The Inequality of Human Races/Author's Dedication
FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION (1854)[1]
TO HIS MAJESTY GEORGE V, KING OF HANOVER
The great events — the bloody wars, the revolutions, and the breaking up of laws — which have been rife for so many years in the States of Europe, are apt to turn men's minds to the study of political problems. While the vulgar consider merely im- mediate results, and heap all their praise and blame on the little electric spark that marks the contact with their own interests, the more serious thinker will seek to discover the hidden causes of these terrible upheavals. He will descend, lamp in hand, by the obscure paths of philosophy and history ; and in the analysis of the human heart or the careful search among the annals of the past he will try to gain the master-key to the enigma which has so long baffled the imagination of man.
Like every one else, I have felt all the prickings of curiosity to which our restless modern world gives rise. But when I tried to study, as completely as I could, the forces underlying this world, I found the horizon of my inquiry growing wider and wider. I had to push further and further into the past, and, forced by analogy almost in spite of myself, to lift my eyes further and further into the future. It seemed that I should aspire to know not merely the immediate causes of the plagues that are supposed to chasten us, but also to trace the more remote reasons for those social evils which the most meagre knowledge of history will show to have prevailed, in exactly the same form, among all the nations that ever lived, as well as those which survive to-day — evils that in all likelihood will exist among nations yet unborn.
Further, the present age, I thought, offered peculiar facilities for such an inquiry. While its very restlessness urges us on to a kind of historical chemistry, it also makes our labours easier. The thick mists, the profound darkness that from time im- memorial veiled the beginnings of civilizations different from our own, now lift and dissolve under the sun of science. An analytic method of marvellous delicacy has made a Rome, un- known to Livy, rise before us under the hands of Niebuhr, and has unravelled for us the truths that lay hid among the legendary tales of early Greece. In another quarter of the world, the Germanic peoples, so long misunderstood, appear to us now as great and majestic as they were thought barbarous by the writers of the Later Empire. Egypt opens its subterranean tombs, translates its hieroglyphs, and reveals the age of its pyramids. Assyria lays bare its palaces with their endless inscriptions, which had till yesterday been buried beneath their own ruins. The Iran of Zoroaster has held no secrets from the searching eyes of Burnouf , and the Vedas of early India take us back to events not far from the dawn of creation. From all these conquests together, so important in themselves, we gain a larger and truer understanding of Homer, Herodotus, and especially of the first chapters of the Bible, that deep well of truth, whose riches we can only begin to appreciate when we go down into it with a fully enlightened mind. These sudden and unexpected discoveries are naturally not always beyond the reach of criticism. They are far from giving us complete lists of dynasties, or an unbroken sequence of reigns and events. In spite, however, of the fragmentary nature of their results, many of them are admirable for my present purpose, and far more fruitful than the most accurate chronological tables would be. I welcome, most of all, the revelation of manners and customs, of the very portraits and costumes, of vanished peoples. We know the condition of their art. Their whole life, public and private, physical and moral, is unrolled before us, and it becomes possible to reconstruct, with the aid of the most authentic materials, that which constitutes the personality of races and mainly determines their value.
With such a treasury of knowledge, new or newly understood, to draw upon, no one can claim any longer to explain the complicated play of social forces, the causes of the rise and decay of nations, in the light of the purely abstract and hypothetical arguments supplied by a sceptical philosophy. Since we have now an abundance of positive facts crowding upon us from all sides, rising from every sepulchre, and lying ready to every seeker's hand, we may no longer, like the theorists of the Revolution, form a collection of imaginary beings out of clouds, and amuse ourselves by moving these chimeras about like marionettes, in a political environment manufactured to suit them. The reality is now too pressing, too well known; and it forbids games like these, which are always unseasonable, and sometimes impious. There is only one tribunal competent to decide rationally upon the general characteristics of man, and that is history—a severe judge, I confess, and one to whom we may well fear to appeal in an age so wretched as our own.
Not that the past is itself without stain. It includes everything, and so may well have many faults, and more than one shameful dereliction of duty, to confess. The men of to-day might even be justified in flourishing in its face some new merits of their own. But suppose, as an answer to their charges, that the past suddenly called up the gigantic shades of the heroic ages, what would they say then? If it reproached them with having compromised the names of religious faith, political honour, and moral duty, what would they answer? If it told them that they are no longer fit for anything but to work out the knowledge of which the principles had already been recognized and laid down by itself; that the virtue of the ancients has become a laughing-stock, that energy has passed from man to steam, that the light of poetry is out, that its great prophets are no more, and that what men call their interests are confined to the most pitiful tasks of daily life;—how could they defend themselves?
They could merely reply that not every beautiful thing is dead which has been swallowed up in silence ; it may be only sleeping. All ages, they might say, have beheld periods of transition, when life grapples with suffering and in the end arises victorious and splendid. Just as Chaldaa in its dotage was succeeded by the young and vigorous Persia, tottering Greece by virile Rome, and the degenerate rule of Augustulus by the kingdoms of the noble Teutonic princes, so the races of modern times will regain their lost youth.
This was a hope I myself cherished for a brief moment, and I should like to have at once flung back in the teeth of History its accusations and gloomy forebodings, had I not been suddenly struck with the devastating thought, that in my hurry I was putting forward something that was absolutely without proof. I began to look about for proofs, and so, in my sympathy for the living, was more and more driven to plumb to their depths the secrets of the dead.
Then, passing from one induction to another, I was gradually penetrated by the conviction that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny. Every one must have had some inkling of this colossal truth, for every one must have seen how certain agglomerations of men have descended on some country, and utterly transformed its way of life ; how they have shown themselves able to strike out a new vein of activity where, before their coming, all had been sunk in torpor. Thus, to take an example, a new era of power was opened for Great Britain by the Anglo-Saxon invasion, thanks to a decree of Providence, which by sending to this island some of the peoples governed by the sword of your Majesty's illustrious ancestors, was to bring two branches of the same nation under the sceptre of a single house — a house that can trace its glorious title to the dim sources of the heroic nation itself.
Recognizing that both strong and weak races exist, I preferred to examine the former, to analyse their qualities, and especially to follow them back to their origins. By this method I convinced myself at last that everything great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth, in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting-point, is the development of a single germ and the result of a single thought ; it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe.
- ↑ This dedication and the following preface apply to the whole work, of which the present volume contains the first book. The remaining books are occupied by a detailed examination of the civilizations mentioned at the end of this volume, and it is of these as well as the present book that the author is thinking, in his preface, when speaking of his imitators. A few passages in the dedication that relate exclusively to these books have been omitted. — Tr.