allow their attentions to become more than platonic. She died of cancer at the age of 65 and left behind her two sons who were as disparate as they could possibly be and, in this sense, typical siblings of highly miscegenated stock.
The elder became Louis XIV and his junior, known as Philippe, Duc d'Orleans (MONSIEUR), grew up to be like our own Edward II and some of the later Valois, one of the most odious creatures imaginable. E. H. Henderson declares, "He really was the scum of the earth, a man of horrible vices, who squandered his own and Madame's (his second wife) money on the vilest favourites, among them the very men who were believed to have poisoned his first wife" — Henrietta of England. (A LADY OF THE OLD RÉGIME, 1909, Chap. IV).
St. Simon's disparagement of him extends to denying him intelligence and declaring him utterly incapable ("capable de rien") . . "C'était un petit homme," he says, "ventru, monté sur des échasses tant ses souliers étaient hauts, toujours paré comme une femme, plein de bagues, de bracelets, de pierreries partout . . . plein de toutes sortes de parfums. On l'accusait de mettre imperceptiblement du rouge" (MÉMOIRES: "He was short and pot-bellied and his shoes had such high heels he appeared to be walking on stilts. Always bedizened like a woman and covered with rings, bracelets and precious stones, he reeked of scent. People even said he secretly rouged his cheeks").
Voltaire, who does not like to dilate on the seamy side of Le Grand Siècle, feels nevertheless bound to confirm St. Simon. He speaks of the Duke of Orleans' effeminacy; says he "s'habillait souvent en femme", and what is more, acknowledges that he "en avait les inclinations" (SIÈCLE DE LOUIS XIV, Chap. XIII. "He often dressed as a woman and had a woman's propensities").
It is interesting that this should have been so, because there is some evidence which indicates that in areas where there has been much intermingling of races, types and stocks, there is a tendency for people of intermediate sex, both in male and female form, to multiply unduly; and the increasing prevalence throughout the modern Western World of homosexuality, whether male or female, may therefore be ascribed, to some extent at least, to the reckless cross-breeding between different races and types, which, as I have already pointed out, began among the common people of Europe with the vastly improved means of transport that accompanied the Industrial Era, and has developed considerably pari passu with the multiplication of these means.
St. Simon, we know, was not favourably disposed to the Court of Louis XIV, or to the monarch himself. For that reason many historians accept with caution his more outspoken criticisms of the regime and its principal figures in the 17th century. When, however, he says of Louis XIV's brother, the Duke of Orleans: "Le goût de Monsieur n'était pas celui des femmes, et il ne s'en cachait même pas", he is probably more trustworthy than historians favourable to the régime may suppose. (MÉMOIRES, Vol. I pp. 60–67. "Monsieur's taste did not incline him to women, and he took no pains to conceal the fact").
At all events, he made both of his wives very miserable, though neither of them had either the power or the inclination to avenge themselves as Isabella of France did against our Edward II.
The Duke of Orleans' brother, Louis XIV, will be the subject of my next article.
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So many historians have extolled Louis XIV, and the literature eulogizing him both as a man and a monarch is now so vast and widely known that to question his greatness is looked upon by many as a historical heresy. From Voltaire (LE SIÈCLE DE LOUIS XIV, 1751) down to Prof. Émile Bourgeois (LE GRAND SIÈCLE, 1896) and A. de Montgon (LOUIS XIV, 1934), the chorus of encomiasts is so loud, that even a careful student may be forgiven for inclining to their side and suspecting denigrators like St. Simon of base motives for their heterodoxy.
A large school in France now certainly rejects the legendary view of the Sun-King's reign; but, to the general reader, especially in England, Louis XIV suggests an Age of unprecedented glory and good government. Nor can this surprise us, seeing that no less an authority than Lord Acton was of the opinion that Louis XIV was "by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne." (CAMB. MOD. HIST., 1905, Vol. V, Chap. I).
Yet it can now hardly be doubted by any one who examines the documents afresh, that the truth in this matter lies, not half way between — say, Voltaire and St. Simon, but with our own historian, Thomas Henry Buckle, whose searching analysis of the Roi Soleil's reign, in Chaps. IV and V of his HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN ENGLAND, cannot fail to convince any unprejudiced reader that although Louis XV's shameful life may have knocked the last nails in the French monarchy's coffin, it was his great-grandfather and immediate predecessor, Louis XIV, who dealt the death-blow that made the coffin necessary, and paved the way to the Revolution.
Buckle suggests that only the royal patronage of literature accounts for the eulogies of a reign that has nothing to recommend it. "The reputation of Louis XIV", he says, "originated in the gratitude of men of letters;" and he argues that his reign "must be utterly condemned if it is tried even by the lowest standards of morals, of honour, or of interest."
