VIEWS A-ND* : • jiiAiEws .lOH'N.STON' Smithsonian Institution Libraries From the RUSSELL E. TRAIN AFRICANA COLLECTION VIEWS AND REVIEWS VIEWS AND REVIEWS FROM THE OUTLOOK OF AN ANTHROPOLOGIST SIR HARRY JOHNSTON G.C.M.G. , K.C.B., D. SC. AUTHOR OF “THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA ” J “THE NEGRO IN THE NEW WORLD,” ETC. LONDON WILLIAMS & NORGATE 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN PREFATORY NOTE It was suggested to me from various sources that I should republish in book form articles which 1 had contributed at various times to periodical litera- ture, mainly to the Nineteenth Century and After ; and also to the Quarterly Review ; the Contemporary Review ; the Daily Graphic and Graphic ; the Daily Chronicle ; and the Westminster Gazette. The con- sent of the proprietors of these reviews and journals was very graciously accorded ; but on second thoughts though I retained the subjects and much of the substance of these essays I rewrote them completely, bringing them up to a later date in their statistics and information, revising my im- pressions in some instances, and adding new matter, including the substance of lectures delivered before German Colonial Societies in London and in Germany. H. H. JOHNSTON. Poling, April 1912. / K/v CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE 1. THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY ... I 2. HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE . . *33 3. THE PEOPLE AND THE LANGUAGE OF IRELAND . 62 4. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY (1) GERMAN INFLUENCE ON EUROPE IN THE PAST . . . . .90 5. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY (2) THE FOREIGN RELATIONS AND COLONIAL ASPIRATIONS OF MODERN GERMANY . IIO 6. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY (3) HOME INTERESTS AND INTERNAL ADMINIS- TRATION . . . . .147 7. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM . 160 8. RACIAL PROBLEMS ..... 200 9. THE RISE OF THE NATIVE . . . 243 10. THE PRESERVATION OF FAUNA AND FLORA . 284 VIEWS AND REVIEWS CHAPTER I THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY Some twenty years back, in the volumes of Mr Punch may be found a Du Maurier drawing of a pretty woman interrogating a pompous personage in evening dress. He says : “ I am — ah — going to the Anthropo- logical Institute.” “ And where do they anthropolodge ? ” is the smiling question which follows this announcement. They — the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland — at that period still “ anthropo- lodged ” in two dark, dirty little rooms in a part of St Martin’s Lane long ago rebuilt. When the Institute was ejected from its modest tenement through the street improvements of this quarter, it took refuge under the wing of the Zoological Society in Hanover Square, securing just about as much accommodation on the third floor as was allotted to the editorial work of the Ibis, a quarterly journal of British ornithologists. When, however, the Zoological Society wisely decided to house itself alongside the birds and beasts in Regent’s Park, the i i 2 VIEWS AND REVIEWS anthropologists of Great Britain and Ireland obtained some rather better-looking rooms in a Great Russell Street house fronting the British Museum. One can, however, imagine the visit to London of some man of science of German, French, Italian, or American nationality, who has by travel or reading acquired some fair conception of that stupendous achievement : the British Empire, over 400,000,000 of human beings belonging to nearly every known sub-species, variety, or race of mankind. Having arrived in the capital of this Empire, he asks, sooner or later, for the headquarters of anthropology. He might fairly expect to find that branch of scientific research occupying the whole of the magnificent buildings of the Imperial Institute, or endowed with the Crystal Palace, or provided with a portion of Burlington House, or a wing of the British Museum, or at any rate housed as well as are the Royal Geographical or Zoological Societies. As a matter of fact, he would discover the association for the study of anthropology squeezed into two rooms on the second - floor front of a house in Bloomsbury, having to suit its installation to its very modest income. But the intelligent foreigner nowadays is intelligent, and has received such a thoroughly sound education that even before he comes to our land to see it with his own eyes his school and college course have taught him all about us. Therefore, he not only knows how enormously important to us is the study of anthropology, but he equally knows our funny way of doing business ; how we put on one side the things that really matter to occupy ourselves DBS THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 3 with almost immaterial pursuits and achievements — and yet — “damn it all ” (as he will say in some mild equivalent of Teutonic or Gallic petulance) — get there all the same. He will not be surprised that we spend millions sterling on horse - breeding, largely for the purpose of gambling with the product ; hundreds of thousands, very wisely, on the perfecting of sheep and cattle, and, less wisely, on the creation of fancy dogs ; that our gold is poured out lavishly to promote factious struggles in home politics, in religious or educational con- troversies, or for the betterment of other nations’ helots, for the hitting of balls with a diversity of implements, on the removal from a private house to a public gallery of some work of art possessing an uncertain value ; and yet that from out of the gigantic wealth in the metropolis of the Empire we are only able to raise two or three thousand pounds annually for the scientific study of the bodies and minds of the 400,000,000 living men and women whom fate has brought under the influence and control of the British Empire. King Edward VII., soon after coming to the throne, conferred the attribute of Royal as a prefix to the title of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. If my readers visit the German capitals of Stuttgart, Munich, Berlin, Bremen, Cologne, and Hamburg they will see — I mean the verb to be taken literally — kings, princes, councillors of state, great nobles and rich merchants taking an eager and a scientific interest in anthropological studies, examining the exhibits in ethnographical museums which they have endowed, criticising the statements 4 VIEWS AND REVIEWS on the labels or in the lectures to which they have listened, doing their utmost, in fact, to make the accurate study of mankind a popular pursuit. In the United Kingdom it is very different. There the work of our one Anthropological Society during half a century has been carried on almost unrecog- nised by those in authority, contemptuously regarded by politicians of all parties — Conservatives, Liberals, and Labour members alike. The Colonial Office, stirred up to action by an unscientific yet zealous anthropologist — Mary Kingsley — began some years back to favour an- thropological research in the newer British possessions in Africa. It supported an ethnologist in Southern Nigeria and accorded some recognition and approval to the first-class work accomplished by officials (such as C. W. Hobley, A. C. Hollis, and most of their colleagues in British East Africa) in the Crown Colonies and Protectorates. Furthermore, it advised young men entering its service to go through a course of study at the Royal Anthropological Institute, before taking up responsible work in Africa or Malaysia. This Institute had already carried out an immense amount of research in most parts of the British dominions at its own expense or through the personal expenditure of time and money on the part of its associates. Its work had, hitherto, cost nothing whatever to the nation at large, and had never been aided by any Government grant. It had given the gratuitous instruction asked for by the Colonial Office ; but finding after a time that the inquiries of such pupils took up its limited space for study and occupied much of the attention of its THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 5 two paid officials, it asked either that it might be put on the same footing as the Royal Geographical Society, or have its contributory membership in- creased by the entrance into its ranks of all colonial officials needing to possess some knowledge of anthropology : an accession not yet achieved. The Royal Geographical Society receives a small annual grant from the Treasury for imparting instruction in geography and surveying, and, above all, for placing at the disposal of the Government its immense store of maps and its expert knowledge. Cramped as the Anthropological Institute has been in the way of space, it is able to render similar services in regard to home, foreign, and colonial questions within its scope ; while the addition to its funds of (say) -£50° a year would enable it to secure premises much more suited to study and to the ample setting out of its fine reference library. These, at least, were the views held some years ago by a number of persons interested in the encourage- ment of anthropology, and most of them lecturers on that science at great Universities. The Government was approached, and the Prime Minister agreed to receive a deputation at the House of Commons. You would have thought, however, from his frown- ing face and unsympathetic manner that this little group of Oxford and Cambridge professors, retired governors and Indian civil servants, great doctors and celebrated lawyers, world-famed biologists and erudite exponents of archaeology were a band of ill-timed jokers come to try his patience with some preposterous proposal, and provoke his spleen in all the stress of party warfare by asking that lotteries 6 VIEWS AND REVIEWS might be re-established, that votes might be given to the inmates of Broadmoor or the wards of Earlwood, that betting on race-courses should be abolished, or vivisection be practised on criminals. The deputation was dismissed, one might almost say, with contumely ; but, reviewing mentally all the great personalities then ruling parties in the House of Commons, one was forced to admit that though B. might have introduced more suavity into his dissmissal of the subject and the pleaders, and C. have held out hopes he had no intention of fulfilling, all would have ranked with A. in ignoring the importance of Anthropological studies in our national scheme of education. The scientific study of Anthropology — the Science of Man,1 the attempt to understand the bodily and mental conditions of earth’s ruler — may be said to have begun in this country at the end of the fifties of the last century, under the direction of Sir Charles Lyell, Professor T. H. Huxley, Sir E. B. Tylor, Sir John Evans, Francis Galton, Col. Lane- Fox-Pitt-Rivers, Sir John Lubbock, Dr John Beddoe, Sir A. W. Franks, Sir Edward Braybrook, Dr Charnock, Sir Richard Burton, Moncure D. Conway, and others. Dr Prichard had written interestingly but unscientifically on the races of mankind in the pre-Darwinian days of the middle-nineteenth century, when a misconception of the Hebrew Scriptures still 1 Anthropology is the accepted general term for the Science of Man, but it is usually employed in a specific sense to cover the physiological study of man as a mammal in contra-distinction to Ethnology (“ the Science of the Nations ”), which deals with all the aspects and results of man’s mental development. THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7 clogged research into the past history and present classification of mankind.1 Prichard and others (including, I believe, one of the ablest and most “ modern ” of these pioneers in anthropology, the late Edward Norris, Librarian of the Foreign Office) had founded the Ethnological Society about 1843 ; but, as the late Professor D. J. Cunningham pointed out in his presidential address of January 1908, the membership, though distinguished, was and remained very small. cc In those days ” — to quote Professor Cunningham — “anthropologists were looked upon with some suspicion. They were regarded as men with advanced ideas — ideas which might possibly prove dangerous to Church and State. In London, as indeed might be expected, no opposition was offered to the formation of the Anthropological Society, but in Paris the first attempt to found a similar Society in 1846 was rendered futile by the intervention of the Govern- ment, and when finally, in 1859, the Anthropological Society of Paris was formed, Broca, its illustrious founder, was bound over to keep the discussions within legitimate and orthodox limits, and a police 1 It is scarcely necessary to point out that the Churches soon became reassured, and many clerics have been enthusiastic supporters of anthropological research. If the contributions made by members of the many missionary societies were to be removed from anthropological journals, there would be left quite a small literature on the subject One of the best periodical reviews in regard to ethnology is Anthroftos , conducted in polyglot fashion from Vienna by the Rev. Dr P. W. Schmidt, and supported by Roman Catholic missionaries throughout the globe. Nor are the clergy of the Church of England, or the missionaries of the Presbyterian, Baptist, or Wesleyan Churches in any way behind the emissaries of the Church of Rome in their fifty years of sound participation in the records of this science. B VIEWS AND REVIEWS agent attended its sittings for two years to enforce the stipulation. The same fear of anthropology, as a subject endowed with eruptive potentialities, was exhibited in Madrid, where the Society of Anthro- pology, after a short and chequered career, was suppressed. It is indeed marvellous how, in the, comparatively speaking, short period which has elapsed, public opinion should have veered round to such an extent that at the present day there is no branch of science which enjoys a greater share of popular favour than anthropology.” The cc popular favour ” to which Professor Cunningham alluded may be accorded [to what should be the first of sciences] in Germany, France, Austria, Spain (Spain has made up for lost time in this respect), Italy, Belgium, and the United States. But there is little sign of it in Britain or in the British Dominions beyond the seas. The total membership of the only Anthropological Institute in Great Britain and Ireland scarcely reaches to two thousand. There are [I believe] no Anthropological Societies in Scotland or Ireland, or in Canada, South Africa, or Australia, though there may be efficient bodies for dealing with archaeology, folklore, and philology. Yet the importance of the complete study of the past and present inhabitants of the world, and of such countries as those mentioned, can hardly be over-estimated both in regard to our reading of history and our understanding of modern political questions. In 1863 the Anthropological Society was founded in London apparently to assume a more militant r61e THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 9 in those eager young days of the new birth of research than had been taken up by the staider Ethnological Society, which was less anxious to offend the clergy of all denominations than the young men filled with the new wine of the evolution thesis. The real difference perhaps between the two was that the ethnologists wished rather to confine themselves to the collection and statement of bare — and sometimes very dry — facts, whereas the anthropologists desired to riot in theories, sometimes with no more fact to support them than the ethnology of the theosophists or the history of the book of Mormon. The anthropologists for eight exciting years, with a fluctuating membership of five to seven hundred, discussed among other topics thorny problems in sociology, religion, church music, the rights of the Negro, the Adamites and pre- Adamites ; then the membership began to dwindle, a movement towards union with the ethnologists was made, and that great man of science, Professor Huxley, as President of the Ethnological Society, proved the bond of union. The two London societies dealing with the Science of Man were amalgamated in 1871 as the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Since 1871 the (Royal) Anthropological Institute has always been a society poorly equipped in funds and spending all it could afford on its publications. Its output of work has been splendid and most stimulating, especially since the last ten years. The response to occasional pressing necessities in past times on the part of the few among its members who are persons of means has been generous, and even the rank and IO VIEWS AND REVIEWS file consented some little while ago to an increase in the subscription. Unfortunately, anthropology as a study has not yet become a fashionable foible to the same extent as is the case with zoology in general or with horticulture. Existing professional anthro- pologists are scarcely ever blessed with large incomes, and to many the limit of their annual money con- tributions to scientific research has already been reached. I wish some abler, more authoritative pen than mine could bring home to