The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races

This definition includes, without exception, all the nations which I have mentioned as being civilized. But, as these nations have few points of resemblance, the question suggests itself: Do not, then, all civilizations tend to the same results? I think not; for, as the nations called to the noble task of accomplishing a civilization, are endowed with the utilitarian and speculative tendencies in various degrees and proportions, their paths must necessarily lie in very divergent directions.

What are the material wants of the Hindoo? Rice and butter for his nourishment, and a piece of cotton cloth for his garment. Nor can this abstemiousness be accounted for by climate, for the native of Thibet, under a much more rigorous sky, displays the same quality. In these peoples, the imaginative faculty greatly predominates, their intellectual efforts are directed to abstractions, and the fruits of their civilization are therefore seldom of a practical or utilitarian character. Magnificent temples are hewn out of mountains of solid rock at an expense of labor and time that terrifies the imagination; gigantic constructions are erected; – all this in honor of the gods, while nothing is done for man's benefit, unless it be tombs. By the side of the miracles wrought by the sculptor's chisel, we admire the finished masterpieces of a literature full of vigor, and as ingenious and subtle in theology and metaphysics, as beautiful in its variety: in speculative efforts, human thought descends without trepidation to immeasurable depths; its lyric poetry challenges the admiration of all mankind.

But if we leave the domain of idealistic reveries, and seek for inventions of practical utility, and for the sciences that are their theoretical basis, we find a deplorable deficiency. From a dazzling height, we suddenly find ourselves descended to a profound and darksome abyss. Useful inventions are scarce, of a petty character, and, being neglected, remain barren of results. While the Chinese observed and invented a great deal, the Hindoos invented but little, and of that little took no care; the Greeks, also, have left us much information, but little worthy of their genius; and the Romans, once arrived at the culminating point of their history, could no longer make any real progress, for the Asiatic admixture in which they were absorbed with surprising rapidity, produced a population incapable of the patient and toilsome investigation of stern realities. Their administrative genius, however, their legislation, and the useful monuments with which they provided the soil of their territories, attest sufficiently the practical character which, at one time, so eminently characterized that people; and prove that if the South of Europe had not been so rapidly submerged with colonists from Asia and the North of Africa, positive science would have been the gainer, and less would have been left to be accomplished by the Germanic races, which afterward gave it a renewed impulse.

The Germanic conquerors of the fifth century were characterized by instincts of a similar kind to those of the Chinese, but of a higher order. While they possessed the utilitarian tendency as strongly, if not stronger, they had, at the same time, a much greater endowment of the speculative. Their disposition presented a happy blending of these two mainsprings of activity. Where-ever the Teutonic blood predominates, the utilitarian tendency, ennobled and refined by the speculative, is unmistakable. In England, North America, and Holland, this tendency governs and preponderates over all the other national instincts. It is so, in a lesser degree, in Belgium, and even in the North of France, where everything susceptible of practical application is understood with marvellous facility. But as we advance further south, this predisposition is less apparent, and, finally, disappears altogether. We cannot attribute this to the action of the sun, for the Piedmontese live in a much warmer climate than the Provençals and the inhabitants of the Languedoc; it is the effect of blood.

The series of speculative races, or those rendered so by admixture, occupies the greater portion of the globe, and this observation is particularly applicable to Europe. With the exception of the Teutonic family, and a portion of the Sclavonic, all other groups of our part of the world are but slightly endowed with the faculty for the useful and practical; or, having already acted their part in the world's history, will not be able to recommence it. All these races, from the Gaul to the Celtiberian, and thence to the variegated compounds of the Italian populations, present a descending scale from a utilitarian point of view. Not that they are devoid of all the aptitudes of that tendency, but they are wanting in some of the most essential.

The union of the Germanic tribes with the races of the ancient world, this engrafting of a vigorous utilitarian principle upon the ideas of that variegated compound, produced our civilization; the richness, diversity, and fecundity of our state of culture is the natural result of that combination of so many different elements, which each contributed their part, and which the practical vigor of our Germanic ancestors, succeeded in blending into a more or less harmonious whole.

Wherever our state of civilization extends, it is characterized by two traits; the first, that the population contains a greater or less admixture of Teutonic blood; the other, that it is Christian. This last feature, however, as I said before, though the most obvious and striking, is by no means essential, because many nations are Christian, and many more may become so, without participating in our civilization. But the first feature is positive, decisive. Wherever the Germanic element has not penetrated, our civilization cannot flourish.101

This leads me to the investigation of a serious and important question: "Can it be asserted that all the European nations are really and thoroughly civilized?" Do the ideas and facts which rise upon the surface of our civilization, strike root in the basis of our social and political structure, and derive their vitality from that source? Are the results of these ideas and facts such as are conformable to the instincts, the tendencies, of the masses? Or, in other words, have the lowest strata of our populations the same direction of thought and action as the highest – that direction which we may call the spirit or genius of our progressive movement?