Only a second Henry IV could have saved the monarchy which this great king's grandson had hopelessly discredited. Only he could have lifted the nobility out of the pit of wasteful indolence, uselessness and vanity into which they had sunk. As Arvède Barine properly remarks, "Jamais monarque n'a travaillé avec plus d'art et de méthode que Louis XIV à annuler sa noblesse et à la détruire dans l'opinion." (LOUIS XIV ET LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE, 1905, Chap. IV. "No monarch ever strove with greater art and method than did Louis XIV to destroy his aristocracy and to ruin it in the eyes of the people.") This was also Lavisse's opinion. (See LOUIS XIV, by David Ogg, 1933, Conclusion).
Nor was Buckle exaggerating when he said that Louis XIV's reign "was an age of decay . . . an age of misery of intolerance and oppression . . . an age of bondage, of ignominy, of incompetence." (See also Boulenger's account of the wretched state of the poor and the peasantry under Louis XIV. op cit. Chap. XII).
But the most conclusive proof of Buckle's accuracy is the public's sense of relief, its joy and jubilation, when at last the Grand Monarque was laid to rest. Even Voltaire concedes that "he was not regretted as he deserved to be" (op. cit. Chap. XXVIII, "il ne fut pas aussi regretté qu'il le méritait"); whilst St. Simon, who hated him, says, "Louis XIV ne fut regretté que de ses valets intérieurs, de peu d'autres gens . . . Le peuple ruiné, accablé, désespéré, rendit grâce à Dieu, avec un éclat scandaleux, d'une délivrance dont ses plus ardents désirs ne doutaient plus." (op. cit. "Louis XIV was lamented only by his domestic retainers, by few others. . . . The people, ruined, oppressed and desperate, thanked God with unbecoming enthusiasm for a deliverance which their most passionate longing could now cease to doubt.") "When the funeral cortège passed through the streets of Paris," says Dr. G. P. Gooch, "on the way to St. Denis there was dancing, singing and drinking in the streets, and insults were hurled at the corpse." (LOUIS XV: THE MONARCHY IN DECLINE, 1956, Chap. 2.)
Those admirers of Louis XIV who may think St. Simon and Buckle unfair, should read Ed. E. Morris's summing-up of the reign, in Chap. XIX of THE AGE OF ANNE (1886). "Louis," he says, "had succeeded to a throne with power consolidated by wise government. He had squandered its resources. He possessed all the externals of a king, but he was lacking in the true virtues of a ruler. . . . He left France exhausted, and under him her people endured misery. . . . No sooner had the old king closed his eyes in death than there passed through France a sigh of relief, one might almost say a cry of delight."
How had this rapid decline in the ability of the dynasty
Trustworthy Boulenger certainly describes Louis XIV as neither "highly intelligent" nor "at all brilliant" (op. cit. Chap. VII); whilst St. Simon says "he was born with a mind below mediocrity" ("né avec un esprit au-dessous du médiocre," op. cit.). Nor was this defect corrected by education, for his shrewd and intelligent sister-in-law, the Duchess of Orleans (Liselotte), who was fond of him, acknowledges that "neither the King nor Monsieur had been taught anything; they scarcely knew how to read and write" (E. F. Henderson: A LADY OF THE OLD RÉGIME, 1909, Chap. II); whilst St. Simon says: "He had hardly been taught to read or write, and he remained so ignorant that the most notable facts of history etc. and law, were unknown to him. Owing to these defects he was sometimes guilty of the most absurd howlers, even in public." (MÉMOIRES. "À peine lui apprit on à lire et à écrire, et il demeura tellement ignorant que les choses les plus connues d' histoire etc. et de lois, il n'en sut jamais un mot. Il tombait, par ce défaut, et quelquefois en public, dans les absurdités les plus grossières.")
A. de Montgon (op. cit. Chap. III) denies this and claims that Louis XIV had had a much better education than the majority of his contemporaries; but against this we have Boulenger, always most fair, who says, "His education was of the scantiest description" (op. cit. Chap. VII. See also W. H. Lewis: THE SPLENDID CENTURY, 1953, Chap. I.)
Like his mother, he adored flattery — "even of the grossest kind" says St. Simon; and although we know that he wept easily, he was singularly heartless as is shown — to mention no other instances — by his repeated acts of brutality to La Vallière and his callous indifference to the Duchess of Burgundy's unhappy plight in 1708. His sitomania has already been mentioned and accounted for, as has also his body odour, a fault which may explain why, when he had one of his very rare baths, an attendant had the duty of burning perfume on a red-hot shovel to sweeten the air.
His one great virtue — indefatigable industry — distinguished him from his indolent mother and inspired the respect of his ministers and courtiers; though whether he controlled them to the extent many suppose, may be doubted. St. Simon declares that "even the youngest and most mediocre" of his lieutenants in the government ruled him more than he did them; whilst, towards women he was often surprisingly helpless. Mdme de Montespan is said to have treated him very much as the Duchess of Cleveland treated our Charles II, and when his heart was engaged, as it was with the young Duchess of Burgundy, for instance, he could suffer even having "a whole dish of salad" flung in his face in public, without protesting. (K. Katz. op. cit., Chap: XIII). Indeed, the regimen of women really began in his reign and not, as some historians allege, with Mdme de Prie, under the Regency.
