Racial Values in the War 



495 



struclivc and non-constructive elements 

 than either of her greatest rivals — Enj^- 

 land and Germany. We can si^eak here 

 of France and England as rivals, for a 

 racial study may ignore alliances and 

 look upon war as a dreadful episode, 

 working disaster to the race values of all, 

 but changing little the race relation by 

 either victory or defeat." 



"The outstanding fact for this in- 

 quiry is that France is not to be a source 

 of future ability to make good the wast- 

 age of present civilization. We must 

 look to peoples whose himian values 

 have not been so long and persistently 

 exploited. France's contributions to the 

 world's advancement may continue, but 

 the days of her greatest achievement are 

 in the past. Long before the world is 

 over-hard pressed for sustaining race 

 values, France will have ceased to be a 

 dominant factor in its civilization. 



GREAT BRITAIN 



"Great Britain is pre-eminently the 

 country of extremes in racial values. 

 No other country excels her in the pro- 

 duction of able men, in the adequacy of 

 their numbers, and the genetic richness 

 of the stocks from which they are 

 derived. Yet Great Britain has a 

 higher proportion of ineffective, under- 

 bred, hopelessly inferior white stocks 

 than any other dominant nation. 



"We are not interested here in the 

 political significance of this condition, 

 nor in the sectional exclusiveness, the 

 persistent social isolation of types, which 

 have carried differentiation of genetic 

 values in Great Britain to unprecedented 

 lengths. Let us take the condition as it 

 exists. 



"No great power has come to perma- 

 nent disaster solely through the increase 

 of its unsocial population. There must 

 be also a drop in its effective values. 

 One able man outnumbers a hundred 

 ineffectives in the control of any situa- 

 tion not actually developed into a riot 

 and the mob is the most effervescent of 

 any m.anifestation of power. England 

 is keenly alive to the threat of her 

 racially depreciated masses — in Lon- 

 don's Fast End, in Liverpool, Man- 

 chester, Glasgow, in the substratum of 

 her agrarian population, and through- 



out all her manufacturing and mining 

 regions; not the steady workers, but the 

 hordes of intermittents and unworkables 

 effective onJy at the business of repro- 

 ducing their kind, adding misery to 

 misery unceasingly. They make for 

 England a social problem that is alread\- 

 a severe tax upon her resources of con- 

 trol, and will become more imposing 

 when the war ends. Yet they will never 

 get their hand upon Great Britain's helm 

 until failure of her best stocks compels 

 the last remnant of her dominant blood 

 to let go. If England can devise a way 

 to reduce the fecundity of her ineffec- 

 tives she may lighten her social burden, 

 but for the preservation of her national 

 life she must look to the adequate per- 

 petuation of the high genetic values 

 which supply her with able men. 



"Thus Great Britain's approach to- 

 ward a critical disproportion between 

 her sustaining and her socially depen- 

 dent stocks is an arithmetical certainty. 

 As with France, the time of her arrival 

 cannot be computed in years, or decades, 

 or centuries. This war has disclosed the 

 remoteness, not the nearness, of her 

 downfall. We simply know that the 

 racial values of Great Britain are dis- 

 tinctly on the wane, and that unless 

 something occurs to reverse her racial 

 trend she will have been counted out in 

 favor of less debilitated peoples long 

 before the world loses the last of its 

 Aryan civilizations. 



"But the superb English inheritance 

 has gone to all parts of the earth, to 

 develop the traditional English resource- 

 fulness long after the home stock shall 

 have bee^n depleted of its effective values. 

 England's contribution to the world's 

 genetic values is to be her crowning 

 achievement. The great civilizations in 

 North America, Australia, New Zea- 

 land, South Africa — in the generations 

 to come, any one of these may grow to be 

 another England in world strength. If 

 under a new conception of human rela- 

 tions these English-speaking peoples 

 yield their small differences and get 

 together in singleness of purpose, the 

 dominating world civilization for un- 

 numbered centuries to come will be 

 English in language and in those quali- 

 ties which have made England great. 