the mass of the voting populace (and they in their turn force the know- ledge on their representatives in Parliament who can unlock the doors of the Treasury) the immense economic importance of “pure” science. At the best, our institutions for the study of biology, geology, and astronomy are regarded with amused tolerance by the masses and even the governing classes, on the “ keep-the-people-out-of-the-public- house ” line of thought. Blamelessness is typified in comedies by a visit to the Zoological Gardens or the British Museum. An evening spent at the Linnaean Society would be considered to be decorous to the point of ostentation, but dull ; yet, at the Linnaean Society there was read one summer’s night in 1858 a paper by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on the “ Origin of Species by Natural Means of Selection,” which revolutionised the mental outlook of all educated men and women in their ideas concerning the genesis of creation and the evolution of man. The fact is, the time has come — if we are really going to be governed intelligently by intelligent THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY n people — when scientific research will have to be heavily endowed, in the same way in which a church, a religion, a theatre was provided with properties and tithes for the purpose of placing it above penury and the risk of a vacillating support due to public indifference. In the course of centuries the people as a whole felt the value of religion or of the drama as a social force, an instructor, and rallied to its assistance of their own free will. Gradually the popular contributions to the faiths and the stage enabled endowments to be redistributed or capitalised, and subsidies to be withdrawn, without the least detriment to “ pure religion and undefiled,” or to the mimic representation of this world’s sorrow, joys, and follies. The time may come when the mass of the people will show a like interest in the spelling out of the New Bible, the Book of the Earth itself, and the profitable lessons to be learnt, the glorious thrills of the imagination to be felt from mastering Nature’s secrets, from unravelling Nature’s mysteries and solving her enigmas. When that happy advance has been reached, scientific research may safely be disendowed, unsubsidised. Twenty years ago it began to dawn on the educated classes as a whole — besides the forerunning prophets, teachers, and philosophers — that anthro- pology in many of its branches led to practical issues. It brought one to the consideration of eugenics ; it suggested the system of finger-print identification ; it assisted criminal jurisprudence by its theories of inherent criminality, of arrested cranial development, and congenital disease ; it pointed the way to the right appreciation of racial values and requirements 12 VIEWS AND REVIEWS — how a race that was stunted and diminishing here might thrive and multiply there ; it supplied reasons for and against racial intermixture and the sub- ordination of one race to another. Then also it opened new chapters of romance to modern thought. Man’s history on this planet was not limited to a backward range of 6000 years ; 600,000 became a more probable figure for the age of his genus or his species. Behind the history recorded in legible writing and credible legends, there stretched vast periods of pre-history to be interpreted bit by bit from a wider range of characters and hieroglyphics : bones, skulls, teeth, implements, the drawings and mouldings of primitive man himself, the casts of the insides of petrified crania, which revealed to us the convolutions of long decayed brains, almost, as one might say, the fossilised thoughts of men who had died one — and even two — hundred years ago ; the beasts, trees, and plants that were coeval with the races of long ago ; the indications presented by the rocks of their sepulture as to the climate ; the land and sea configuration in the remote days of our most ancient forefathers. But at the moment in which Du Maurier (himself, a decade later, to experience the fascination of anthropology) drew his illustra- tion round the little flippancy, “ Where do they anthropolodge ? ”, Society still looked on the Science of Man as a boring fad ; respectable, it might be, and associated with white whiskers, white waistcoats, and Oxford dons with nice faces ; yet still a somewhat tedious pastime ranking in import- ance with stamp-collecting and conchology. (Such sneerers little realised that many of these collected THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 13 shells were letters forming words which would prove to be explanatory glosses in the New Bible.) Nowadays every tenth man and twentieth woman you meet in the streets of London has probably heard of Pithecanthropus erectus — that missing link which, had it been discovered in the early sixties instead of in the early nineties, might have been the death of some Anglican bishop, and the cause of fulminations from an Irish Cardinal. Nowadays, not merely the Times , the Spectator , and the Athenaeum realise the intense interest to their readers which lies in studying all aspects of the human race, but the attractions of anthropology have become popularised in a much wider circle of daily and weekly news- papers. It has ceased to be a c< funny ” subject ; allusions to gorillas (generally represented as tailed) are no longer waggishly inserted as alternatives to the Eden legend ; and when from time to time Nature grudgingly makes one of her sudden revela- tions of a new chapter, a missing sentence in the record of human evolution, when the zeal of some persistent searcher is rewarded by a discovery in a French cavern, a German river valley, or an English gravel-pit, the news is given as much prominence in the front page of an evening or morning paper as the marriage of a musical comedy actress or the “ death of a London lady on Margate Sands ” (usually a most respectable person from Islington succumbing to a surfeit of shrimps and strawberries). Sergi’s fantastic and far-fetched — yet stimulating — theories are discussed at smart dinner-tables by charming women quite in society and by barristers of no more than normal education. H VIEWS AND REVIEWS This is all as it should be, and constitutes some advance, even if many of the facts and theories still popular in newspapers and as conversational counters are false and strained or discredited and discarded. But anthropology is not yet taught authoritatively, competently, and compulsorily in every school or college. (I add “ compulsorily,” because otherwise ignorant parents might raise objections. I was once shown by a council school teacher in Marylebone a letter from the mother of one of her pupils to whom, in common with the rest of the class, she had attempted to impart some elementary notions of physiology : £C Madam, ... I beg you will not talk to my little girl about her intestines. It is a very rude subject, and Milly has always been carefully brought up.”) The study of Man, body and mind, is still mishandled in pseudo-scientific works, still remains, as was formerly the case with zoology and oriental languages, a domain in which duffers may pose as authorities, and — to quote Punch once more — peacocks pontify to jays. Incorrect statements, facts which are unfacts, statistics that are out of date, muddled, or cooked, are still made the basis of wild theories that are thrust on the attention of statesmen as grounds for action or inaction. How weary the more practised anthropologist becomes — that rare individual, who has made some study of comparative and human anatomy, who has mastered the mentality and the speech of a so-called savage race, or the complex nature of a great nation — when he hears some bland or rabid utterance by a philanthropist or a politician on the subject of the Negro, the Negroid races, the Amerindian, the THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 15 Bengali, or the French people ; some worn-out platitude, exaggeration ; some misleading generalisa- tion based on an apothegm fifty years old ! The French nation, for example (now at the top, formerly at the bottom of public affection) : who can rightly define a general character for this most diverse of European peoples ? The inhabitants of Artois, Lorraine, and Brittany not only differ greatly, each from the other, in manners, character, and physique, but still more widely from the Gascons, Basques, and Marseillese. And in our own kingdom, except in belonging to the Caucasian sub-species and being subjects of the same crown, what affinity is there between an East Anglian farm labourer and a semi- Moorish peasant of the Dingle peninsula of south- west Ireland ? Can both be squeezed into the same procrustean bed of social legislation, of religious faith and dietary ? What does the man in the street or even the average member of Parliament know about the Germans and all the varied types of race included within that empire ? When he con- demns Portugal because of a glance at the Lisbon canaille, has he realised the Gothic people of northern Portugal or the sober, hard-working quasi-Moorish folk of the Algarve ? Persia is discussed most heatedly just now. Its claim to be left alone is upheld by some writer to the press out of gratitude for the sublime couplets of Omar Khayyam (who was as much indebted to the interpretation of Fitz- Gerald as the abrupt, defective, and sometimes obscure text of the Hebrew scriptures is to the learned men of Jacobean England for its rendering into a magnificent English classic). Or Persia is VIEWS AND REVIEWS 16 represented as being throughout a lawless, culture- less land of Kurd and Turkoman robbers, cringing Armenians, ugly Laris, and immoral Baluchis. The Persian problem is a most difficult one, and for aught I know the British and Russian governments have gone the right way to work to solve it. But an accurate opinion on this question can only be arrived at through the channel of anthropological studies. In reality there are only about a dozen persons in Great Britain and the same number in India — and none of them is on a par with Sven Hedin 1 — who possess sufficient acquaintance with the physical features, the mental culture, the religious ideas — even the number and distribution — of the Persian people to be capable of understanding the Persian Question, or, equipped by that understanding, of framing the right British policy in respect to it. If statesmen in the United Kingdom and the daughter nations wish in a conscientious way to form a correct opinion on the problems connected with the Negro, they must put themselves to school and acquire exact information on the anatomy of this human sub-species, learning how and in what degree its physiology differs from that of the Nordic Caucasian or the typical Mongol.2 They should find out whether in any one of his many stages of mental development he is above, below, or on a level 1 I am surprised that his book, Overland to India , with its marvellously accurate pictures of Persian life, has been so little quoted in the recent controversy. 2 Dr Arthur Keith’s lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1910, and reported by the Lancet and the Times , give the best summary of the peculiarities of Negro anatomy, especially in regard to skull formation. THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 17 with the white man of the same stage of civilisation. We do not know enough yet to pronounce dogmati- cally on the question of inter-breeding between whites and negroes, or to confirm the old dictum that it was harmful to both races, because it created a midway mulatto type inferior to its parents in physique, and possessing the seeds of mental and moral degeneration. Writers of anti-negro bias continue to repeat axioms on the subject uttered two generations ago, without taking the trouble to visit the West Indies, West Africa, South Africa (especi- ally Cape Colony), or Brazil, and there to estimate the corporeal and intellectual value of some eleven millions of mulattoes and octoroons who do not strike experienced anthropologists as being at all a degenerate or dying-out race. What rubbish is not uttered by arm-chair philo- sophers or enthusiasts ignorant of anthropology in regard to the exploitation of Africa ! By such we are begged to leave the Negro alone, to believe that he originated of himself centuries or millenniums ago arts and sciences, philosophies and abstruse religious beliefs, that he is wholly apart from the white man, and capable of developing his own continent unaided ! What does accurate modern anthropology teach on the subject ? That there are very few Negro tribes, except the pygmies and perhaps the Bushmen, that can be held to be entirely free from some ancient intermixture with the Caucasian1 — an inter- 1 On the other hand, it might show us that the Negro colonised the Mediterranean basin (coming from Asia) before he invaded tropical Africa; that there is an ancient Negroid element pervad- ing the highly civilised Mediterranean and Iberian peoples, the Assyrians, southern Persians, and Jews. 2 1 8 VIEWS AND REVIEWS mixture which has endowed Africa with an infinitude of negroid types, including some very handsome hybrids between the Mediterranean races and the black man : that the Negro owes a debt he can scarcely repay to the Caucasian of ten thousand, one thousand, three hundred, thirty years ago for the introduction of cultivated plants, domestic animals, implements, arms, and tools, industries, faiths, music, and the art of building. It is doubtful even whether ten thousand years ago is not too recent a date to suggest for the commencement of the opening-up of Africa by the white man : it is at any rate sufficient for the purpose of showing that throughout all the range of history the Negro has never been left to himself, that Congo tragedies and the enslavement of black by white were epi- sodes of the distant historical past as they are of the present period. Accurate anthropology would also dispose, once and for all, of that ridiculous theory that the white race was evolved in Central Africa, or even that the marvellous civilisation of ancient Egypt arose from an African impulse. We require to learn from anthropological research that the physiological difference between the Caucasian in America and the indigenous Amerindian is so slight that the Neo- American peoples may be en- couraged to absorb the C£ Indians ” into their midst with no more shame or lowering of the white man’s ideal of corporal beauty and fitness than has been occasioned by the absorption of the Gypsy and the Jew. Are the Amerindians of Canada to remain and develop apart on different lines as a race by them- selves ? Is just treatment secured to them and to THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 19 the Amerindians of British Guiana and Honduras ? Or are both these last a negligible quantity, to be allowed without much preventive fuss to drink them- selves to death with their own or the white man’s alcohol, or to die of the white man’s diseases ? What is to be done with the black Australian and the Papuan ? Is fusion, extrusion, or education to be fostered in these cases ? Is their extermination (assuming such to be contemplated) to proceed much further without remonstrance from the metropolis ? If the hybridising of the Australasian negroid with early migrating types of Caucasian can produce such good half-breeds as the Polynesian, may not the latter in its turn be encouraged to enter the white fold in the building up of a great Australian nation ? Or, in regard to the black Australian and the almost negro Papuan, is it preferable to discriminate between these races of marked nigrescence and the fairer-skinned Polynesian, and though according them the most considerate treatment, to discourage their interbreeding with the white settlers ? What, in short, are the plans to be adopted for the black Australian’s future, and for the racial development of Papua, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji ? These matters may be left in the main for the legislatures of Australia to decide, but we cannot disinterest the metropolis of the Empire from their consideration. Then there are the tremendous questions concern- ing India, racial problems that daunt the imagination with their complexity and the degree of happiness or unhappiness that will result from the wise or unwise nature of Great Britain’s answer. There is always the social status to be settled of the Eurasian half- 20 VIEWS AND REVIEWS S~^ breeds, who, if loyalty and faithfulness count for anything, have deserved well from the British rulers of India. How little is known about them not only in England but by the (mostly uneducated) “ mem sahibs ” who go out to India as the spouses of the British officials and merchants ! We are almost unacquainted with their numbers, their physical fitness or unfitness, their degree of culture, their hopes, ambitions, and the work they are most quali- fied to do. Through sheer inexcusable ignorance we may discourage in this mixed race a valuable bond between East and West. Are there to be local parliaments in India ? Is there to be a