Grant: Democracy and Heredity 



165 



which have created and maintained the 

 British Empire. 



Alley ne Ireland's paper on democracy 

 is a straight challenge to the relative 

 value of heredity and environment. 

 The extreme democratic, and still more 

 the socialist, theory of government 

 necessarily rests on the assumption that 

 whatever inequalities exist between 

 men or races are due to an unfavorable 

 environment, and that, given an equal 

 environment, which today spells educa- 

 tion, the result will be the speedy oblit- 

 eration of the differences between man 

 and man and make them all equal in 

 body, character and intellect. 



This must be a very popular view- 

 point, and this theory does commend 

 itself most strongly to the lowest classes 

 in every community, and in America it 

 appeals to those races who, repudiated 

 at home, have found here an hospital 

 refuge. These classes and elements are 

 noisy out of proportion to their number 

 and are totally devoid of the American 

 traditions of the past three centuries. 

 To these classes and to these races, 

 which have been previously denied, 

 perhaps on the merits, access to social 

 circles and to positions of responsibility, 

 the breaking down of all barriers is most 

 welcome. 



This is Internationalism — a creed 

 which finds ready acceptance among 

 those individuals who, having neither 

 flag, nor country, nor antecedents, nor 

 traditions, nor language, nor even sur- 

 names of their own, are naturally 

 desirous of abolishing these attributes 

 or "privileges" in others. These men 

 deny all discussion of race and raise the 

 cry of "race prejudice" the moment the 

 subject is opened. 



Race, of course, is the greatest of all 

 privileges and is the one thing that 

 cannot be abolished by any human 

 device except the actual killing of its 

 possessor. In the last analysis the 

 Bolshevist movement in Russia is a 

 war of races. The Alpine peasantry, 

 under vSemitic leadership, are engaged in 

 destroying the Nordic bourgeoisie, and 

 with it the only racial elements of value 

 in that great sodden welter of quasi- 

 European peoples called "The Russias." 



This objection to the discussion of 



race values, as I am informed, was 

 largely responsible for the failure in 

 France to take anthropological measure- 

 ments during the war. In this country 

 Mr. Ireland's paper will meet with 

 violent protest from those races who feel 

 themselves aggrieved by any classifica- 

 tion or distinction among mankind 

 based upon race. 



If more Americans would come for- 

 ward and say in print that which is 

 universally stated and admitted in 

 private conversation concerning the 

 military, social and political value of the 

 different immigrant races which have of 

 recent years flooded our country, there 

 would be a far more health}^ reaction to 

 the problems involved and less would be 

 heard about a universal democracy 

 bringing in the millennium. 



In America the melting pot is an 

 absolute failure. Immigrant races re- 

 tain just what they brought with them, 

 and some are good and some are bad. 

 This is well-nigh universally admitted 

 in private, but in public it is most un- 

 popular to hesitate to bend the knee in 

 servile adulation to the great god. 

 Demos. 



Our vaunted freedom of speech and 

 of press in America probably is less 

 observed than anywhere else among 

 civilized men. If any reader doubts this 

 statement let him try to obtain space in 

 the public press for strictures on certain 

 races and on certain religions; to make 

 comments on their doubtful loyalty 

 during the war; to mention their bias 

 in favor of Old World antipathies; to 

 discuss or disclose the shifty measures 

 used to avoid the draft by some of these 

 aliens; to point out the religious forces 

 that lay behind the refusal of Australia 

 or of Ireland to accept the draft and bear 

 their share in the great world war, or to 

 indicate the source of the opposition to 

 the draft in French Canada. After such 

 an attempt he will be auickly relieved of 

 the idea that this is a free country. 



It is, therefore, an act of no small 

 courage on the part of Mr. Ireland to 

 come forward and register a protest 

 against the fatuous folly of the universal 

 extension of the theory that all human 

 ills can be cured by democracy and then 

 "more democrac3^" 