Physically, he was handsome; but his teeth were always bad and, as he is said to have swallowed his food before properly masticating it, he suffered all his life from digestive troubles. He could hardly have been a weakling, however; for, despite his constant self-indulgence and other abuses, together with the barbarous mishandling he underwent owing to the ignorance of the
Although he believed he was God's deputy on earth and acted the part with a skill that impressed the whole of Europe, the state of his kingdom at his death shows him to have been deplorably incompetent and shortsighted.
His wife, Marie Thérèse, the daughter of Philip IV of Spain and Elizabeth of France (sister of Louis XIII), besides adding more foreign blood, also contributed a further dose of Marie de Médicis, to the dynasty, and the decline, already pronounced, was thus inevitably accelerated. Boulenger describes her as "a pattern of the greatest stupidity" (op. cit. Chap. VII); Julia Cartwright calls her "dull, ignorant and bigoted" (MADAME, 1903, Chap. VII); whilst W. H. Lewis, in THE SUNSET OF THE SPLENDID CENTURY (1955, Chap. 4), says, "she had been a stupid girl, and grew into a stupid woman" — in short, a chip of the old Marie de Médicis block.
After the birth of the Grand Dauphin, she bore Louis XIV six children, five of whom died in infancy. What the fruit of their ill-assorted marriage was, will be seen in my next article.
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All we know about heredity and the effects of cross- and in-breeding would bo placed in doubt if the offspring of Louis XIV and Marie Thérèse had been fine specimens of humanity with even a few of the gifts of the dynasty's great founder, Henry IV.
Truth to tell, however, no such deviation from the established laws actually occurred; for the poor Grand Dauphin, one of the most hopeless nonentities ever born in a royal house, abundantly illustrated every mistake made in the mating of his ancestors. And, most extraordinary as it may seem, there appears to have been at least one person in his entourage who, despite the prevailing ignorance about human breeding, divined, or rather guessed, the truth about this vital matter. This person was clever Mdme de Maintenon.
It will be remembered that I called attention to a curious difference between the breeding practices of the common people and those of the royal houses of Europe, at least up to the time of the revolution in the means of transport; and I pointed to the fact, the importance of which is quite unnoticed by historians, that whereas the upper classes and all royal families were condemned to the worst consequences of consistent random cross-breeding, the common people were everywhere able to enjoy the benefits of endogamy.
Now listen to Mdme de Maintenon in 1681, addressing the Duc du Maine, Louis XIV's bastard son by Mdme de Montespan: "It is well that you should realize that you are happily saved from the mixed blood that is ordinarily the fate of persons of your class." (W. H. Lewis: THE
Evidently hinting at the fact that, unlike the King's legitimate children, the Duke du Maine was at least the son of a French mother, her remark shows that already in those days, an intelligent woman could recognize the dire consequences of the excessive cross-breeding that was customary in the royal houses of Europe.
The Grand Dauphin (1661–1711) was certainly no example of the advantages of the system. Indeed, he was the best possible warning against it; for he was miserably endowed. Henri Carré who declares him "feeble-minded" says, "Of less than average intelligence and of more than average indolence, his lack of energy and his lack of wit made his influence at court almost negligible." (LA DUCHESSE DE BOURGOGNE, 1936, Chaps. III and XVI). To judge by his manners even in his father's presence, it seems doubtful whether he was quite sane. He would suddenly give vent to "loud guffaws" and raise his voice in public in a way which was endured only because of his exalted rank. Bloated, and coarse in his tastes, he was "incapable of acquiring knowledge, phenomenally ignorant, and unable to talk about anything except hunting and cooking." (MADAME DE MAINTENON: HER LIFE & TIMES, by C. C. Dyson, 1910, Chap. V and XIII). St. Simon says, "his indolence and a sort of imbecility made him soft and easy-going . . . all his life he had never read anything but the list of deaths and marriages in the Paris articles of the Gazette de France . . . he was encased in fat and benightedness." In passages full of unconscious humour and patriotic zeal, St. Simon confesses that when Monseigneur was supposed to be dying of small pox, he and Mdme de Simon so much dreaded the consequences of his accession that they prayed that he might not recover. When there were for a while faint hopes of his cure, they were panic-stricken; and when at last he succumbed to his illness, they leapt with joy. "Ma délivérance particulier," he says, "me semblait si grande et si inespéré qu'il me semblait. . . que l'Etat gagnait tout en une telle perte . . . a eut été un roi pernicieux." (Memoires: "My own relief seemed so great and unhoped for, because I believed his death to be in every respect a gain for the State . . . he would have made a pernicious sovereign.")
Neither the court nor the nation felt any regret at his death; and secretly at least, Louis XIV was perhaps of all the French people the most gratified by the event.
The Grand Dauphin's wife, Marie-Anne, Victoria, Christine of Bavaria, is said to have been an ugly, insignificant and, according to Boulenger (op. cit. Chap. VII), "a not very healthy," German woman. There is a hint that she was a hypochondriac and, from 1685, when she was only 25 years of age, until her end, she "was always complaining of ill-health." After "a year of extreme suffering" she died in 1690 at the early age of thirty.