Confederation of the British West Indies with some large measure of self-government ? Is the Sudan to be wholly separated from Egypt in its administration and dependence ? Are the Egyptians racially capable of self-government ? Is Indian immigration into Malaysia, East Africa, South Africa, North Australia to be encouraged ? Ought we to facilitate white settlement on the East African uplands or in the valleys of Kashmir ? What can we make of Somaliland ? Is the black monopoly of Basutoland a menace to South Africa ? Is Trinidad, like Mauritius, to become a land of Indian kulis ? If we allow and encourage the millions of Chinese to replace or supplement the sparse Malay, Hindu, and Negrito populations of the great Malay peninsula or Borneo, shall we still be able to govern them in the interests of the British Empire and the world in general ? Can we encourage Spain, France, and Italy to resume and complete the work of Rome in North THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 21 Africa, or will the failure of our allies to do so involve us in an awkward position ? What are the elements of durability in the Turkish Empire ? How far are Slav sentiments to be taken into account in the settlement of Balkan affairs by Germany and Austria ? Is there sufficient homo- geneity and cohesion among the Albanians for them to form a semi-independent principality, or are they to come in future under Montenegrin or Austrian control ? What is to be the future of Arabia : a confederation of independent Arab states, a Turkish dominion, or one or more European protectorates ? All these are questions in the solving of which the data and conclusions of modern, accurate Anthro- pology would be of great value. Perhaps also our anthropological studies should begin at home, where a great field lies before us, most insufficiently worked. We are badly informed as to the physical condition of all the people of these two islands : their stature, musculature, good or bad teeth, fertility, longevity, racial type, local talents, susceptibility to disease, food requirements, circum- stances of life, degree of intelligence, and cranial capacity. Researches along the lines of the articles published by Dr F. C. Shrubsall (of the Hospital for Consumption, Brompton Road) would show the results of town life under present conditions on this or that racial element in the British population : how, for example, tall blonds are best suited to a life in the country, while brunets are better adapted to resist the bacteria of towns. A knowledge of the anthropology of the British Isles might assist in clearing up the Irish problems 22 VIEWS AND REVIEWS and enable Saxon legislators better to understand Wales. It would show, for example, that the Irish, like the Welsh and the Scottish peoples, are com- posed of much the same racial elements as the inhabitants of England, only arranged in different proportions and not nearly so well fused. It would enable us to understand the idiosyncrasies of the diverse elements that form the Irish nation, which we would see was composed of still distinct strata of some Proto-Caucasian type (like the Galley Hill Man of North Kent who lived a matter of 100,000 years ago) ; of Iberians, like Moors and Spaniards ; of red-haired Kelts and fair-haired Danes ; of Caledonian Scots and Saxon English. Such re- searches should further interest us — to the extent that we were formerly interested in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew — in the remarkable Kelt-lberian languages which are still spoken or remembered in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Man, and Cornwall. It is indeed preposterous that the dominating English people should for thirteen hundred years have ignored the two Keltic languages of these islands — the Goidelic of Ireland, Man, and the Scottish Highlands, and the Brythonic of Wales, and formerly of all England. They are as interesting as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and much more so than Hebrew. In their structure and vocabulary is locked up much “ pre-historic ” history, these languages representing in varying degrees a combination in vocabulary and syntax between the Aryan speech of the Kelts’ ancestors in Central Europe and the Iberian tongues which preceded the Aryan in western and southern Europe. THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 23 The existing means for the efficient study of anthropology in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge are small. Naturally this science has always been so closely associated with medicine and surgery that every doctor, surgeon, or veterinary surgeon is a possible anthropologist,1 and their teaching institutions and colleges, together with the wards of hospitals, are schools of anthropology. So far as comparative anatomy exists as a science in the United Kingdom, it may be said to have been founded by the great John Hunter, whose collec- tions of specimens to illustrate the difference and the resemblances in the structure of man and other animals are permanently established in the remark- able Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn. This is probably the finest museum of the kind in the Old World or the New ; and it is the only museum, so far, existing in the British Isles which deals adequately with the exposition of human physiology, and in which it is possible for the student correctly and easily to compare the details of human anatomy with the bones, brains, and “ soft parts ” of the different mammalian types, or of other verte- brates. Nearly a century of thanks is due by the British public to the College of Surgeons of Great Britain for their gratuitous assistance to the study of anthropology and comparative anatomy in general, by the institution and maintenance of this magnificent museum, the germ of which was the collection made by John Hunter. But so far as public exhibits and displayed in- 1 And this class in the community might prove to be valuable allies in the Anthropological Investigation of the British Isles. 24 VIEWS AND REVIEWS formation are concerned, we are very much in arrears as to the means of realising the physical aspect and structure of man — man as a mammal — compared, that is, with the museums of France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Ethno- graphically, perhaps, we stand first, with our magnificent collections in the British Museum ; though therein is all too little space for the adequate display of those objects which illustrate the primitive culture of the existing races of savage men or the greatly varied archaeology of the Caucasian peoples. The collections are there ; the skill and zeal in exhibiting them in an educating way are decidedly present in a staff of exceptional ability ; but the Nation, as represented by the Treasury, still finds itself unable to meet the cost of further exhibition rooms. As regards the other aspect of the Subject — Man, above all British man, considered physically, our institutions are most inadequate. Putting aside the private help afforded by the College of Surgeons, all that is shown to the public of Man as a mammal at the British Museum (Natural History) is in a small portion of one of the uppermost galleries, to be reached after ascending four flights of fatiguing steps. The greater part of this gallery is of necessity devoted to the exposition of apes, monkeys, lemurs, and bats. The space that remains is occupied by cases containing a valuable collection of skulls (im- perfectly exhibited), a few skeletons and bones, a placard refuting palmistry by an appeal to the gorilla’s foot, and a series of photographs illustrating certain savage tribes. As to the types of the British Isles, they are conspicuous by their absence. Go to THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 25 the chief countries on the Continent, and in the public museums you will find an array of life-sized models or photographs of the different types of men and women of the land, giving you some idea of the race or races to be found therein. Nothing of the kind exists in the British Isles, and all published works on anthropology avoid the subject, and reduce British anthropology to a few paltry paragraphs, illustrated by one or two picture-postcard photographs of fishermen or Welsh cottagers wearing stage costumes, together with some faked, sickly sweet “ types of English beauty ” (in some cases taken from actresses or professional models whose birthplace was on the Continent of Europe). But after attending in an adequate degree to the illustration of the Anthropology of the United Kingdom, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland — if it were only properly supported and subscribed to by the nation as a whole — might get into touch with the educational establish- ments of the Daughter Nations, of the Crown Colonies or Protectorates, and of India. It would suggest, where they do not already exist, the establish- ment of Anthropological Societies or Departments in all the great centres of population throughout the British Empire. It would urge on the completion of the much- needed Anthropological survey of British West African Colonies and Protectorates ; of the Falkland Islands, where a new and interesting type of white man is gradually developing ; of Cyprus, where there are several layers of Mediterranean races ; of 26 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Malta, where there is a wonderful prehistoric past to be revealed ; but, above all, of South Africa. Seeing that we have been the ruling power in the South African sub-continent for over a hundred years, it is little less than a national disgrace that we have made such poor use of our opportunity for enriching the knowledge of the world in regard to the past and present Negro peoples of South Africa.1 So far as Government action is concerned there is scarcely 1 Where, in the whole range of British South African literature, can we find such a work as that of Professor Leonhard Schultz : A us Namaland und Kalahari ? It is practically a description of man and nature — the anthropology, above all — of North-west Cape Colony, subsidised by the German Government. The ability to write such a work on Cape Colony, Basutoland, or Zululand is present in many British students or professors of anthropology, but they have not the means to illustrate such work efficiently or to publish it at their own cost, and publishers do not consider scientific anthro- pology a paying subject. Crossing the Zambezi* northwards, look at the way in which the German Government has enabled Dr Fiilleborn and others to illus- trate the anthropology of German East Africa and Nyasaland, and consider what impetus or assistance our own Imperial Government has given towards dealing with the anthropology, the native codes of law, the languages, myths, traditions, institutions, of British Central Africa, British East Africa, or Uganda. Such work as has been done by British pens has been for the most part carried out by missionaries or government officials at their own expense, or by travellers or explorers not always of British nationality. Similarly, private enterprise, often on the part of people of very small means, has certainly done something to illustrate and elucidate the manners and customs of the South African Bantu tribes. We owe much recent information under this head to the writings of Mr Dudley Kidd and Miss A. Werner, to a number of missionaries of the London Missionary Society, the Scottish missionaries of Nyasaland, the Rev. Father Torrend of the Zambezi, to the Universities’ Mission, to Anglican bishops of South-eastern Africa, and recently to officials of the British South African Company ; but comparatively with the importance of Cis-Zambezian and Trans-Zambezian Africa in the scheme of the British Empire our knowledge of the Anthropology and Ethnology, and even the languages of its seven or eight millions of negroes, is pitifully small. THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 27 anything to record. Fortunately, there was once a Governor of Cape Colony who had a love for science, Sir George Grey. Under his instigation Dr Livingstone and Dr W. I. Bleek collected much information as to perishing tribes — Bushman, Hottentot, and Bantu. The Colonial Government found — and find still — a small fund wherewith to maintain a librarian and a museum curator at Cape Town, but in the National Library of Cape Town are still preserved in manuscript most of the im- portant anthropological and ethnological studies of Livingstone, Bleek, and others, which this great Daughter nation has either been too poor or too un- interested to publish. There are in pigeon-holes some- where the very valuable Reports of Mr Palgrave, the Commissioner sent in the early seventies to examine Damaraland. (The anthropological photographs obtained on this expedition — most creditable to Mr Palgrave, considering the epoch in which he worked — are in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society.) So far, no great Africander has arisen who has displayed any scientific aptitude for the study of the Negro races of South Africa. Almost all the recorded work has been done by outsiders — British, German, French, Swiss, and Norwegians. Yet what links in the chain of evidence of the evolu- tion of humanity as a whole or of branches of the Negro sub-species in particular are locked up in this southern prolongation of the Dark Continent ! The little research stimulated and paid for by the Cape of Good Hope Government has revealed the 28 VIEWS AND REVIEWS remains of vanished races in the coast-lands of South Africa, called by the Dutch name of “ Strand- looper ” or shore-runners, from the idea that they frequented chiefly the seashore, where they lived on shell-fish, erecting huge kitchen middens out of the discarded shells. But there seem to have been two very distinct types of “ Strandlooper ” skull, only accidentally associated by the careless name of “ seashore dwellers.” One cranium will show a very prognathous Bushman type — something between Bushman and Congo pygmy, but more “ simian ” than either (for pictures of surviving examples of this form see the illustrations on p. 20 of my book on The Negro in the New World ) — another, especially associated with the conditions of a cave-dweller, is entirely different, is almost Caucasian in shape and brain capacity, and has suggested to authorities like Dr F. C. Shrubsall and Dr Peringuey the startling conclusion that at a relatively remote period (not easily gauged as to the number of centuries or millenniums by the evidence at present available) South Africa was sparsely inhabited by a Caucasian race not improbably akin to the Hamitic tribes who have so long inhabited and influenced east and north-east Africa. But it is dangerous to theorise on evidence which is still scanty, and the subject is only worth a reference to show what interesting chapters might be added to man’s pre- historic record if the anthropology and archaeology of all South Africa were most thoroughly investigated. Such a research would also (if quickly undertaken) set at rest the problem of the Vaalpens or “ Ashy- bellies ” described in the works of the late Professor THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 29 A. H. Keane.1 This would seem to be a very primitive race still lingering in the northern Trans- vaal and perhaps descended from the prognathous type of “ Strandlooper.” Keane’s stories were based on the reports of recent travellers examining this part of the Limpopo watershed, and his descriptions and theories have been pooh-poohed by other explorers who have failed to see in the Vaalpens anything more than an outcast Bechuana tribe. But it is curious to find a French traveller — Delegorgue — referring in 1847 to a similar dwarfish people living in the north or north-west Transvaal. The subject is one which the Union Government of South Africa should investigate without delay, for every succeeding year brings the outcast and unsuccessful tribes of Africa nearer to extinction. This consideration — the rapid disappearance of evidence as to the origin and development of the human species — is the factor in the case which excuses the peevish outcry of this chapter. It is as though we were from time to time offered the Sibylline books, chapters of the New Bible, which will reveal to us one of the great secrets of the universe — the creation of man. Each time we refuse to pay the price ; and each time the Sibyl returns, the precious manuscript is more and more defective. Are we then so incurious, so hypnotised by religion falsely so-called, that only about ten thousand out of the world’s population of 1,610,000,000 care to know anything of the origin, the long 1 Popular Anthropology — I mean, Anthropology popularised — owes much to the labours and researches of the late Professor A. H. Keane. 