To arrive at a true and unbiassed solution of this question, let us examine other civilizations, different from ours, and then institute a comparison.

The similarity of views and ideas, the unity of purpose, which characterized the whole body of citizens in the Grecian states, during the brilliant period of their history, has been justly admired. Upon every essential point, the opinions of every individual, though often conflicting, were, nevertheless, derived from the same source, emanated from the same general views and sentiments; individuals might differ in politics, one wishing a more oligarchical, another a more democratic government; or they might differ in religion, one worshipping, by preference, the Eleusinian Ceres, another the Minerva of the Parthenon; or in matters of taste, one might prefer Æschylus to Sophocles, Alceus to Pindar. At the bottom, the disputants all participated in the same views and ideas, ideas which might well be called national. The question was one of degree, not of kind.102

Rome, previous to the Punic wars, presented the same spectacle; the civilization of the country was uniform, and embraced all, from the master to the slave.103 All might not participate in it to the same extent, but all participated in it and in no other.

But in Rome, after the Punic wars, and in Greece, soon after Pericles, and especially after Philip of Macedon, this character of homogeneity began to disappear. The greater mixture of nations produced a corresponding mixture of civilizations, and the compound thus formed exceeded in variety, elegance, refinement, and learning, the ancient mode of culture. But it had this capital inconvenience, both in Hellas and in Italy, that it belonged exclusively to the higher classes. Its nature, its merits, its tendencies, were ignored by the sub-strata of the population. Let us take the civilization of Rome after the Asiatic wars. It was a grand, magnificent monument of human genius. It had a cosmopolitan character: the rhetoricians of Greece contributed to it the transcendental spirit, the jurists and publicists of Syria and Alexandria gave it a code of atheistic, levelling, and monarchical laws – each part of the empire furnished to the common store some portion of its ideas, its sciences, and its character. But whom did this civilization embrace? The men engaged in the public administration or in great monetary enterprises, the people of wealth and of leisure. It was merely submitted to, not adopted by the masses. The populations of Europe understood nothing of those Asiatic and African contributions to the civilization; the inhabitants of Egypt, Numidia, or Asia, were equally uninterested in what came from Gaul and Spain, countries with which they had nothing in common. But a small minority of the Roman people stood on the pinnacle, and being in possession of the secret, valued it. The rest, those not included in the aristocracy of wealth and position, preserved the civilization peculiar to the land of their birth, or, perhaps, had none at all. Here, then, we have an example of a great and highly perfected civilization, dominating over untold millions, but founding its reign not in their desires or convictions, but in their exhaustion, their weakness, their listlessness.

A very different spectacle is presented in China. The boundless extent of that empire includes, indeed, several races markedly distinct, but I shall speak at present only of the national race, the Chinese proper. One spirit animates the whole of this immense multitude, which is counted by hundreds of millions. Whatever we think of their civilization, whether we admire or censure the principles upon which it is based, the results which it has produced, and the direction which it takes; we cannot deny that it pervades all ranks, that every individual takes in it a definite and intelligent part. And this is not because the country is free, in our sense of the word: there is no democratic principle which secures, by law, to every one the position which his efforts may attain, and thus spurs him on to exertions. No; I discard all Utopian pictures. The peasant and the man of the middle classes, in the Celestial Empire, are no better assured of rising by their own merit only, than they are elsewhere. It is true that, in theory, public honors are solely the reward of merit, and every one is permitted to offer himself as a candidate;104 but it is well known that, in reality, the families of great functionaries monopolize all lucrative offices, and that the scholastic diplomas often cost more money than efforts of study. But disappointed or hopeless ambition never leads the possessor to imagine a different system; the aim of the reformer is to remedy the abuses of the established organization, not to substitute another. The masses may groan under ills and abuses, but the fault is charged, not to the social and political system, which to them is an object of unqualified admiration, but to the persons to whose care the performance of its duties is committed. The head of the government, or his functionaries, may become unpopular, but the form itself, the government, never. A very remarkable feature of the Chinese is that among them primary instruction is so universal; it reaches classes whom we hardly imagine to have any need of it. The cheapness of books, the immense number and low price of the schools, enable even the poorest to acquire the elements of knowledge, reading and writing.105 The laws, their spirit and tendency, are well known and understood by all classes, and the government prides itself upon facilitating the study of this useful science.106 The instinct of the masses is decidedly averse to all political convulsions. Mr. Davis, who was commissioner of H. B. Majesty in China, and who studied its affairs with the assiduity of a man who is interested in understanding them well, says that the character of the people cannot be better expressed than by calling them "a nation of steady conservatives."107