What could be expected of such a couple? Besides importing fresh foreign blood, Marie-Anne failed to contribute any health or beauty to the dynasty, and it is surprising that their offspring, poor as they undoubtedly were, proved as presentable as they turned out to be.
The eldest, the Duke of Burgundy, who became Dauphin at his father's death, is described as "of small stature and sickly appearance, with an ill-looking mouth and a humpback" (Dyson, op cit. Chap. XVI). The Duchess of Orleans (Liselotte) tells us that "the good soul was ugly enough without endeavouring to make himself more so" — meaning his hunchback; and she adds that he had "a shocking mouth, and unhealthy skin, and was deformed." (Carré: op. cit. Chap. XII). Carré also suggests that these shortcomings made him distasteful to his wife. St Simon hints at homosexual tendencies; says "il devint bossu" (he became a hunchback) in spite of wearing steel supports, and adds that he finally went lame. But it is obvious that St. Simon, prompted chiefly by his inveterate snobbery, prefers him before the Montespan brood of legitimized bastards; for he speaks of his early death in 1712 as a major calamity. "God showed France a prince she did not deserve," he says. "The world was unworthy of him and he was all too ready to enter eternal happiness." (MÉMOIRES).
But although St. Simon may have been right in exalting Louis XIV's legitimate, above his bastard, children, the Duke of Burgundy was by no means the paragon he would have us believe. He was certainly sexually abnormal and probably alienated his wife on that account. Long before his death, moreover, his increasing religious mania indicated some intellectual weakness. Nor did he shine as a soldier, and Carré says his behaviour in camp during the siege of Lille was disgraceful (op. cit. Chap XVII). He certainly failed to win his young wife's respect, and Carré declares that she would often raise a laugh in company by imitating her husband's limping gait. (Chap. XI).
Although by far the old monarch's greatest favourite at court, the Duchess of Burgundy could not have been a very admirable character. The grand-daughter of that deplorable creature, Philippe d'Orléans, and of Henrietta of England (Charles I's daughter), she had only youthful charm to recommend her. Her health was never good, her constitution was always delicate, and her nerves were unsteady (F. Hamel: THE DAUPHINES OF FRANCE, 1909, Chap. VIII). Liselotte, her step-grand-mother, thought her "delicate and even sickly." St. Simon describes her as "ugly, with few teeth, and those decayed, a long neck betraying signs of goitre, and pendant cheeks." (MÉMOIRES). Nevertheless her charm, which is generally admitted, succeeded in captivating her great uncle, Louis XIV; for she it was whom, without protest, he suffered to fling a dish of salad in his face in public; and it was she who could so confidently trade on his tolerant affection as to dare on one occasion to have a clyster administered to her in his presence. He only laughed. (St. Simon).
Carré says that she and her husband were quite incompatible; but whether she was ever unfaithful to him, remains, despite her frivolity, somewhat doubtful. According to F. Hamel, she was not even intelligent and, to the end of her days, wrote and spelt with great difficulty. There are many incidents in her life which go to confirm this judgment and Louis XIV's infatuation about her is not easy to understand. Carré declares her "Heartless, careless and frivolous", which seems a pretty fair summing up of her character; and the judgment is important, because her repulsive son probably inherited these failings from her. Carré also tells us she had "little culture and in conversation was not brilliant." (op. cit. Chap. XXII).
She imported a Savoyan and English strain into the dynasty without enriching it with either stamina, health, beauty or intelligence. She died in 1712 at the age of 27.
Such were the parents of the monster, Louis XV, who consummated the havoc wrought in the State by his great grandfather; and of whom it may fairly be said that, with Louis XIV, he was probably responsible for most of the disasters that have overtaken Europe from the time of his accession to independent power in 1743 to the present day.
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XVI
This dismal record of the decadence of a dynasty and the final dissipation of the brilliant gifts with which it started, is now drawing towards its tragic close; nor would it have been worthy of the narrow scrutiny we have given it, had it been only a local affair, a foreign family's private history, and not exactly "our business". But, unfortunately, it has proved only too surely to have been the business of every modern European, if not of every world-inhabitant; for the repercussions of the hardly credible blindness, stupidity, reckless hedonism and sordid lechery of the two French rulers who followed Louis XIII, have left hardly any modern nation's institutions, beliefs, sacred shrines and customs, unassailed, if not irreparably damaged.
Of Louis XV, in whom all the most depraved of the Bourbon characteristics seem to have been concentrated, Pierre de Nolhac says:— "one may well recoil in terror from the power of his evil propensities . . . left as he was at the mercy of his all-pervading lasciviousness, what would have become of him if in his heart there had not been that faint trace, forgotten perhaps though not wholly obliterated, of the Christian rule of duty?" (Apparently he contrived, despite all his depravity, to retain until the end a belief in Hell). "This alone perhaps delayed for a while his utter corruption and the impenitent triumph of his egoism. Without it, the road leading from passion to vice would have been covered much more rapidly; without it, in after years, this vicious man would have become a monster." (LOUIS XV ET MARIE LECZINSKA, 1900, Chap. III.)