30 VIEWS AND REVIEWS martyrdom of growth, the divergencies, degenera- tions, expansions, seventh-wave advances, recoils, and successes of the human species : this god in the chrysalis stage ? It has become the fashion to sneer at the American- inspired attempts on the part of the press and of speculative publishers to invigorate knowledge and put money in their own coffers by cajoling and urging the public to purchase encyclopaedias, histories, dictionaries, self-educators, works on zoology or scenery. But in my humble opinion these ventures have done much to increase the education of the classes and the masses during the last decade. They are bought — perhaps shamefacedly — and they are read because they have been bought. Perhaps their vogue may in time prepare those who publish and those who buy, for the issue of an Encyclopaedia of Man, a work on Anthropology and Ethnology in twenty-four volumes, with an index and an atlas ; something a little like Ratzel’s History of Mankind which appeared first in Germany about twenty years ago, only far more complete in knowledge and filled with the latest facts. Ratzel’s book almost ignores the races of Europe, and gives but scanty informa- tion regarding comparative anatomy. It is in this last direction that — without vying with surgical treatises or pathological text-books — information of a kind suitable for the mass of the public should be collected and published.1 There exists in no language as yet a really complete manual of human comparative anatomy, wherein the physical features — the bones, 1 The model one would like to see followed in this respect is the Morphology and Anthropology by W. L. H. Duckworth. THE EMPIRE AND ANTHROPOLOGY 31 muscles, viscera, nerves, brain, glands, hair, teeth — are set forth in accordance with our latest knowledge, not only in comparison with the structure and organs of other mammalian types and with the apes, but as between one human sub-species or race and another. In a limited manner this has been done with regard to the skull — shape, length, breadth, capacity, and facial angle ; and in a lesser degree by giving the pro- portions of the bones of the skeleton, the poise and curve of the spine. Comparisons in these details have been chiefly made between such extreme types as the Caucasian and the Negro, but very little with regard to intermediate or scarcer races, such as the Arab, Tartar, Chinaman, Eskimo, Asiatic, Negrito, Papuan, Hindu, Ainu, Malay, Australoid, Amerindian, Yeddah, and Polynesian. We know so little about the structure of all the living races of mankind (as compared one with the other, and again with the forms nearest allied to humanity amongst the apes) that we are not able to decide whether all the living races of mankind are merely local varieties of a single species, or if they should be elevated to the rank of sub-species, or whether the three types most divergent from the ancestral form should be con- sidered the separate species of a single genus — the isolated genus Homo. No person of great riches, in subsidising such a comprehensive work on anthropology and ethnology, could better lay out his money in the cause of peace, sweet reasonableness, and the breaking down of racial prejudices ; for if any salient facts are brought out forcibly by anthropological study, they are that all men are brothers under their skins, that 32 VIEWS AND REVIEWS no existing race has sunk so low that it cannot enter into some degree of civilisation, and no race has risen so high that it can afford to neglect the care of its body, the cultivation of its mind, and the safeguards of a public morality. Anthropology is, therefore, the best corrective of intolerance, cruelty, sentimentality, and racial arrogance. CHAPTER II HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE Although green is a dominating tint in Irish landscapes and may as well as any other hue be taken as the national colour, yet Ireland is a land not only green but purple and red-gold, a land of much variety and intensity of colour, even where deficient in grandeur or elaboration of outline. Her land- scapes are purple with many square miles of heather- covered moor and mountain — a purple darkened into indigo by cloud shadows, and repeated often in the sky when the rain-clouds are piled in serried masses. There is purple also in the abundant thistles, in the knapweed, the loosestrife, and the dyes of the countrywomen’s skirts. Green — emerald- green, bottle-green, sage-green, blue-green — meets the eye in the velvet mosses of the bogs, in meadows, turfy banks, and fern-choked glens, in the many fields of cabbage, the large-leaved drooping ash trees, the tree-like gorse ; in the clear sea-water off the rock-bound coasts ; and in the sea-green marble of Connemara. Red-gold and russet are present in most of the landscapes and in the hair of the Keltic people. In the shallow estuaries the oily water is unable to break into billows owing to the floating 33 3 34 VIEWS AND REVIEWS wreaths of red-gold seaweed. The tussocks of the bogs and the banks of the rivers are yellow and red with sedgy grasses and stunted rushes. The russet sorrel grows in great abundance ; the bracken in the autumn, winter, and spring ranges from the colour of ripe maize through red-gold to red-brown, and gives these tints to vast spaces of undulating tableland or whole ranges of hills. Through the black bogs flow streams of clear chestnut-brown water margined with creamy foam, as though the country ran with beer. Red-gold, green, and purple are the dominating colours of Ireland ; but there is also the grey of her limestone rocks, granite boulders, cliffs, and mountains, the unvarying grey of the stone walls which in most parts do not so much replace the hedges of England as reinforce them against the wind ; grey in the thick-haired donkeys, the hooded crows, and the flocks of geese which are never absent from the villages and the surrounding meadows and moors. There are also geese of the purest white, and creamy-white is the prevailing tint among the sheep that dot the hillsides and of the exquisite mantle thrown over hedges and thickets when the hawthorn is in bloom. Everywhere the cottages and the habitations of the poor in town or country are white as whitewash can make them. In autumn, winter, and spring white gulls are to be seen on every loch and inlet of the sea, on fields which have been manured, on the foul rivers that flow through towns, and among the ships in the harbours, great and small. There is the white sea-foam all round the coast ; a creamy or a bluish-white appears HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 35 in the chalk cliffs of Antrim, marked as with giant writing by parallel rows of black flints. Then there is pale gold in summer and autumn in the fields of oats and rye, and at all times in the thatch that roofs the white cottages ; in the abundant honeysuckle of the hedgerows ; in the hair and beards of the Danish population on the coasts and islands. There is in one season or another the yellow of the daffodil, of the iris, the water-lily, the corn-marigold, the blazing ragwort, and the blossoms of the gorse — that gorse which in the south and west grows into a tree. There is pink in the omnipresent white-haired pig, and a rose colour for four months in the year in the flowers of the pink campion which fringe every lane side and meadow path. There is pink in June and July in the dog roses. Dull pink is the colour of the sandstone rocks in southern Ireland. The clubbed seed-stalks of the arums are coral-red in summer and autumn. In autumn and early winter the rowan trees blaze with crimson-scarlet berries. The fruitage of the hawthorn and the dog rose is dull crimson and bright scarlet. Crimson- scarlet greets one in the long beak and legs of the Irish chough ; crimson-purple blossoms for four months in the hedgerows and on the edges of the bog drains where grow the finest foxgloves in the world. Crimson is strewn with a lavish hand over the fuchsia bushes which now grow wild about all the villages and are in blossom from May to October. The ground beneath them is dark crimson with the fallen flowers. Then, to complete the colour-scheme, there is the sobering note of black : the blue-black of the basalt, of that cooling down of the volcanic 36 VIEWS AND REVIEWS outburst that has capped the cliff's of Antrim, the crystalline rocks of Donegal, and the peaks of the Mourne and Wicklow mountains ; the russet black of the squares of peat piled in rectangular stacks by many a lonely roadside on the edge of quaking bogs. These, too, in between their tussocks of turf and heather exhibit smooth black, slimy surfaces, like ink thickened by evaporation. There is black in the rooks of the East, the crows of the North, and the ravens of the West, in the glossy Kerry cattle, and in the hair of those Kerry people, who, if they were dressed up in burnus and haik , might be Berbers from North Africa. If Ireland is reached by the stranger from Wales or Scotland, the scenery which greets him up and down the east coast is not very dissimilar to that which he has left. He sees mountains nearly as high as those he has quitted in Wales, and higher than the hills of south-west Scotland. But, like all the Irish mountains, they give you full value for the trouble of coming to see them, for the reason that they usually rise up with great abruptness from a sea coast, a loch, or a green valley at sea level. They may be steep, smooth pyramids, or crags crowned with rocks like fantastic ruins. They curve huge shoulders of purple heather among the low-lying, fast- flying clouds. Though they fall short by a thousand feet or so of the greatest height attained in Scotland, and scarcely reach the altitude of Snowdon, it may be said with fairness that for their size they are more imposing in appearance than the notable summits among our Scotch and English ranges, perhaps on account of the more detached HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 37 nature of each mountain. Examples of imposing mass, beautiful or fantastic outline may be cited in such mountains as Slieve Donard, which looks down on the Irish Channel in Newcastle Bay ; or Croagh Patrick in the far west, whose peaks, like the cusps of a molar tooth, are among the many wonderful details in a view which for grandeur and beauty — as Thackeray remarked — makes Clew Bay in Mayo a picture worth travelling five hundred miles to see. Errigal Moun- tain in north-west Donegal is another peak which in its grandest aspect is a perfect cone. The Wicklow mountains and Portuguese-like scenery of the Killarney ranges (which last claim the highest altitude of Ireland — 3414 feet) have not been over-praised. And with the grandeur or the rugged savagery of the mountains goes hand in hand the loveliness of the lakes and the fiord-like inlets of the sea. The fresh-water lakes of Ireland are uncountable. Loch Neagh (pronounced Nei), near Belfast, is the largest sheet of fresh water in the British Islands, but offers no landscapes comparable in beauty with those lakes along the Shannon’s course (studded with islets), or the lochs of Mayo, Fermanagh, and Kerry. Some of the most exquisite aspects of Irish scenery occur where a loch lies at the base of an abrupt mountain. The still surface on a windless day becomes a perfect mirror, doubling the precipitous two thousand feet of rock that towers up above the reedy shores, and repeating, scarcely dimmed or blurred, this mass of pinkish sandstone or pale grey gleaming granite, scarped and quarried by torrents, yet brightly painted in green, gold, and purple wherever vegetation can cling to its sides. 38 VIEWS AND REVIEWS So much may be written in praise of Irish land- scapes. Much about them is grand and beautiful enough to justify greater discomforts than are in- curred at the present time in crossing St George’s Channel. But quite half the surface of Ireland is ugly, monotonous, or dull. Imagine that you are starting from London to visit the Atlantic cliffs or the beautiful mountains of Mayo — not forgetting Achill Island, which is perhaps the climax of strange beauty in Irish scenery. You will probably arrive in Dublin too late in the evening or too early in the morning to notice the scenery of Dublin Bay. You are rapidly transferred from the steamer to the train, and for quite a hundred and fifty miles you travel across the central plain of Ireland, through scenery which may have intimate, detailed charms of its own, apparent to a resident, but is generally to be described as ugly or uninteresting. Weedy crops, ragged hedges, criss-cross lines of stunted ash trees, white-washed, oblong cottages, muddy roads, dirty peasants, ill-kempt horses, uninteresting towns of sad grey houses — block-like buildings without relief — churches of recent construction ; above all, miles and miles and miles of bog, the surface of the bog being mainly covered by dull yellow vegetation ; here and there a hummocky hillock of undistin- guished outline ; sheets of water bordered by marsh and reflecting nothing but the sky ; sluggish rivers and canals ignobly bridged. Perhaps over all this there is a sky of dull grey clouds and a drizzle of rain. Here you have the average aspect of Central Ireland, and seeing this you scarcely wonder that a certain sadness broods over the land. HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 39 Compared with Wales and England, and even Scotland, Ireland is singularly destitute of forests, and after the stranger has quitted the eastern sea- board he is more and more struck by the absence of naturally growing trees, especially on the moun- tains of the West and North. The bogs undoubtedly represent the sites of ancient forests which were again succeeded by other growths of trees, the last of the series being mainly oaks. No one who has visited an Irish bog has failed to see the remarkable whitened stumps of the oak trees, all of them cut off at about the same height above the ground. Many of the stumps protrude a foot or so above the surface of the bog, but as a rule they are only revealed when excavations are made for peat fuel. The causes which led to the destruction of all these forests, and their replacement by bogland, are not clearly explained. There is apparently no reason why trees should not grow and flourish all over Ireland, except where unprotected from Atlantic gales ; and a great deal might be done in addition to what has been already accomplished in the replanting of forests. Along the eastern seaboard of Ireland, the woodlands are often as luxuriant and beautiful as in England, while in that lovely county of Kerry dense forests are the characteristic feature, and vastly interest the botanist by the Portuguese relationships of their trees and shrubs. In parts of the West and North- West there are peasants who have never seen a tree, and who only know of the existence of trees by pictures in books. According to statistics, the tree which most pre- dominates in Ireland is still the oak, and next to 4o VIEWS AND REVIEWS that the Scotch pine ; but the tree which most meets the traveller’s eye is the ash. The ash is certainly the dominant type of tree in Ireland, in towns and villages, along the sides of roads, and in the fields and hedgerows. In full summer the green of the ash’s foliage is slightly sombre ; in autumn its fading yellow is unpleasing. To sum up, the leading features in the scenery of Ireland are the heather-bracken-and-gorse-covered mountains, with their gleaming streaks and scaurs of bare rock and lace-like waterfalls ; the black bogs covering the whitened skeletons of trees, and them- selves partially covered by tussocks of yellow sedges, patches of emerald moss, and bunches of rose-pink heather — bogs on which grey and white geese are always grazing ; villages of one-storied, yellow- thatched, white-washed houses, above which the Gothic steeple of the new Roman Catholic church towers a hundred, two hundred feet skywards, dis- proportionate in bulk and architecture to the needs of its peasant surroundings ; blue lochs and blue ribbons of rivers ; mud-coloured and dark green canals ; innumerable gaunt, ruined mills ; two beautiful cities — Dublin and Cork — one with a look of Venice, and the other with a touch of Naples ; many grey towns with muddy streets and well-furnished shops ; much mud, indeed, every- where in town and country, and but few really good roads ; the hawthorn more prominent than the shamrock ; the gull and the lapwing every- where ; and the handsomest, pleasantest, healthiest people in the British Islands. There are only three cities — some would say HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 41 only two, Dublin and Cork — that have nobility of appearance, the impressiveness of time-worn archi- tecture, and the romance of history about them — that romance which is wholly lacking from all towns in Wales but Bangor and Carnarvon, all in Scotland save Edinburgh, St Andrews, and Ayr, but which is present in nearly every English village, town, county capital south of Northumberland and Liverpool. The prosperous towns of Eastern Ireland have the cosy, respectable, suburban look of similar places in England which owe their main existence to nineteenth-century developments. In fact, the well-to-do parts of Ireland are singularly nineteenth century, and look as if they had had no existence before that era. There are points in Londonderry and Drogheda that are worth an artist’s attention, and also in Newry and