Here, then, we have a most striking contrast to the civilization of Rome in her latter days, when governmental changes occurred in fearfully rapid succession, until the arrival of the nations of the north. In every portion of that vast empire, there were whole populations that had no interest in the preservation of established order, and were ever ready to second the maddest schemes, to embark in any enterprise that seemed to promise advantage, or that was represented in seductive colors by some ambitious demagogue. During that long period of several centuries, no scheme was left untried: property, religion, the sanctity of family relations, were all called in question, and innovators in every portion of the empire, found multitudes ever disposed to carry their theories into practice by force. Nothing in the Greco-Roman world rested on a solid basis, not even the imperial unity, so indispensable, it would seem, to the mere self-preservation of such a state of society. It was not only the armies, with their swarm of improvisto Cæsars, that undertook the task of shaking this palladium of national safety; the emperors themselves, beginning with Diocletian, had so little faith in monarchy, that they willingly made the experiment of dualism in the government, and finally found four at a time not too many for governing the empire.108 I repeat it, not one institution, not one principle, was stable in that wretched state of society, which continued to preserve some outward form, merely from the physical impossibility of assuming any others, until the men of the north came to assist in its demolition.

Between these two great societies, then, the Roman empire, and that of China, we perceive the most complete contrast. By the side of the civilization of Eastern Asia, I may mention that of India, Thibet, and other portions of Central Asia, which is equally universal, and diffused among all ranks and classes. As in China there is a certain level of information to which all attain, so in Hindostan, every one is animated by the same spirit; each individual knows precisely what his caste requires him to learn, to think, to believe. Among the Buddhists of Thibet, and the table-lands of Asia, nothing is rarer than to find a peasant who cannot read, and there everybody has the same convictions upon important subjects.

Do we find this homogeneity in European nations? It is scarce worth while to put the question. Not even the Greco-Roman empire presents incongruities so strange, or contrasts so striking, as are to be found among us; not only among the various nationalities of Europe, but in the bosom of the same sovereignty. I shall not speak of Russia, and the states that form the Austrian empire; the demonstration of my position would there be too facile. Let us turn to Germany; to Italy, Southern Italy in particular; to Spain, which, though in a less degree, presents a similar picture; or to France.

I select France. The difference of manners, in various parts of this country, has struck even the most superficial observer, and it has long since been observed that Paris is separated from the rest of France by a line of demarcation so decided and accurately defined, that at the very gates of the capital, a nation is found, utterly different from that within the walls. Nothing can be more true: those who attach to our political unity the idea of similarity of thoughts, of character – in fine, of nationality, are laboring under a great delusion. There is not one principle that governs society and is connected with our civilization, which is understood in the same manner in all our departments. I do not speak here merely of the peculiarities that characterize the native of Normandy, of Brittany, Angevin, Limousin, Gascony, Provence. Every one knows how little alike these various populations are,109 and how they differ in their tendencies and modes of thinking. I wish to draw attention to the fact, that while in China, Thibet, India, the most essential ideas upon which the civilization is based, are common to all classes, participated in by all, it is by no means so among us. The very rudiments of our knowledge, the most elementary and most generally accessible portion of it, remain an impenetrable mystery to our rural populations, among whom but few individuals are found acquainted with reading and writing. This is not for want of opportunities – it is because no value is attached to these acquisitions, because their utility is not perceived. I speak from my own observation, and that of persons who had ample facilities, and brought extensive information and great judgment to the task of investigation. Government has made the most praiseworthy efforts to remedy the evil, to raise the peasantry from the sink of ignorance in which they vegetate. But the wisest laws, and the most carefully calculated institutions have proved abortive. The smallest village affords ample opportunities for common education; even the adult, when conscription forces him into the army, finds in the regimental schools every facility for acquiring the most necessary branches of knowledge. Compulsion is resorted to – every one who has lived in the provinces knows with what success. Parents send their children to school with undisguised repugnance, for they regret the time thus spent as wasted, and, therefore, eagerly seize the most trifling pretext for withdrawing them, and never suffer them to exceed the legal term of attendance. So soon as the young man leaves school, or the soldier has served his time, they hasten to forget what they were compelled to learn, and what they are heartily ashamed of. They return forever after to the local patois110 of their birthplace, and pretend to have forgotten the French language, which, indeed, is but too often true. It is a painful conclusion, but one which many and careful observations have forced upon me, that all the generous private and public endeavors to instruct our rural population, are absolutely futile, and can tend no further than to enforce an outward compliance. They care not for the knowledge we wish to give them – they will not have it, and this not from mere negligence or apathy, but from a feeling of positive hostility to our civilization. This is a startling assertion, but I have not yet adduced all the proofs in support of it.