Edward Armstrong describes his life as "absolutely idle", devoted to his dogs, horses and mistresses, and implies that he was heartless. (CAMB. MOD. HIST. 1925, Vol. VI, Chap. V.) Casimir Stryienski, the French authority on the period, defends Louis XV by emphasizing the fatal errors in his upbringing (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1916, Chap. II); but he admits that "all his life he was idle, a great hunter and an equally great gambler" (Part II, Chap. VI). Prof. A. G. Grant says of Louis XV, "it would be difficult to mention the name of any European king whose private life shows such a record of vulgar vice unredeemed by higher aims of any kind" (ENCYCL. BRITAN. Vol. XVII). Nolhac speaks of his "paresse invincible" ("invincible laziness"; op. cit. Chap. III).
Even Pierre Gaxotte, whose book, LOUIS THE FIFTEENTH AND HIS TIMES(1934), is really an attempt at whitewashing the king, has to admit a great deal that weakens his plea for the defence. In his Preface he maintains that Louis "has been judged wholly and solely on the testimony of his enemies"; but his own evidence reveals the king as weak, always prone to subordinate himself to some masculinoid woman, and never energetic or conscientious enough to attend with application to his duties as a ruler. In fact, Gaxotte acknowledges that Louis was "the most scandalous of princes" and from his pages we obtain convincing proof of the King's heartlessness. For instance, he tells us how, on one occasion "by way of being funny" he deliberately "trod on the foot of a man who had recently had an attack of gout," and he adds, "The good fellow felt such terrible pain that he left Versailles and would never come back, although they coaxed him to do so." (Chap. VI.) Can one wonder! Something else Gaxotte says which rather invalidates
D'Argenson, Louis XV's distinguished Minister of War, whom Mdme de Pompadour caused to be sacked, said of the whole reign, "under the appearance of personal monarchy, it was really anarchy that reigned," and, as Louis sank ever more deeply into debauchery and vice, the summing-up seems increasingly accurate. At last, infected by one of the young girls with whom, as a man of sixty-four, he happened in 1774 to be cohabiting, the King died of small-pox and left his miserably endowed eldest grandson, the impossible task of restoring the royal prestige, and establishing order and a sound government in the country.
"I have governed and administered badly" Louis XV wrote in his will, "because I have little talent." (Stryienski, Part III. Chap. XV.) This was at least frank; but he might truthfully have added:— "and because all my life I have been a rake." His legacy to his countrymen, says Dr. G. P. Gooch (LOUIS XV: THE MONARCHY IN DECLINE, 1956, Chap. 12), "was an ill-governed, discontented, frustrated France."
As for Louis XV's wife, she was the last person who, by her charm, beauty and wit, could have inspired a lasting affection in her husband. Besides her incompatibility as a foreigner, which meant that she introduced a further alien strain into the blood of the dynasty, Marie Leszczynska was six and a half years older than her husband, and was neither good looking nor amusing. A German writer calls her positively ugly. Gaxotte represents her as spinsterly, humdrum and provincial. (Chap. VI.) A paragon of virtue, she was also dismally dull; and Louis XV, being what he was, this was probably her worst defect. Her ten confinements had not increased her attractiveness and the whole of her behaviour and general interests were petty and more middle-class than aristocratic.
Pierre de Nolhac, however, regards her as much superior to Marie Antoinette in the attention she gave to culture and the arts. (Chap. IV.) But she had inherited from her father, King Stanislas, not only his plain looks, but also his homely and mediocre gifts. De Nolhac says Stanislas "was full of incurable ambition, but only indifferently endowed to realising it. . . . He was born to lead the life of a country squire with dignity and to play the tender rôle of a family man, rather than to exercise the authority and bear the responsibility of a ruler of a great nation." (Chap. I.)
These remarks should be remembered particularly as Marie Leszczynska seems to have handed on to her grandson, Louis XVI, many of the same characteristics. Ex-king Stanislas had brought up his daughter himself and had trained her for a position much more humble than that of Queen of France; though whether he would have been capable of preparing her fore the exalted post she ultimately held — that is, if he had been able to foresee her destiny — is most probably doubtful. She was not enamoured of her rôle of Queen. "It is no fun being Queen," she is alleged to have remarked, and Dr. Gooch tells us that when she died at the age of sixty-five 'she was glad to go." (Chap. 6, II.) She was at least spared the ultimate humiliation of seeing Mdme du Barry installed as Maîtresse en titre.