Wexford, more as seaports, however, than as historic towns. The glories of Dublin mostly date from Ireland’s golden age, the eighteenth century, when even a bad and unrepre- sentative Parliament gave a greater stimulus to national genius than the best of English Govern- ments, though it must be admitted that some of the most beautiful and original architectural work in Trinity College, Dublin — notably that unique Byzantine Hall, built of Irish marbles, and used as a geological museum — was executed in the very middle of the nineteenth century, when English ascendency was at its height. I suspect a good deal of the beauty of Cork dates back to the nineteenth century only. It is partly to be attri- buted (in the churches, for example) to the exquisite tints of the south Irish sandstone, which assumes 42 VIEWS AND REVIEWS an old rose colour, a greyish-crimson in time, and sympathetically attracts lichens of green and grey, which vary its colour surface and tone down the too gorgeous red of the new stone. This sandstone contrasts strikingly with the white and grey lime- stones from Eastern and Central Ireland, the green serpentine marble from Connemara, and the black marble from Kilkenny. Cork rises up from the waterside, like Naples, in a series of terraces. The broad River Lee is very clear above the locks, and on a sunshiny day its surface is golden-green with the reflected foliage, through the shimmer of which, however, can be seen the clear sandy bottom. Along its northern bank grow fine elms, their trunks covered with ivy. Above the tops of these rise grey-pink garden walls crested with rose-coloured valerian or purple snap- dragon through the summer and autumn, and en- closing sheltered gardens nearly hidden by the dark evergreen bushes of myrtles, box, Irish yew, arbutus, veronica, and justicia. The houses to which these sloping gardens belong are distempered in bright or light colours — blue, pink, cream, mauve, grey, white— like those in Spanish towns, and their roofs are of green or violet-grey slates. Beyond the houses are green hills looped with red roads, and between the hills glimpses of river bends. The bridges over the Lee are mainly of white limestone, all except one, a hideous green ironwork bridge, dedicated to Parnell. How the city fathers of Cork allowed such a marring note to break the harmonious beauty of their town I cannot think ; for in all other respects Cork, in spite of its gay, foreign- HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 43 looking villas, is a place in which the display of fine building stone is a feature of permanent beauty. The jail, for example, one would never take for a prison : it looks like a Doric palace with its grey columns and its stately, flanking walls. Galway in the far West has a sombre picturesque- ness in the taller among its old houses with the Spanish hatchments — the residences of the Spanish merchants engaged in the wine trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the rest of the town, like Limerick, is mean and dreary. Limerick, beyond the famous Thomond bridge and the castle attributed to King John, has little of interest to arrest the eye of a lover of form and colour, but a painter might render with the poetry of a Whistler the melancholy mystery of its gaunt warehouses and quays, overhanging the mud of a yellow Shannon at low tide, and seeming to be peering from their small windows towards the west, looking for the commerce which has receded from that noble waterway. Belfast, of course, is the third in the group of great Irish cities of notable appearance ; and yet an honest critic must admit that it lacks the inten- tional beauty of Dublin and Cork, the older parts of which (excluding the inevitable new suburbs) make a definite and individual impression as a whole, as though in some way or at some time their position, their landscape surroundings had been considered and their general appearance been planned to produce a noble effect. This element is lacking in Belfast, which can show here and there magnificent build- ings, some barely finished and few that are older 44 VIEWS AND REVIEWS than i860, but which has no one street, square, or continuous area of fine architecture free from brick or stucco, painted iron, or tawdry accessories. In Sheffield, an artist of original genius might produce some very wonderful and impressive pictures out of the Styx-like canals, the in- numerable organ-pipe chimneys, the flames and the red glow, the yellow thick smoke, the blue semi-transparent or iridescent smoke from the hidden furnaces ; but the effect of his work would move the soul to pity, for that such scenes (not without their grandeur and even a dreadful beauty) were the abodes of women and children and the sleeping- places as well as the workshops of men. So it might be in some quarters of Belfast ; yet Belfast is cheerier than are most Lancashire, Staffordshire, or Yorkshire manufacturing towns. But from the artists’ point of view it is not cc born.” It is a vague, vast, scattered, formless town, a thing of shreds and patches, wholly lacking the melancholy dignity of Dublin or the Neapolitan charm of Cork (I might equally well have written Portuguese instead of Italian : Cork reminding one very much of Oporto or even Lisbon, on account of the luxuriant vegetation, the multitude of churches and convents, and — picturesque beggars !). I have not seen Belfast for some years, and, when there, was badly impressed by the poor lighting of the mean side streets (mean because of the low Bermondsey-like houses). But I was taken to task by the leading paper of the North of Ireland and told that I had greatly libelled this city, that her municipality prided itself with justice on the lavish HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 45 lighting of the whole town. Perhaps the glare of the arc lamps on the main thoroughfares half- blinded me, so that I thought the side streets and alleys gloomy ; in any case I have reason to believe now that Belfast has made such strides in the amenities of life, since I was there, that the diatribes of nine and ten years ago no longer apply. Even then I realised the breadth and straightness of the streets, and the vista at the end of every long road of a background of green mountain and down, rising above the smoke and mist of the noisy city and breathing hope to those who loathe a great concourse of people and crave the relief of lonely spaces. To the very base of these green heights, which have also the dignity of exposed geological strata — black volcanic basalt capping ancient chalk — and whose sides are pitted with the caverns hollowed by water and once inhabited by men of the Stone Age, extend the electric tramway lines. The workers of Belfast in all grades of life can be quickly face to face with Nature and ancient history — can take the air amid the scenes (marked by ruined forts and limbs of castles) wherein Piets fought against Gaels, Irish against Scottish invaders, and both alike against the Normans, Welsh, and English. There is a great deal of red in Belfast city. In the outskirts a red clay is found which is particularly suitable for brick-making, and the bricks manu- factured from this earth are a bright rosy red. Almost unintentionally — as I imagine — the huge red-brick bulks which tower into the sky with massive chimneys have a decided beauty in im- 4 6 VIEWS AND REVIEWS pressiveness, derived from their size and the expanse of rose-red surface. The smoke from the furnace fires is blown hither and thither by the sea breeze from Belfast Loch, or is mixed in rainbow effects with the occasional showers sweep- ing over the great town from the encircling mountains ; and these atmospheric veils and curtains of thinnest gauze temper the over-redness of the brick columns, cubes, sky-scrapers, and cupolas, so that this huge collection of giant industries looks like a fantastic city of the Jinns imagined in a Persian story. Stand on a bridge over the River Lagan and you will see several impressive pictures. The tide may be low and the nearer bank be a vast expanse of mud, with a surface in colour like tarnished silver, yet still liquid enough to be permeated with dim reflections of buildings and stranded ships. The mud is dotted with white gulls. The sluggish tide of the Lagan, imprisoned and slackened by docks, is a reeling mirror of sky and masts and giant chimneys. The brightly painted funnels of the many steamers, the masts and slackened canvas of sailing ships, the domes and turrets in slate or grey stone that cap the more pretentious buildings : above all, the great red towers of the factories (perhaps designed for other purposes than chimneys, large and corpulent below and tapering upwards, some like minarets, others in the conventional shape of the Irish Round Tower) lend further variety to a scene which smacks of enterprise, energy, wealth, and even sordid gain, of beauty which is quite unconscious and un- HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 47 intended, of squalor as represented by needless mud and drunken loafers, and of hope, so far as a future of beauty is concerned, in the blue background of mountain wall, with its varied outline, its patches of forest, and its appeal to city men as a ready refuge from noise and ugliness. Belfast as a town has a long history, going back to the seventh century ; and in “ pre-history,” and as a focus of human habitation, to ten thousand years or so ago. In the Middle Ages it was little more than a large fishing village. The real founder of the modern city that exists to-day was Sir Arthur Chichester, who at the close of the sixteenth century, after the complete conquest of the Irish chieftains of Ulster, was granted the forfeited lands of the O’Neils. He was a Devonshire man and imported a large number of Devonians from his estates in that county to settle in the town he was building, and although the population as it grew inevitably mixed with the Irish women of the neighbourhood (who, like the Poles, have again and again enslaved the settlers of another race), it was constantly reinforced from Saxondom during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by immigrants from Scotland and Lancashire. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, Belfast became the most “ English ” town in Ireland. Perhaps one should say “cosmopolitan,” for numerous French Huguenots settled here two hundred years ago and greatly stimulated the new industries of the place, especially the linen manufactures. But the main development and vast importance of modern Belfast — an import- ance which should not be overlooked in politics — 48 VIEWS AND REVIEWS really dates from the application of steam engines to navigation. Early in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century experiments were made in the construction of steamboats at Belfast. A native of that town, Mr Harland — why is there no statue put up to him ? — founded the celebrated firm of Harland and Wolff and started the shipbuilding industry on the River Lagan, near where it expands into the great sea inlet or loch of Belfast, on land which was little more than mud, and which is still called “ Queen’s Island,” because it was created by Harland’s energy soon after Queen Victoria’s accession. The speciality of the work of the firm was the construction of iron ships fitted with steam engines. They recruited their workmen in the fifties of the last century from the sturdy Protestant population of County Down, the sons of small farmers and peasants who were descended mostly from English and Scottish settlers, and whose Protestantism was of a perfervid character and narrow-minded intolerance. Although Belfast was practically an English town in its foundation and replenishment, the glamour of the Irish race lay over it. The Irish language was still spoken in the glens of Antrim and the mountains of Down a hundred years ago, and had already given the Irish brogue to the descendants of Englishmen, Welshmen, French Huguenots, and Lowland Scots, who have it as strongly to-day as any other natives of Ireland. But, above all, Roman Catholic Chris- tianity reconquered generation after generation of these sons of Puritans, Presbyterians, Calvinists, and Methodists. The Catholics, therefore, have become HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 49 strong in the central part of Belfast, and once their form of religion was freed from all disabilities in the early part of the nineteenth century their complete freedom of worship led not unnaturally to exultant arrogance. The Presbyterians and Anglicans of old Belfast had grown up alongside the descendants of the persecuted Catholics, and were perhaps seventy years ago lazily tolerant. But into sharp conflict with the now aggressive Catholics came the thousands of bigoted Protestants imported from the farms of County Down to the steel and iron works of Queen’s Island. They served as a rallying point for the militant Presbyterianism of the fifties, and street quarrels began to occur between the Protestants and Catholics among the working classes of Belfast as early as 1856. It was, however, in 1864 that the first serious outbreak took place. A rumour suddenly arose that certain of the Roman Catholic navvies, more or less tipsy (the god really worshipped by Catholics and Protestants alike was then the whisky bottle), had invaded a Presbyterian school- house, had beaten the children and turned them into the street. When this story — largely false and grossly exaggerated — reached the Protestant riveters on Queen’s Island, they threw down all their tools except hammers and “ bits ” and rushed in a great body, perhaps ten thousand strong, into the poor Catholic quarter. Catholic schools and churches were half destroyed, and large bodies of Roman Catholic workmen were driven down into the mud of the River Lagan, in which at least two hundred were drowned or suffocated [and all in the name of the religion of Christ !]. The real loss of life on 4 5° VIEWS AND REVIEWS both sides was so considerable that the actual numbers of killed were unpublished, and the matter was hushed up as much as possible by the horrified municipal authorities of the day.1 Nevertheless, “lest we forget,” and as a reminder to the generation now growing up, and to the “ Orange ” men in politics, the Protestants of Belfast should erect a great expiatory group of statuary in atonement for this massacre of fellow-Christians : the Catholics might make their amends by a similar TDenkmal on the blood-stained sites of Wexford and Scullabogue : and the Belfast monument (by an Irish sculptor) should stand at the summit of Shan Kill for all the world to see. Shan Kill (an Irish name meaning the old church or monastic cell) is a fine broad avenue with somewhat mean houses on either side which runs westward from the busiest part of Belfast towards the encircling hills. After this first faction fight of which it was the rallying point, in 1864, the Shan Kill Road has continued to be the battle-ground between the Orangemen and the Catholics in Belfast. Strong police barracks are built, however, in this district, and many measures arranged by which cords and chains can be drawn across the road to check the impetus of crowds. The eastern half of this road runs through the Catholic quarter ; the western through a large suburban district mainly inhabited by the thousands of Protestant workmen in the great shipbuilding yards, who, when 1 revisited these scenes a few years ago, still derived the satisfaction of a semi- savage from writing up in white chalk on the 1 Similar religious riots took place in 1880 and 1886. HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 51 corners of Catholic side streets, “ To Hell with the Pope.” It is pleasanter to turn from these scenes of needless strife and clamour about non-essentials to some of Belfast’s great industries. Truly this gallant city has merited well of Ireland and done much to atone for the crimes of English administration in that unhappy island. When the woollen trade was deliberately ruined at the close of the seventeenth century because of its competition with that of England, the linen trade (fostered by William III., and stimulated by those great benefactors of the world, the expelled Huguenots of France) became one of the notable industries of Belfast, employing many of the sisters and daughters of the fifteen thousand workmen in the shipyards ; though, in consequence of the decline in Irish agriculture (onlyjust arrested), the flax for the Belfast manufactories has now to come from Belgium. I will not dwell on the distilleries : it is sad to think how many there are, and that they pour out about fifty thousand gallons of whisky a week into an already too alcoholic world. Perhaps in the advance of chemistry these distilleries may cease to produce spirits for human consumption and give us instead that alcoholic essence which might be such an invaluable agent as a motive power in locomotion, as a vehicle for dyes, perfumes, dis- infectants, and in the hundred-and-one applications of modern inventions. Curiously enough, in this centre of the alcohol industry was first invented and manufactured