In those parts of the country where the laboring classes are employed in manufactures principally, and in the great cities, the workmen are easily induced to learn to read and write. The circumstances with which they are surrounded, leave them no doubt as to the practical advantages accruing to them from these acquisitions. But so soon as these men have sufficiently mastered the first elements of knowledge, to what use do they, for the most part, apply them? To imbibe or give vent to ideas and sentiments the most subversive of all social order. The instinctive, but passive hostility to our civilization, is superseded by a bitter and active enmity, often productive of the most fearful calamities. It is among these classes that the projectors of the wildest, most incendiary schemes readily recruit their partisans; that the advocates of socialism, community of goods and wives, all, in fact, who, under the pretext of removing the ills and abuses that afflict the social system, propose to tear it down, find ready listeners and zealous believers.

There are, however, portions of the country to which this picture does not apply; and these exceptions furnish me with another proof in favor of my proposition. Among the agricultural and manufacturing populations of the north and northeast, information is general; it is readily received, and, once received, retained and productive of good fruits. These people are intelligent, well-informed, and orderly, like their neighbors in Belgium and the whole of the Netherlands. And these, also, are the populations most closely akin to the Teutonic race, the race which, as I said in another place, gave the initiative to our civilization.

The aversion to our civilization, of which I spoke, is not the only singular feature in the character of our rural populations. If we penetrate into the privacy of their thoughts and beliefs, we make discoveries equally striking and startling. The bishops and parish clergy have to this day, as they had one, five, or fifteen centuries ago, to battle with mysterious superstitions, or hereditary tendencies, some of which are the more formidable as they are seldom openly avowed, and can, therefore, be neither attacked nor conquered. There is no enlightened priest, that has the care of his flock at heart, but knows from experience with what deep cunning the peasant, however devout, knows how to conceal in his own bosom some fondly cherished traditional idea or belief, which reveals itself only at long intervals, and without his knowledge. If he is spoken to about it, he denies or evades the discussion, but remains unshaken in his convictions. He has unbounded confidence in his pastor, unbounded except upon this one subject, that might not inappropriately be called his secret religion. Hence that taciturnity and reserve which, in all our provinces, is the most marked characteristic of the peasant, and which he never for a moment lays aside towards the class he calls bourgeois; that impassable barrier between him and even the most popular and well-intentioned landed proprietor of his district.

It must not be supposed that this results merely from rudeness and ignorance. Were it so, we might console ourselves with the hope that they will gradually improve and assimilate with the more enlightened classes. But these people are precisely like certain savages; at a superficial glance they appear unreflecting and brutish, because their exterior is humble, and their character requires to be studied. But so soon as we penetrate, however little, into their own circle of ideas, the feelings that govern their private life, we discover that in their obstinate isolation from our civilization, they are not actuated by a feeling of degradation. Their affections and antipathies do not arise from mere accidental circumstances, but, on the contrary, are in accordance with logical reasoning based upon well-defined and clearly conceived ideas.111 In speaking of their religious notions awhile ago, I should have remarked what an immense distance there is between our doctrines of morals and those of the peasantry, how widely different are their ideas from those which we attach to the same word.112 With what pertinacious obstinacy they continue to look upon every one not peasant like themselves, as the people of remote antiquity looked upon a foreigner. It is true they do not kill him, thanks to the singular and mysterious terror which the laws, in the making of which they have no part, inspire them; but they hate him cordially, distrust him, and if they can do so without too great a risk, fleece him without scruple and with immense satisfaction. Yet they are not wicked or ill-disposed. Among themselves they are kind-hearted, charitable, and obliging. But then they regard themselves as a distinct race – a race, they tell you – that is weak, oppressed, and that must resort to cunning and stratagem to gain their due, but which, nevertheless, preserves its pride and contempt for all others. In many of our provinces, the laborer believes himself of much better stock than his former lord or present employer. The family pride of many of our peasants is, to say the least, as great as that of the nobility during the Middle Ages.113

It cannot be doubted that the lower strata of the population of France have few features in common with the higher. Our civilization penetrates but little below the surface. The great mass is indifferent – nay, positively hostile to it. The most tragic events have stained the country with torrents of blood, unparalleled convulsions have destroyed every ancient fabric, both social and political. Yet the agricultural populations have never been roused from their apathetic indifference,114 have never taken any other part but that to which they were forced. When their own personal and immediate interests were not at stake, they allowed the tempests to blow by without concern, without even passive sympathy on one side or the other. Many persons, frightened and scandalized at this spectacle, have declared the peasantry as irreclaimably perverse. This is at the same time an injustice, and a very false appreciation of their character. The peasants regard us almost as their enemies. They comprehend nothing of our civilization, contribute nothing to it of their own accord, and they think themselves authorized to profit by its disasters, whenever they can. Apart from this antagonism, which sometimes displays itself in an active, but oftener in a passive manner, it cannot be doubted that they possess moral qualities of a high order, though often singularly applied.