The Royal couple's only son who survived, was the Dauphin Louis, who in appearance was "very like the Queen." Like her, too, he was reserved. "His conversation was coherent, well-informed and agreeable. . . . He was a considerable judge of character and could express himself concisely." He "would doubtless have shown more energy on the throne than did his son Louis XVI." (Stryienski. Chap. VIII.) Too fat to enjoy the chase, "he was taciturn, preoccupied and heavy", and in considering his son's lamentable lack of sound judgment, it is perhaps important to note that he was probably most tactless, if not actually heartless as well. One outstanding instance of these two failings was his treatment of his second wife, Marie Josephe re Saxe, whom he compelled for years to wear "bracelets that contained portraits of his first wife." (F. Hamel: THE DAUPHINES OF FRANCE, 1909, Chap. X.) "His chief pleasure," Stryienski tells us, "was to find a quiet corner where he might indulge his taste for study." (Chap. VIII.) Dr. G. P. Gooch, who devotes twelve pages of his book on Louis XV to the Dauphin, speaks of him as "one of the riddles of French history," and the impression we derive from his description of Louis XV's son and heir, is that, like his grandfather the Duke of Burgundy, he would probably have turned out to be a pious and bigoted, rather than an efficient and capable, sovereign, a student and dreamer rather than a man of action. (Chap. 6.) He died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1765.
His second wife, Marie Josephe de Saxe (1731–1767), the mother of the three last Bourbon Kings of France, was fifteen when he married her in 1746. She was the third daughter of Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, the man who had seized her mother-in-law, Marie Leszczynska's father's throne, a fact which created an awkward situation at court. She is described as "not pretty". Her nose and teeth were bad; yet some thought her attractive. Chevery says she was "cross to her household and little liked" (Gooch: 6, III), and this seems to be confirmed by Walpole who in 1765 said of her, "looks cross, is not civil and has the true Westphalian grace and accents." (F. Hamel, Chap. X.) Some thought her intelligent; but it is probable that the couple were more respected than liked "and were voted dull by most of the courtiers." (Gooch: ibid.) Stryienski (Part II, Chap. VIII), however, describes her as "high-minded and well-educated" and says "she won universal esteem." She succumbed to the same disease as her husband in 1767; having, like many of her predecessors on the French throne, introduced a further foreign strain into the dynasty; this time, Dano-German.
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XVII
In view of his antecedents and his breeding, it would have been little short of a miracle if Louis XVI, grandson of Louis XV, had been a great man, capable of dealing successfully with the deplorable conditions, both in the country, its finances, and the absolute and corrupt system of Government, existing when in 1774 he ascended the throne of France.
The state of affairs called for a man of the stamp of the Founder of the Dynasty. No one less gifted could be expected to cope with it. Instead, however, France was given a youth only 20 years old, well-meaning and honest, but weak, ill-trained for his responsible functions, and possessed of tastes and leanings which made him shun rather than welcome the onerous duties of his exalted rank. Dangerously subject to his young attractive wife and more anxious to please everybody than firmly and resolutely, in consultation with the few wise men about him, to frame such prudent policies as the disordered state of the nation urgently demanded, he started by making concession after concession to every party or interest that displayed enough determination to intimidate him; and he had not been on the throne more than three months before Marie Antoinette was instrumental in making him dismiss a man like Maupeou, in whom he himself firmly believed.
He was unfortunately not the sort of man to inspire respect or self-sacrificing devotion in his spouse, or to control her high-spirited, wilful and domineering personality. Stryenski describes him as "heavy, ungainly, morally and physically awkward". Caraccioli, the Neapolitan Ambassador, says he was "boorish and rustic to such a degree that he might have been educated in a wood". (THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Part II, Chap. V). Mdme Campan who had ample opportunities of observing him at close quarters, throws many revelatory sidelights upon his character. "He had certain rather noble features (des traits assez nobles)", she says, "stamped, however, with melancholy. His bearing was clumsy and devoid of grandeur, whilst in his dress he was always extremely untidy. However skilful his hairdresser might be, he very soon appeared dishevelled, thanks to the scant care he took of his person. His voice, though not harsh, was far from pleasing; and when he grew excited it often rose to a shrill falsetto." (MÉMOIRES, Chap. V).
Moreover — and this was his most fatal short-
This was all the more unfortunate, because it naturally undermined his wife's respect and affection for him, and threw her into the arms and under the influence of associates who were neither her best advisers nor the most favourably placed to understand the problems with which she and the King were confronted. Mdme Campan mentions, for instance, the very sinister figure of l'abbé de Vermond as among these associates, and says of him that he was the evil genius of Marie Antoinette's reign:— "l'étoile funeste de Marie Antoinette," (Ibid. Chap. II).
In any case, she had been unfortunate in her education and had, like her sisters, little culture. Nor did it improve her to be thrown at the age of fourteen into the dissolute Court of Louis XV. She needed a spouse who could have corrected the faults in her upbringing and, by winning her entire trust and devotion, have provided her with wise leadership. Instead, she had a man who was wax in her hands. "The King has only one man about him," wrote Mirabeau, — "his wife." (Madelin, Op. cit. Chap. IV). What made matters worse was that, besides being inexperienced, thoughtless, and over-fond of gambling and dress, she was easily influenced, so that she soon became the tool of a secret party at Court "whose only principle was to secure places, sinecures and reversions to the detriment of those who might have been of use to the State." (Stryenski, Op. cit. Chap. XVII).