a temperance drink — ginger ale — which has attained the greatest vogue among the many substitutes for that rarest of all beverages — 52 VIEWS AND REVIEWS pure, sparkling cold water. Ginger ale and other aerated drinks are exported from Belfast in such quantities now that they are becoming, together with excellent biscuits, rivalling those of Reading, one of the leading products of the place. For two hundred years Belfast has been a notable centre of the rope- and canvas-making, and the modern “ rope walks ” are well worth seeing. A great amount of high-class printing, colour-printing, and lithography is done in this city. The pleasant feature about all these industries — in some of which, like the lace-making, the finer linen embroidery, or the printing, a very remarkable degree of taste is being developed — is the exceedingly healthy look of all employed therein. Belfast is to be congratu- lated on the looks of her people, the beauty of her surrounding scenery, the possession of great educational institutes, and the finest fernery to be seen in any Botanical Gardens outside the tropics. Dublin is in the main a grey city, flanked on the south by beautiful green mountains and with a splendid outpost on the north in the Hill of Howth. It is a commonplace to say that it is among the beautiful cities of the world, worthy in every way to be the capital of a State. Its streets are broader and straighter than those of London, and the first impression made on the eye of the visitor is the number of fine buildings in the architecture of Greece and Italy — classic and cinque-cento — built for the most part of Irish limestone, which has weathered beautifully to tints of dark and light grey — that grey which on misty days and in shadowed HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 53 recesses has a bluish tinge. The general impression of colour in Dublin is grey, in spite of the many houses and public buildings of red brick — a grey perhaps touched with rose colour here and there, where the pale sunshine brings the rosy brick into relief. Yet even the red brick houses, banks, clubs, and the gigantic new dwellings for the poor (on which a splendid style of architecture has been lavished) are edged with stone, have stone copings, balconies, or slate roofs, while much of the brick, by smoke and rain, dust and lichen, has faded to a greyish-brown. The straight artery of the Liffey might be a canal in Venice, and the innumerable beautiful bridges of white, weathered limestone which cross it could very well be of marble. They recall in their designs the bridges over Venetian canals. There are two ex- ceptions to the almost uniform beauty of these bridges — exceptions which, like the Parnell bridge at Cork, are a disgrace to the city authorities. One is the railway bridge, the ugliest ever known, which crosses the Liffey just above the Customs House, and thereby mars deliberately one of the noblest views in any European town. The other is a horrible erection, like old Vauxhall bridge in minia- ture, which is the main artery of traffic across the Liffey between north and south. The ironwork of this abomination is — or was up to the time of my last visit — hung with gigantic letters advertising pills and whisky. In these two bridges stands the proof that no matter what revival may have taken place in letters though the growth of the national spirit, little heed has been given so far to the creation or preserva- tion of beauty in the towns (or, for the matter of 54 VIEWS AND REVIEWS that, in the landscapes). But the existence of Charing Cross railway bridge makes it difficult for a Londoner to criticise this marring of the Liffey in Dublin. The most splendid monument of eighteenth- century Dublin is the Customs House, one of the celebrated buildings of the world, cited in all treatises on architecture. Here is the grey of Dublin wrought into an exquisite embodiment. The sculpture is charming in its graceful emblems, and especially taking to the eye are the great urns which mask some of the chimneys. Seen from a projecting corner of the quay, mirrored by zigzag reflections in the brown waters of the Liffey, or more dimly reproduced at low tide on the gleaming surface of the umber-coloured mud, this Customs House is quite worthy of Venice. It was designed by James Gandon, whose art may be seen in other eighteenth- century buildings of Dublin, notably in portions of the Parliament House (temporarily occupied by the Bank of Ireland). Gandon was an Englishman, and deserves to be commemorated in Dublin, together with an Irish peer, the Duke of Leinster, under whose viceroyalty so much that has proved lasting, useful, and stately was founded in Dublin. The “ Customs House as a name is no longer applicable to James Gandon’s building ; it is really the head- quarters of the Local Government Board of Ireland and of other administrative departments of that kingdom. It is therefore the more surprising that the Castle Government has made no conspicuous effort to abolish or modify the railway bridge on the west of the Customs House, or to induce the Municipality to clean up the dirty streets in its rear. HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 55 The docks which lie to the eastward of the Customs House are picturesque, but slightly sad to look at ; for they represent a vanished commerce. The tall, stately warehouses which surround each dock on three sides are — or were when I last saw them — mostly unused, and reminded me of some dead city by the Zuyder Zee. Here and there perhaps a sailing vessel of antique rig had been good-naturedly moored to the deserted quay, possibly to gratify the eye with a picture. Indeed, it occurred to me that if no better use could be found for them, these deserted docks might be kept up by the Science and Art Department in Dublin as a beauty spot, an interesting link with the past, furnished with brightly painted hulls and tall spars to illustrate the types of sailing ship that plied to and fro to Dublin before the days of steam. A mile or more up the Liffey, just within sight of the Customs House, is its sister beauty, the “ Four Courts ” building. This again would not be out of place in Venice or Florence. Like the Customs House, it is grey, with a tinge of blue about the roofing of the dome. Grey —I must repeat — is the colour of Dublin : the whitish -grey columns, porticoes, colonnades of the Bank of Ireland (the old — and perhaps the new — Parliament buildings), the blue-grey of the Four Courts, the grey of a gull’s back which is the tint of the Customs House, the greyish-white of the Liffey bridges, the grey cathedrals of Christ Church and St Patrick’s, the grey Post Office, the yellowish-grey buildings of Trinity College, the umber-grey of the Liffey waters and of the canals, docks, and tributary streams VIEWS AND REVIEWS 56 connected with it, the dirty grey of the stone-paved thoroughfares and pavements, the grey sky, and the grey-and-white seagulls that flip-flap, flip-flap above the bridges and the quays, that swim on the ponds in Stephen’s Green, and give the city a maritime air by their flight and their sad cries. The grey is as a whole pearly, and infinitely charm- ing to the eye in almost all phases of weather ; but a greyness has also got into the mental atmosphere of the city. Except for the hideous rattle of wheeled vehicles over the pitiless paving stones — a pavement which again reminds one of an Italian city — Dublin strikes the stranger as quiet and morne. There is none of the cheerful clamour of Belfast. People do not shout at one another in the street ; even the gigantic policemen direct the traffic or answer questions in low-cadenced voices. No music ever seems to be played, away from the precincts of the hidden Castle or the headquarters of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the far-distant bandstands of Phoenix Park. The city is noble of aspect, if sad — the sadness of a discrowned queen uncertain of her restoration to power. But it is orderly and clean, and less smelly than London, owing to the universal stone paving, on which at most a thin black mud collects after rain. Though this pavement gives off a great rumble of traffic, the increasing use of rubber tyres and motor vehicles is diminishing the noise of the broad streets, which are very seldom taken up for repairs, and consequently know little of those blocks to traffic which make London thoroughfares so trying to the patience. But for the mass of the people Dublin is dull, HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 57 sad, and quiet. The spasmodic gaieties and hidden pomp of that Castle, which is so concealed in a labyrinth of mean streets and blank walls that you would not know it existed if you read no guide- book, only reach a select circle of English and Irish officials. As far as nine-tenths of the citizens are concerned, the Viceregal Court is non-existent. The people have the most beautiful park to walk in which is possessed by any city, if they choose to make a journey from the heart of the town equivalent to the distance of Hampstead Heath from Charing Cross. They also have their St James’s and Green Parks in Stephen’s Green, with its water-fowl, its flower-beds, and velvet lawns. (This they owe, like the restoration of St Patrick’s Cathedral, the great and comely blocks of dwellings for the poor, which have taken the place of many a vanished slum, to the generosity of the patron saints of Dublin, the Guinness family.) In Phoenix Park — the name is a silly English corruption of Fion iscay “ beautiful water ” — there are the gardens and menageries of the far-famed Royal Irish Zoological Society, an institution of which Ireland may well be proud, as it has taught many things in the way of keeping and breeding wild animals to the other zoological gardens of the world. At Glasnevin — about as far from Dublin as Kew is from London — • there are Botanical Gardens of a beauty and complete- ness quite exceptional. Dublin has also a National Gallery of pictures, a Museum worthy of a first-class German town, and a Public Library which might be in Washington, U.S.A., so admirably adapted is it to all classes of students, so free from the restrictions, 58 VIEWS AND REVIEWS the capricious closings, the veiled, fretful tyranny of the British Museum library in London. Dublin, in short, is splendidly equipped for study ; but its amenities are almost exclusively of the daytime. It is not well provided with theatres or concerts. The cinematographic shows are beginning (I am told), as in all civilised towns, to amuse the people by moving pictures and silent dramas played in dumb show. But the necessities of our complex lives which seem to me to be missing most in Dublin are music and good food. Its hotels are comfortable and of late have attended to the reproach formerly levelled against them — the reproach of all Ireland outside Ulster — of not being scrupulously clean. There is little cause for complaint on this score now in Dublin, and in the chief tourist resorts in west and south Ireland ; but in Dublin and nearly every- where, except in Belfast, the cooking and the food are seldom completely good. Dublin may be better now than when I knew it well, a few years ago. Then one had to complain that it was very poorly supplied with restaurants, serving their customers with food of first-rate quality, cleanly and appetisingly cooked. I am thinking of quite simple food, not of elaborate French menus. Take one’s breakfast in the morning at the best hotels of Dublin : the plain boiled egg would be a shop egg of musty flavour and unknown age ; the bacon tasted queer ; the sausages were suspects ; the haddock probably tinned haddock ; and the milk not pure milk, so far as taste and look could define it. But of course in such matters the passing tourist fares badly. I have known Dublin under delightful HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 59 auspices, staying with friends in the handsome Georgian houses of the dignified squares, and enjoy- ing to the full the play of conversation between the great professors, the many intellectual lights, the witty and the learned who make Dublin their residence or the headquarters of their teaching ; but when I was there only as a tourist I dreaded those dull, dark evenings, for Dublin was formerly very ill-lit — no doubt it is better now — and there seemed to be little else to do after dinner but to go to bed. Perhaps this lack of gaiety — so strange in a town with the Italian look of having been built as a background to pageantry, carnivals, processions, music, colour, gallantry, and laughter — is part of the mourning in which the capital of Ireland has sat since her parliament was taken away and she possessed that sweet-bitter freedom of managing her own affairs, instead of having them managed mostly by personages imported from England and headed up by an often absent Viceroy. The Viceroy tends to be an absentee because he is nearly always an English or a Scottish peer with his home across the sea. The Secretary to the Viceregal government is never an Irishman, but almost invariably a native of England, to whom the prevailing faith of Ireland is antipathetic, her native language unknown, her past history, fauna, flora, soil, climate, requirements, such a complex puzzle that after a few months spent in feverish attempts to think out a Home Rule bill, he generally retires to a staid London existence in — let us say — Lexham Gardens (where wild nature is at most represented by an area cat pursuing smoky sparrows), 6o VIEWS AND REVIEWS and on account of his duties in the Westminster Parliament and the Downing Street Cabinet Council can give up to Ireland little more than a summer month or a Whitsuntide recess spent in the Secre- tary’s lodge in Phoenix Park. St George’s Channel and its rough seas are the chief difficulty in the way of an English adminis- tration of Ireland, and one of the surest salves of Irish discontent, and quickest ways of promoting fusion of ideas and ideals between English and Irish, would be — as I wrote ten years ago — to make a channel tunnel between the south-west coast of Scotland and the north-east coast of Ireland ; and run through trains from Euston to Dublin, Belfast, Cork, and that land of faerie, Achill Island : Achill Island, which ought to be the national park, the big game paradise of the British Islands. The great obstacle to a complete understanding and commercial and agricultural development of Ireland is that infernally uncomfortable sea-passage between the Welsh and the Irish coasts. The passage from Stranraer to Larne is shorter, but the steamers have to be small, and the crossing is often very rough, while there is the break of a night’s rest at embarkation and again at disembarkation. I am told there are two over- whelming difficulties in the way of this tunnel : Grim’s Dyke — a trough 600 feet deep in the narrow sea between Galloway and Carrickfergus 1 — and the fact that the gauge of the Irish railways is different 1 The length of such a tunnel would be about 20 miles. The length of a tunnel between Bardsey Island in West Wales and Arklow in Ireland would be about 38 miles : the depth of the sea-bottom here does not exceed 240 feet. This Bardsey-Arklow tunnel would con- nect Dublin and London by an almost straight route. HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE 61 from the English gauge. Neither of these facts seems to me a sufficient stopper to this tunnel when we remember that we have in Ireland a fertile, healthy island, with a good climate, romantically beautiful scenery, and an area of 32,531 square miles, which might, with proper investments of capital and labour, support a population of 1 5,000,000. A tunnel under St George’s Channel seems to me the only logical alternative to the granting to Ireland of a Prince of the Blood as perpetual Viceroy, and such degree of responsible home government as would be consistent with the interests of England and Scotland : at any rate a government of Ireland by resident Irish officials, and not by Englishmen hating the discomforts of the sea-passage, yet obliged to spend the greater part of the year in London. I am making no personal references in these remarks, which apply generally to all the viceroys and secretaries appointed to the government of Ireland for the last fifty years, since steam naviga- tion took the place of sailing vessels, and Dublin was brought within a day’s journey of London, yet retained in this transit sixty miles of possible sea- sickness, of cold, wet, and repellent discomfort. CHAPTER III THE PEOPLE AND THE LANGUAGE OF IRELAND The people who live in this island of bare mountains, bog, lake, moor, and meadow, came for the most part from the neighbouring island of Great Britain at one time or another ; and all belong to stocks which have contributed similarly to the existing population of England, Scotland, and Wales. It is true that ethnologists have suggested in addition a direct migration in Neolithic times or in the early age of metal from the shores of Spain to Ireland. It is not very easy to believe that the stormy seas of the Bay of Biscay could be crossed by the coracles or dug-out