Before passing on to the consideration of evolutionary changes during the historic period, a few words must be said about the crossing and blending of races. Such blending has been, no doubt, one of the principal causes of the great variety of human types at present existing on the earth. It has been going on for long ages in almost all regions; but especially in Europe and Africa. All existing stocks (with few exceptions) are the products of race-blending. No one of the existing European peoples is of unmixed stock; every one is the product of successive mixtures and blendings of allied stocks; and the mixing and blending still goes on; while in America (both north and south) the greatest experiments in race-blending that the world has yet seen are taking place before our eyes.
Authors differ widely as to the results of the crossing of human races and subraces. Some assert that the effect of crossing of races is always bad, that the cross-bred progeny is always inferior to the parent stocks. They make no allowance for unfavourable conditions, especially the lack of the strong moral traditions of old organised societies. Others maintain the opposite opinion. Both opinions are probably correct in a certain sense. I think the facts enable us to make with some confidence the following generalisation. The crossing of the most widely different stocks, stocks belonging to any two of the four main races of man, produces an inferior race; but the crossing of stocks belonging to the same principal race, and especially the crossing of closely allied stocks, generally produces a blended subrace superior to the mean of the two parental stocks, or at least not inferior.
This generalisation cannot yet be based on exact and firmly established data, unfortunately; but it is in harmony with old established popular beliefs, and with what we know of the crossing of animal breeds; and it is borne out by a general inspection of many examples. For instance, the blending of the white, negro, and American stocks, which has been going on in South America for some centuries, seems to have resulted in a subrace which up to the present time is inferior to the parent races; or at any rate to the white race. So the mulattoes of North America and the West Indies, although superior in some respects to the pure negroes, seem deficient in vitality and fertility, and the race does not maintain itself. The Eurasians of India are commonly said to be a comparatively feeble people. The blend of the Caucasian with the yellow race is also generally of a poor type. Examples abound in Java of people of mixed Javanese and Dutch blood; and they are for the most part feeble specimens of humanity. It is generally recognised that a recently blended stock may produce a few individuals of exceptional vigour and capacity and physical beauty. But setting these aside, the blended stock seems to be inferior in two respects: (1) a general lack of vigour, which expresses itself in lack of power of resistance to many diseases and in relative infertility; so that the blended stock can hardly maintain its numbers; (2) a lack of harmony of qualities, both mental and physical. It may be that such lack of harmony is the ground of the relative infertility of blended stocks. It expresses itself in the inharmonious combination of physical features, characteristic of the mongrel. The negro race has a beauty of its own, which is spoilt by blending.
As regards mental constitution, although we cannot directly observe and measure these disharmonies of composition, there seems good reason to believe that they exist. The soul of the cross-bred is, it would seem, apt to be the scene of perpetual conflict of inharmonious tendencies. This has been the theme of many stories, and, though no doubt many of them are overdrawn, there is no reason to doubt that they in the main depict actual experience or are founded on close observation.
It is on the moral, rather than the intellectual, side of the mind that the disharmony seems to make itself felt most strongly; and the moral detachment of the cross-bred from the moral traditions of both the parent stocks is possibly due in part to a certain lack of innate compatibility with those traditions, as well as to social ostracism; the cross-bred can assimilate neither tradition so easily and completely as the pure-bred stocks.
It is possible, though this is a still more speculative view, that the same is true of the intellectual constitution of the mind.
The superiority of subraces formed by the blending of allied stocks seems to fall principally under two heads: (1) a general vigour of constitution; (2) a greater variety and variability of innate mental qualities. The greater variability of qualities of a subrace renders that race more adaptable to changing conditions; for racial adaptability depends upon the occurrence of abundant spontaneous variations. A large variety of innate qualities renders a race capable of progressing rapidly in civilisation; it renders it more capable both of producing novel ideas and of appreciating and assimilating the ideas, discoveries, and institutions of other peoples; and such imitative assimilation from one people to another has been a main condition of the progress of culture.
It is, of course, well recognised that the great centres of development of culture have been the places where different peoples have come most freely into contact, notably the centre of the old world where Asia, Africa, and Europe meet together. This was the area in which the three great races of Europe came first into contact and mingled freely. Some authors attribute the fertilising influence upon culture wholly to the blending or contact of cultures; but there is good reason to believe that it is largely due also to race-blending.
We might compare in this respect the three great culture areas of the old world—Europe, India and China. The Chinese afford an instance of one relatively pure race occupying a very large area. In spite of its early start and great mental capacities, its culture has stagnated. The stock was perhaps too pure. India on the other hand seems to owe its peculiar history largely to the fact that its population in almost all parts has been made up from very widely different races—white, yellow and black; the heterogeneity has been too great for stability and continued progress. In Europe different branches and sub-branches of the white race, that is of stocks not too widely different in constitution, have undergone repeated crossing and recrossing.
It is worth while to point out that, if our generalisation is valid, it follows that race-blending has been an important factor in the progress of civilisation. And the generalisation has also an important bearing upon one of the most urgent problems confronting the statesmen of the world at the present time, and not only the statesmen but all the citizens of the civilised states, especially the citizens of the British Empire and of America. For it justifies abundantly the refusal of the white inhabitants of various countries to admit immigrants of the yellow or negro race to settle among them; and it justifies, and more than justifies, the objection to intermarriage with those other races which Englishmen have upheld wherever they have settled, and which most other peoples have not upheld[120].
In all the currents of heated discussion as to the rights and wrongs of the treatment of other races, this question of the kind of subrace which will result from intermarriage is generally left in the background; whereas its importance is far greater than that of all other considerations taken together. Some, like Sir S. Olivier[121], are content to approve race-blending on the ground that it improves the inferior race. But the racial qualities of the leading peoples of the world are too precious to be squandered in the process of improving in some uncertain degree the quality of the overwhelming mass of humanity of inferior stocks; the process would probably result in the total destruction of all that humanity has striven and suffered for in its nobler efforts.
It is an interesting question—When two races or subraces are crossed, do they ever produce a homogeneous and true subrace, exhibiting a true and stable blend of the qualities of the parental stocks? Or does the blend always remain imperfect, with many individuals in whom the qualities of one or other of the parental stocks predominate? The answer seems to be that a stable subrace may be formed in this way, though usually not until free intermarriage has gone on for many generations. According to the most recent doctrine of heredity, the Mendelian, every human being is a mosaic or patchwork of unit qualities, organs, or capacities, each of which is inherited wholly from one of the parents and not at all from the other. If this view is well founded, it follows that there can be no true blending of these unit qualities. But still the mosaic may be so finely grained and the unit qualities derived from the two parents so closely interwoven, that each individual may present an intimate mixture of the parental qualities, may represent for all practical purposes a blending of the two stocks.