In the end, therefore, although she may have been much to blame for her unpopularity and the slanders and insults to which she was subjected, it was her husband, the King, whose character and constitution were chiefly responsible for the fate that ultimately overtook her. It was his weakness and fecklessness, his lack of manliness and mettle, that made her dare to measure her will against his and to turn elsewhere than to him for guidance and even companionship. A wife who could put the clock forward a half to three-quarters of an hour so as to speed her sleepy husband to bed and the sooner to bring out the faro table, could hardly be deemed happy and well-mated; and the whole tragedy of her life may thus perhaps be fairly summed up as the outcome of a mesalliance.
Truth to tell, Louis XVI had only two passions, which he indulged with unflinching assiduity, and they both left him exhausted at the end of the day. He spent hours of valuable time "in trifling mechanical pursuits" and frequently retired from the hunting field so worn out that he would fall asleep in Council "when grave business was under discussion". (Prof. F. C. Montague: CAMB. MOD. HIST. Vol. VIII, Chap. IV). Mdme Campan mentions masonry and locksmith's work (serrurie) among his favourite pastimes, and says that he worked with a journeyman locksmith at cutting keys and constructing locks. "After such work", she says, "his hands were often so filthy that I have heard the Queen remonstrate with him and rebuke him quite angrily."
He was neither a wicked nor a heartless ruler. On the contrary, he was a much better man and king than his grandfather, and would have made an excellent squire or constitutional monarch. In this respect he displayed the mediocre and domestic virtues he had probably inherited from his great-grandfather, the dethroned King of Poland, which were not the qualities required to win the tremendous fight he was called upon to wage in the late eighties of the century.
It is typical of him, for instance, that on May 4th 1789, when the States-General met in the Cathedral of St. Louis and the hour had struck for the exercise of the utmost caution and wisdom in the control of the factions there assembled, he not only kept the assembly waiting three whole hours before he turned up, but when at last he did appear and La Fare, Bishop of Nancy, preached a sermon in which "he read the Court a lecture", Louis fell fast asleep and, when the bishop concluded his veiled admonition and the sudden burst of applause from the more revolutionary among those present woke the King up, he beamed gratefully upon the prelate as if taking for granted that the harangue had been a fulsome eulogy of the reign. Again: when five months later "the surging populace set out for Versailles crying 'Bread! Bread!'" and they first insulted the Assembly and then turned towards the Palace, "When they came there," Dr. G. W. Kitchin tells us, "the King was out hunting". (HISTORY OF FRANCE, 1903, Vol. III, Chap. VIII).
Until it was too late to adopt any other policy than flight — and even this, as we know, he succeeded in bungling most miserably — he appears to have had no statesmanlike understanding of the forces both intellectual and physical that were preparing the way for the Revolution. In fact, he displayed all those shortcomings both of character and constitution which are the inevitable product of a long history of miscegenation and random mating.
In his person, we see vividly exemplified all the irresolution, self-distrust, inconsequence and infirmity of purpose, which naturally afflict the man whose mind is a tumult of the contending voices of scores of disparate forebears; who knows no single well-defined goal, no clear-cut aim, because too many different impulses strive for supremacy in his breast. Add to this the extreme mediocrity, compounded with villainy, of many of his ancestors, their violations of sound rulership, and the fact that even his brothers were among those who conspired against him, and you behold a tragic figure who was probably more sinned against than sinning, and who, as Professor Montague declares, was "no more than an inglorious victim" of the circumstances in which Fate had placed him.
When, therefore, he ascended the scaffold on that January morning 1793, he paid with his blood for the ignorance, stupidity and lack of ordinary common farmhouse knowledge in the ruling houses of Europe. Yet, if we are to judge from the subsequent history of royalty in this continent, his death really served no purpose; for it taught no lesson to his many royal survivors; failed to open the eyes even of historians concerning the fundamental causes of the Revolution and of the failure of monarchy, and, except for giving superficial people the opportunity to croak, "All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", it left us where we were regarding our ideas and policies as they affected human breeding.
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XVIII
In view of what has been said on Race in the previous articles of this series, and of the cogent historical and scientific evidence adduced in support of the claim that random breeding and miscegenation are inconsistent with the cultivation of the desirable qualities of body and mind which we associate with thoroughbred stock, the reader of the SOUTH AFRICAN OBSERVER may be wondering how it is that the General Public, almost all over the world to-day, besides being quite unfamiliar with the scientific reasons favouring racial integrity, is usually so assiduously indoctrinated to take the diametrically opposite point of view, that they cause no surprise whatsoever if even in their sleep they mumble automatically, "No Racial Discrimination!" — "Differences of Colour, Type and Nationality are of no account!" — "No Colour Bar!"
Everywhere Youth is being trained to regard such slogans as the quintessence of eternal Truth, and it is now difficult to come across any young person, who will not immediately flare up indignantly if one of these slogans is questioned. Now, apart from indicating how insidiously skilful propaganda leads the average common man and woman to assume that the ideas they have actually imbibed at their particular Fleet Street fountain, or obtained from their wireless, are really of their own mintage and the product of their own original cogitations, what is the meaning of this universal conditioning of modern mankind to believe in a practice that impairs sanity, reduces comeliness, injures the constitution and disturbs the harmony of the body's organs and parts?