canoes which were probably all the means of navigation possessed by the Palaeolithic or Early Neolithic peoples. It is more likely that until the Mediterranean races invented ships of a size and shape permitting them to affront the rough sea waves without imminent danger of capsizing — ships, too, which could undertake long voyages because they were propelled by many oarsmen and by lateen sails — the invasion of Ireland from Spain did not occur on any considerable scale. Such an event may have been as late in human history as about a thousand years before the present era, long after 62 PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 63 Ireland had received a Neolithic civilisation from the direction of southern Scotland. The actual peopling of Ireland by man goes back far beyond that to a period of indefinite remoteness, possibly to the days — a hundred thousand years ago — when the Emerald Isle was a huge peninsula of Britain connected with Scotland by one isthmus and Wales by another : a large lake and a river flowing southward into the Atlantic partially separating the two countries. When the Atlantic waves ate their way through the slowly sinking lowlands which filled up so much of what is now the Irish Channel, the nearness of Ireland to Scotland between Galloway and Antrim was such that even men in a very barbarous Palaeolithic stage could cross over into Ireland by means of rude rafts such as the black Australians still use. The great attraction of the sister island in those days lay in its having become a hunter’s paradise. It was populated by immense numbers of the huge Megaceros deer (wrongly termed the Irish Elk, really an enormous fallow deer), by red deer, mammoths, reindeer, horses, hippopotami, and the fat and easily captured Great Auk. The first men who came to hunt and fish may, if the Sligo calvarium now in the British Museum is a fair indication, have been not unlike the Neanderthaloid Australian of the present day : dark-skinned, v/ith low, projecting brows, hairy, prognathous-faced, long- armed and short-legged : in fact, like the earliest Palaeolithic types of man in England. I have one or two photographs in my collection from outlying parts of the west of Ireland which show this type not very greatly changed after a 64 VIEWS AND REVIEWS hundred thousand years or so since it inhabited southern England. But there are also vestiges of another ancient race in the west and north-west of Ireland, besides here and there in Scotland. This has sometimes been called “ Eskimo,” because it has dark, deep-set eyes, high cheek-bones, and straight, thin nose ; but it might more correctly be styled “ Euramerican,” and indicate a human race intermediate between the Mongol and the Caucasian, at one time ranging through the whole northern world, from Ireland across northern Britain and all northern Europe and Asia to the Atlantic coast of America, becoming, in fact, with other blendings, the Amerindian of the New World. The resemblance between old Irish women and men of the peasant class in the islands and peninsulas of the northern half of Ireland on the one hand, and the Amerindians of western North America, and even the Eskimo, is most striking. Crossings between this ancient Mongoloid type and the still older Australoid of early Palaeolithic days gives the ugly, forbidding, semi-savage strain certainly to be met with in out-of-the-way districts (mainly in the west and north-west), but in reality rare. Some- how this wild-looking peasant was early singled out by the English invaders as being quite of another class to themselves, and became, no doubt, the original of the ferocious caricatures of Irishmen in the illustrated newspapers of the middle nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the Irish people in the mass are taller, better-looking than the English and Welsh, and handsomer than the Scots. But it is PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 65 not to be denied that Ireland is a very precious museum of human types, ancient and modern, far less perfectly blended than the folk in the larger island to the east. The principal strains which go to form the bulk of the Irish at the present day may be catalogued as (1) the Iberian, (2) the red-haired Kelt, (3) the fair-haired Scandinavian, and (4) the Anglo-Saxon (the English and Lowland Scotch). There are also the remains of fair-haired British or Belgian colonies dating from ancient times — say two thousand years ago — the descendants of whom are very like the flaxen-haired, dark-grey-eyed people of Holland and Flemish Belgium. The Iberian Irish have dark or black hair associated in the south and west of Ireland with brown eyes, but more often with eyes of beautiful grey or even blue, no doubt through intermixture with other races. They are the descendants probably of the Neolithic people coming from Spain or France thousands of years ago, who introduced into Ireland, as into Britain, a certain mastery over stone both as a building material and a substance from which perfected tools and weapons could be made ; probably also pottery, boat-building, agriculture, and more systematic methods of domesticating animals, rearing and training them for many uses. The Iberians probably conquered nearly all Ireland and absorbed or killed a proportion of the preceding savage races. Then, seven hundred years or so before the Christian era, came the Aryan Kelts, the vanguard of those Aryan conquerors of Europe, who with a knowledge of iron turned aside the bronze or copper weapons of the Mediterranean races and made them- 5 66 VIEWS AND REVIEWS selves masters of all Europe except northern Finland, northern Russia, and Spain beyond the Ebro. Some authorities have thought that these Kelts of the Goidelic branch,1 who may perhaps be identified with the tall, red-haired, raw-boned, freckled people in Ireland and Scotland and parts of England, invaded Ireland from northern Spain, afterwards crossing over from Ireland into Wales, Man, and Scotland, to which last country they bequeathed the name of one of their tribes, called by the Roman geographers, the Scoti. Others that the Goidels first invaded Britain coming from Belgium and France, and from Britain crossed over into Ireland, leaving, however, linguistic traces of their presence in English monu- ments, in Wales, and in Scotland. Of course, we know historically that the Scots of Ulster invaded Caledonian, Brythonic, Pictish Scotland in the fifth and sixth centuries, united later with the Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons, and made the regions north of the Tweed into a kingdom independent of Anglo- Saxon and Norman England, giving to the highland and western parts of that kingdom their Irish language, which in the form of Gaelic survives to this day. But the question of Gaelic being entirely due to the historical colonisation of Scotland by an Irish invasion (and similarly the Goidelic dialects which were spoken in Wales down to the seventh century a.c.) has been much disputed by ethnologists. There are indeed good grounds for believing that 1 It is scarcely necessary to explain that the Keltic-speaking people are divided into two branches : the /-Kelts (that use the consonant / in certain words), and the ^-Kelts (those that put q or kw, c, instead of/). The Goidelic or Gaelic Kelts are of the q branch ; the Brythonic or British belong to the/ group. PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 67 all the British Islands may have spoken Goidelic dialects (except where the non-Aryan languages lingered among the Irish and British Piets) at one time — say four hundred years before Christ ; and until the arrival from the continent of the Brythonic Kelts, whose conquest of Britain when the Romans came on the scene did not extend far into “ Caledonia ” or cover the south of Wales. The Goidels seem to have reached a certain degree of civilisation and wealth in Ireland (if indeed the Iberians had not done so before them) by the working of gold, in which Ireland was then very rich ; and a trade in gold was carried on with Spain across the sea, possibly in Spanish, Phoenician, or Greek vessels. But so far as the dim pre-history of Ireland can be spelt out, it seems more likely that its first Goidelic invasions took place from north-west Scotland rather than from Wales, for there is no indication of the original Goidelic Kelts having possessed sailing boats, or means of crossing the sea much superior to canoes and coracles. At a later date, before Caesar landed in south-east Britain to punish the Belgian tribes there for making common cause with the Gauls of Picardy, these Belgian British were settling here and there on the coast of Ireland and adding to the Aryan element in that distressful island, wherein racial struggles still continue. Though the Romans never reached Ireland, they influenced its culture development most considerably, though indirectly ; and amongst the Roman ideas which crossed St George’s Channel in the trading ships passing to and fro between Wales, Cumberland, and Ireland was, the new Christian faith, carried no 68 VIEWS AND REVIEWS doubt by British slaves, who, with dogs, cattle, glass beads and vessels, linen and weapons, were the trade products of the period. Christianity was known in Ireland before it was preached there by Succat Patricius (St Patrick), a native of British Dumbarton- shire, who, sold as a slave to the Piets of North Ireland, escaped, returned to Carlisle (where his father had settled), entered the British Church, and eventually became the Apostle of Ireland. Ireland then once again became more civilised than Britain, especially as the Roman culture of the larger island was drenched in blood by the invading Saxons. Irish missionaries converted Scotland and northern England to Christianity, and thence brought much of Germany within the fold of the Church, while Ireland itself became known as the Isle of Saints. Then came fresh barbarian invasion, which ulti- mately brought Ireland to utter ruin and led to the English conquest. The Scandinavians — blond Norse- men and darker-haired Danes — came with their ships and overthrew the Romano-Keltic civilisation. From the eighth century onwards they occupied all the ports of the Irish coast, and even followed the Irish monk-navigators to Iceland, and perhaps to the Azores. The Scandinavians have left a profound impression on the Irish population. Anyone who travels round the coasts and islands of Ireland, from Waterford in the south northwards to Mayo in the west, and who enters certain inland counties, such as Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Leitrim, must be struck with the Scandinavian appearance of the tall, blue- eyed, golden-haired people (actually called “ Danes,” I am told, by their darker-haired neighbours). These PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 69 types can be matched easily in Denmark, Norway, and southern Sweden. In the course of time these four principal elements in the Irish population — Palaeolithic, Iberian, red-haired Kelt, and blond Scandinavian — have crossed and recrossed with one another, despite bitter racial hatreds ; this mingling resulting in much the same mixed types as in England and Wales. Thus you have in Ireland, besides the remnants of the parent stocks, red-haired people with the projecting cheek-bones of the Mongol and the brown eyes of the Iberian ; others with the dark hair of the Mediterranean race combined with the tall stature of the Aryan Kelt. Some there are retaining the broad faces and low stature of the Eskimo, or the long arms, short legs, and negroid profile of the Galley Hill Man, yet possessing the yellow hair and blue eyes of superior races who came much later into the land ; or there may be seen individuals reproducing the red hair of the Goidelic Kelts together with the Moorish oval face and thick arched eyebrows of the Iberians. English administrators and soldiers have not lived in a land of beautiful women for eight hundred years without results. The Englishman had the same tendency to marry the fascinating Irishwoman and to adopt the wrongs and rights and accent of her race as have the Germans to marry Poles and become anti -Prussian in policy, or Americans from the Northern States to espouse both the persons and the prejudices of the Southern Creoles of French or Spanish blood. Ancient intermixture along the eastern seaboard 70 VIEWS AND REVIEWS of Ireland has produced certain types of face particularly characteristic of the English Pale. One is a stout, rubicund, blunt-featured person, with a thick, fleshy nose and long upper lip, together with a great tendency in the male to bushy whiskers — in short (except for the nose, which is too coarse and formless), a John Bull. Another very frequently seen visage in English-Ireland — Cork, Dublin, Waterford, Meath, and Kildare — is the “ weepy ” type, so-called from the watery blue eye, which seems always tinged with emotion, and is often red-rimmed, as though with tear-shedding. With the moist, prominent, pale-blue or green eyes and light eyelashes goes a large Wellingtonian nose, with a prominent red bump marking the end of the nasal bone. The lips are loose and slightly pendulous. The firm chin becomes in old age somewhat “ punchy.” The hands have prominent blue veins and long, bony, large-jointed fingers. The personal habit of the body tends to thinness (as contrasted with the coarse fleshiness of the John Bull type), and in the mental outlook these excellent “ weepy ” persons incline to sentimentality, especially if they are women. Of such are the martyrs in many of Ireland’s causes, or in the great struggles of the British world against disease, religious persecution, and the tyranny of custom. The lachrymose-looking Anglo-Irish are a type much more associated with Protestantism than with the Roman faith. They are inclined to severe teetotalism rather than stout (which is the beverage of the “ John Bull ” Irishman), or whisky (which is the bane of the Scandinavian and the Scot). Despite its often gaunt and uncomely PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 71 exterior, this weepy hybrid between English and Irish of the south-east of Ireland has furnished some of the greatest men in the nineteenth century to the professions, the churches, the literary world, and the State. It has crossed to America and come back to us in an ambassadorial capacity from the United States ; it has presided over Australian councils, and steadily, sweetly, persuasively fought the cause of woman in the long, thankless struggle which has been going on for sixty years to obtain for the female half of the community the same rights of citizenship as are granted to the male. In North-east Ireland there is the Scotch type of face, derived of course from Scotland, and in Scotland formed — it may be — from a pre-historic Germanic or Scandinavian invasion (the Caledonians) that interbred with the Keltic and Pictish, and the later- arriving Norwegian and Saxon elements. It scarcely needs to be pointed out that a large proportion of the Ulster population is descended from the Scottish settlers planted in Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The physical characteristics of these Irishmen of Down, Antrim, and Londonderry are a tall stature, an ungainly figure, a rough-hewn face with keen eyes, bushy eyebrows, and thin lips : a type which at once inspires respect by its moral worth, its taciturnity, steadfastness, and old-fashioned courtesy ; at the same time a race that takes its pleasures sadly and has little appreciation of beauty or tolerance of a different outlook in religion. Yet it is this stock which, more than any other, has made the prosperity of the United States. Through poverty, a certain inherent laziness, a 72 VIEWS AND REVIEWS mild climate, and a long deadened sense of the beauty of tidiness, it is not to be denied that the Irish are inclined to be slatternly in the way they dress and the lack of care they bestow on their appearance. The men among the peasantry in the agricultural districts wear any form of coat and trousers they can get hold of, second-hand ; they are as a rule most shabbily dressed, yet are often of such fine physique and have such agreeable faces that their rags pass muster as picturesque. Untidiness, indeed, is the worst of Irish vices, and dirt comes next. In the coast districts of the West the men’s costume is more pleasing to the eye. It consists generally of a fisherman’s jersey or jumper and loose trousers. The traditional costume of preposterous tall hat, dress coat with long tails, and knee breeches is not quite extinct yet. I have recently received from a correspondent a photograph of a very Neanderthaloid type thus clad, a type so wild that it should in all appropriateness have been clothed in untanned skins. In the country districts (and the smaller towns or villages) the women of the poorer or peasant classes wear no headgear but a kerchief or shawl. As a rule they are bareheaded, their often lovely but dirty faces framed by abundant, ill-kempt manes of hair. In the extreme West, however, the women are most picturesquely and neatly clad in tight-fitting bodices and ample