The answer is that, for the last twenty-five years at least, it has been in the interests of an influential and powerful minority in all civilized countries, to undermine and if possible destroy the very instincts, let alone the ideas, of mankind, which from time immemorial have favoured endogamy, assortive mating and race-preservation.
And why was it in their interest to do this? — Because the instincts and ideas in question, when popularly held and popularly applied, mean that the influential and powerful minority might themselves suffer, if not persecution, at least cold-shouldering, social discrimination, ostracism, at the hands of every population among which they happened to be racially incongruous. As, however, it would have been too blatant, too obviously revelatory of their motive, merely to attack xenophobia, and might have opened the eyes of the blindest to their private intentions, they flung the net of the "Brotherhood of Mankind" wide enough to baffle the gullible multitude. By instigating the movement against Man's inveterate distaste for strange types, unusual skin pigmentation and exotic features in general, they themselves were able to retreat within a small inner circumference of the wide circle they described, where no one's attention would be drawn to the discreet kernel they occupied in the vast sphere of their "humanitarian" propaganda.
Thus, the Press, the Stage, Public Oratory and the Wireless, all began simultaneously to bleat that Race Discrimination was the antithesis of enlightenment, civilization and decency, and no word to the contrary was allowed to be seen or heard anywhere. To utter such a word without horror and loathing, was at once to be classed a Fascist or a Nazi.
This does not mean, of course, that Science, all Science bent the knee. Many allegedly scientific anthropologists and biologists did. But the more independent and intrepid did not. They continued to state the facts and arguments which confirmed the wisdom of mankind's traditional belief in race purity. They even added to these facts and arguments many that were both new and convincing. After all, the "Freedom-loving Nations" were believed to enjoy a Free Press and Freedom of Speech, so how could qualified scientists, however awkward their findings, be denied the freedom to express their views? And the powerful minority controlling our channels of publicity were the more ready to grant this concession, seeing that the books and journals in which the awkward arguments and facts were published, were notoriously either inaccessible to the General Public, or else quite unknown to them, through being never under any circumstances noticed by the National Press if they contained any "Fascist" views.
What did it matter then if Professor Crew of Edinburgh should write in favour of endogamy and go so far as to state that it was a means of regenerating a deteriorated population? The powers-that-be knew perfectly well that no member of the General Newspaper-fed Public would ever read the book in which he said it. And, as no whisper about the existence of the book (ORGANIC INHERITANCE IN MAN) was allowed to disturb the serene "humanitarianism" of the National Press, he might, so far as the General Public was concerned, never have written it.
When in 1935 the International Library of Sexology and Psychology published my long, carefully argued and thoroughly documented treatise on human mating (THE CHOICE OF A MATE), in which, supported by an exhaustive account of the scientific data then available, I stressed the essentialness of endogamy and assortive mating if modern mankind wished to regenerate their stock, not a hint of the existence of my book was ever allowed to appear in any but very learned publications, never seen by the general population.
Indeed the silence about it was so complete that many readers who heard of it only through personal recommendation, were astonished that, in view of its cogency and authoritative support, so little appeared to have been said about it. They guilelessly assumed that only incompetent work could be thus ignored by the modern journalist. They did not know that the Freedom-loving Peoples suffer a rigid Press-censorship, beside which the INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM and the restrictions of Dictators like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, are but child's play.
Nor is this an obsolete or obsolescent feature, at least of English life; for as late as July 5th, 1958, an article appeared in the learned Journal, NATURE, written by Professor C. D. Darlington, F.R.S. of Oxford, in which he said so many things that must have seemed awkward to the influential and powerful minority controlling our cul-
With commendable courage, Professor Darlington said in this article: "The repugnance for outbreeding, of course, is common to all life . . . The repugnance for inbreeding on the other hand is new."
How new, Professor? — I humbly suggest, as new as the decade preceding the outbreak of World War II, and for obvious reasons.
Then Professor Darlington continues: "A change from outbreeding to inbreeding . . . provides the means of rapid improvement, if we want improvement." — Exactly! "if we want improvement", and not merely doctrinal protection for an intimidated though powerful minority.
Modern Governments," Professor Darlington adds, "take less care for posterity than did their predecessors in antiquity . . . There is indeed much evidence of a genetic component in the survival of nations. The nation which takes thought for its own genetic future is, therefore, most likely to have a future."
But not a word of this article, important though it was, was reproduced in any of the leading National Newspapers. After its publication in NATURE of July 5th, 1958, there was not even a mention of its existence. Does the reader now perhaps understand why the British Public at least, if not why all Europeans to-day, know so little about the laws of good breeding and about the drawbacks and dangers of miscegenation and random mating?
To-day, we have to contend with many forces that are threatening our independence and freedom, and by no means the least sinister of these forces is that which aims at destroying our soundest instincts and causing us to forget our most precious traditions.
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