but short skirts dyed crimson or purple. The old women of the Western peasantry, if they belong to the “Eskimo” type, are amusingly hideous, but frequently retain quite late in life beautiful and abundant hair. Though the men (and, sad to say, the women) in many parts of Ireland are over-much PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 73 given to alcohol, this abuse does not make itself apparent in. their faces by grotesque red noses ; it is exhibited in a more refined way by excessive pallor. At the same time the healthy, open-air life in a mild climate dissipates some of the ill effects of too much whisky, though it does not help them against the dyspepsia caused by their other principal poison -over-brewed tea. Of course I judge greatly as to the abuse of alcohol by the frequency — the disgusting frequency — of drunken people in Irish country towns on market days, in the streets and slums of Belfast and Dublin, at village festivals and wakes. I daresay they are not worse in this respect than the folk of Wales and South-west Scotland. [For drunkenness it is hard to beat the Welsh borderland — Brecon and Hay, for instance — on market days or occasions connected somehow with sheep, for in the principal hotels there one smells not only whisky, rum, and gin, but tallow and the disagreeable odour of huddled sheep.] But, except as regards parts of Donegal where the Irish race seems to be badly smitten with phthisis and nervous diseases, I am always compelled, after each succeeding visit, to sum up my impressions of the Irish as being an essentially healthy people, and I know that this impression on the eye is confirmed by official statistics. It is also evident that their present general well-being, their increased sturdiness is due to the effects of the Land Settlement Acts, and above all the work of the Congested Districts Board, and the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised efforts of the Department of Agriculture and Technical In- 74 VIEWS AND REVIEWS struction, which has gone far towards making a New Ireland. In the west of Donegal, in County Mayo (especially Achill Island), and in Connaught there are computed to be twenty thousand persons who only speak the Irish language and understand no English. In Achill Island I have had fair-haired Scandinavian- looking guides who could only convey their ideas in the Gaelic speech, and as my knowledge of that was just what I could read out from phrase books, and the spoken tongue differs more widely in pro- nunciation from the written version than does any other language in the world, I enjoyed the delightful sensation of feeling utterly a foreigner in a land governed from London. Indeed, in Achill Island generally, although only twenty hours from Euston, one feels transported back to the end of the Stone Age, and the hearing Irish spoken only enhanced the impression of the reversal of time ; for it is a language of Neolithic days, conceived when the westernmost Aryans, armed with iron weapons, first conquered, then inter-married with a dark-haired Iberian people, who in their turn had imposed a Mediterranean speech on the still earlier Mongoloids, Australoids, and Basques of Palaeolithic Ireland. In all Ireland there are now, out of a total population of 4,300,000, about 650,000 persons who can speak Irish, and of these all but 20,000 speak English as well or better. In Scotland the closely allied Gaelic dialect is still used by about 203,000 Highlanders and Islanders, 28,000 of whom know no other language. But Manx, which in some PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 75 respects is the most archaic and interesting of the Goidelic tongues, is verging on the status of a dead language. ' It is only now understood or gpoken by about 4000 persons in the western parts of Man, and in actual- use is much mixed with the Lancashire English. The Irish language would ere now have been declining steadily towards the same fate as Manx, had it not been for the zealous propaganda of the Gaelic League. This organisation was started in 1893 under the patronage of the Roman Catholic clergy, the Nationalist party, and a few Irishmen independ- ent of either political or religious associations, but interested in Keltic studies. Unhappily, their zeal seems to have been very little tempered by philological knowledge, and they approached the study of Irish from the same point of view as fifty years ago some worthy but ignorant missionary grappled with the realisation on paper of an African language, hampered in his rendering of its sounds and syntax by having no previous knowledge of any speech but English. I do not mean to say that the majority of the Gaelic Leaguers, being priests, did not know Latin, but they seem to have been unconscious of Comparative Aryan philology, and ignorant — for the most part — of the epoch-making studies on the Goidelic tongues by the German writers, Zeuss ( Grammatica Celtica ), Windisch, Zimmer, K. Meyer, and L. C. Stern, besides the Irishman, Whitley Stokes. Their aims were to revive the use of the Irish language, to encourage Irish poetry, and to create an Irish drama. In the first of these they have had some measure of success. Those who compile Irish statistics 7 6 VIEWS AND REVIEWS tell us that since the Gaelic League got to work, about 50,000 more persons can speak Irish to-day than were able to do so, say, in 1890. A good deal of so-called Irish poetry has been written in English since 1893 by members of the Gaelic League, who, with a characteristic Irish perversity — for it is, with all its grand qualities, the most perverse people under the sun — live in London and pretend to believe in fairies and banshees. They would also, in the years of their first enthusiasm, the dying nineteenth-century days of “ pose,” have liked you to infer that when they visited Ireland they lived in caves clothed only with their hair, using bone needles and chipped flints, and in every way being very archaic — and this as a protest against the excessive modernism of the London that bought their poems and quoted their poetry. The priestly members of the League in their hatred of modernism held up the seventh century and Monkish Ireland as the ideal time and the ideal life, and were perhaps a little more sensible than the archaic ones (who pretended to believe in fairies and were not even correct in their archaisms and ethnology), for the Leaguers who were Catholic clergymen have done much of late to set forth with accurate historical research the most wonderful period in the history of Ireland, when a kind of new birth of Christianity took place in that remote island, together with a renaissance of classical learning. But in the ten years which have elapsed since I first ventured to write on the subject of the Gaelic League, notable work has been accomplished by clerical and lay members alike, and if only more attention were given to the researches of modern PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 77 anthropology and philology in the books issued under the auspices of this League, one would feel it was rendering national services as great as those of the Board of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, or of Mr W. G. Wood-Martin, who wrote the Ancient Faiths of Ireland. Soon after getting to work, the Gaelic League persuaded the municipalities of Dublin, Limerick, Ennis, Galway, and no doubt other Irish towns to have the names of streets put up in the Irish language and characters. Generally the English version was given underneath ; but, if not, the stranger, not knowing how to read, and still more how to pronounce Irish,1 was in a quandary about find- ing his way. Now, personally, I much sympathise with this attempt to revive a language which goes back to the Neolithic period, and in any case am very fond of language studies and welcome the chance of learning any fresh form of human speech which is pressed on my notice. But there is one thing about the present state of the Irish language and the singularly perverse way in which it is being revived which I cannot stand (Welsh is similarly nonsensical). The spelling of English is illogical in the divorce between the written symbols and their present pro- nunciation ; but it is trifling in its inconsistencies, its redundant letters, and its tax on the memory compared with the spelling of Irish and Welsh. And in the case of Irish there is the superadded difficulty that a crabbed alphabet, a monkish corrup- tion from the Roman letters in the seventh century, is employed to render sounds which could be far 1 For example, Limerick is written in Irish, Limnaig. 78 VIEWS AND REVIEWS more easily expressed by the modern Italian char- acters in universal use among all civilised peoples except a dying- out section of the Germans, the Russians, and a few of the other more backward Slavs. This “ cussed ” Irish script, which is still protected by the Gaelic League in that policy of holy obscurantism lingering about the Leaguers (as though, half in rage against the horrid unsympathetic Saxon, they said, “ We don’t want to make our language easy to you or modern in any sense ”), has no claim to be sacrosanct by any far-stretching history behind it. One could sympathise with a very patriotic Copt who tried to revive the use of hieroglyphics, or a Gaelic Leaguer who wrote his Irish in the Ogam characters which really were of Keltic — British — origin 1 ; but the national alphabet adopted for the writing and printing of Irish is, as 1 have said before, only a crabbed way of transcribing the Roman letters (with perhaps a suggestion from the Greek and a symbol or two taken from the Anglo-Saxon or German), introduced by the monks in about the seventh or eighth century of the present era. There is no more reason for retaining it than there is for reviving the black letter in which English was printed in the reign of Henry VIII. It is ugly, clumsy, and indistinct. It cannot lend itself to all the effective variations of Italian type : “ Roman,” “ Italic,” “ Ruby,” and “ Pearl.” Its letters re- semble one another so closely in some cases that it is a severe tax on the eyesight to distinguish them : for instance, the f (p), p (p), r (p), and s (p) ; the b (t>) and d ("o) are so much alike that even practised 1 Probably derived from the Teutonic Runes in ultimate origin. PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 79 readers have to peer very closely at the page to be sure of their letter. Then, again, many consonants are completely altered by being “ aspirated ” (not that they are aspirated in the real meaning of the word), and this falsely styled “ aspiration ” is only marked by a dot above the letter, which is often blurred in printing. Yet t) (Bh), c (x), and aspir- ated D, F, G, M, S, and T are entirely different in pronunciation to the znzaspirated B, C, D, F, G, etc. Fh is a mere extravagance : it is never pronounced at all. Bh and Mh = English v or w ; Ch is the Greek x or Scotch Ch. Sh and Th are simply pro- nounced H ; Gh is pronounced in various ways or remains silent, but in no case has it any resemblance to a G, aspirated or unaspirated. Dh, however, is my special loathing. It has nothing whatever to do with D, and has no pronunciation of its own, merely a subtle power of corrupting all vowels anywhere near it. Then, again, the vowels and consonants are so unstable : for a nothing the S changes to sh or is silent. S, in fact, as a letter, is always ashamed of itself in Irish, and leaves the sentence for any one of three hundred reasons. D is mortally afraid of N, yet lords it over T. B is perpetually languishing as V, followed closely in this respect by M. If M can get hold of B, B is extinguished. F is a nincompoop, always wanting to be taken for H. G is the bully of the alphabet ; it upsets everything it touches, and the student shudders at its approach. Any vowel may be pronounced like any other vowel than itself ; no unaccented diphthong is sounded like a diphthong ; you take the trouble to write a triph- 8o VIEWS AND REVIEWS thong, to find it hardly worth pronouncing. What the Gaelic Leaguer loves is to write a triphthong, then put in a dh or a gh, then inscribe another triphthong, and finally to pronounce the whole seven letters as the simple i sound in “ ravine.” That is thought to be very classical. Of course the justification put forward for the use of this medieval alphabet is that its monstrous mis- spelling of the Irish tongue, though now as divorced from the form and pronunciation of the words as is Anglo-Saxon from nineteenth-century English, was once a faithful transcription of the language as it was spoken in the seventh century. I doubt this. I think the whole trouble arose from the cranky intelligences of the monkish scribes, who were resolved to give up the Ogam writing because of its Runic associations with sorcery, and yet had not the wit to make as good a use of the Latin alphabet for the translation of their sounds as the Anglo- Saxon had done. For instance, there were in Irish, as in many other Aryan tongues, short and obscure vowel sounds as well as long and broad. The monks adopted the plan (somewhat as the Greeks and some Italic peoples had done earlier) of rendering these by diphthongs, using, for example, an i after an a or an e to dilute (as it were) the long sound of the simple vowel. Nevertheless, the Monkish alphabet does in many cases represent an extended form of word which in the course of twelve hundred years has got worn down from three syllables to two or even one. And half unconsciously the Gaelic Leaguers and other Irish patrons of the Irish language are ashamed to have their mother- PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 81 country’s native speech shown in its miserably abbreviated, corrupted, modern form ; so they cling to the ancient spelling, yet enforce meticulously the modern pronunciation. Moreover, in their text-books there is not one Irish dialect but three, those of Ulster, Connaught, and Munster ; and so quarrelsome are they on the subject, that no one can succeed in having one or other of these selected as the standard. If they would only do this, and then, having fixed the standard pronunciation, have the entire language (and Gaelic and Manx likewise, mutatis mutandis) respelt to conform with it — re- written by a rational phonetic system like that of Lepsius’s Standard alphabet — there might be some chance for a revival of Irish on practical lines. But the present orthography is as unreasonable as that of such modern Greeks as would like to return to the spelling of classical times and yet continue the much altered pronunciation of Modern Greek in vogue at the present day. Or, to use a more effective parallel, the Gaelic Leaguers are acting as illogically as the French would do if they were to spell their language as it was written in the tenth century and yet apply to it the modern pronunciation of Paris. In case my diatribe should be thought exaggerated in tone, I will give here some examples of the divergence which exists between spelling and pronunciation in modern Irish. Let us begin with a passage from a back number of the Gaelic League’s Journal, An Claidheamh Soluis (a title pronounced An Kllv S&lwis). Here it is first in the crabbed Irish characters: — 6 82 VIEWS AND REVIEWS x\n UAtAm nA ^nAitiriAiS. Hi X)eACAM(K a nie^f ^up c|uiai*6 Ap pop-$Ae*6eAt An xz-Amm fin tiiAf t)o in At) nA x>o ctoifinc 5A11 cooc ’riA f^opnAC "j 5A11 T>eop T)o fiteAT). I next give the spelling rendered into Roman characters and the actual pronunciation of each word underneath 1 : — An tathair na Gramhnaigh. Ni deacair a mheas gur ’N tahir 6 grauni Nyidyakir a vaes gurr cruaidh ar fhior-Ghaedheal an t’ainm sin thuas do krui er ior yeol ’n ttaenyim shin huas ddo luadh na do chloisint gan tocht ’na sgdrnach agus gan lua no ddo xieshnt gan toxt na skornax ogos gan deor do shileadh. dor ddo hilyu. i Here are some instances of the lack of corre- spondence between spelling and pronunciation : — 1 Naturally in this and all other phonetic transcriptions I use a form of the Lepsius Standard alphabet with which most educated people are now acquainted, and which has long been in use by British Government departments (like the India Office), by mis- sionary and scientific societies in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. In this, the broad vowels have their Italian value ; the German o stands for the vowel sound of u in “ hurt,” a is the short sound of u in “ but,” o is the sound of o in “ store ” (vulgarly transcribed as aw), 6 represents the o in ubone,” se is a in “fat.” x is the Greek guttural sounded like the Scotch ch ; gh is the' modern Greek g, the Arabic ghain, or the r grass eye of the French ; d = the th in “ this,” and t = the th in “think.” In this last particular I follow the great writer on the Keltic peoples of Britain and Ireland, Sir John Rhys, who employs d to represent the dh in Wales. It is necessary to reserve dh and th to represent the aspirated dentals in many languages. PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 83 Maolmhuire pronounced Foghmhar „ Bliabhain „ Fearabhail ' „ Droichead-atha „ A Mhaire ! A Mhuire ! Mamhuirnin A Mathair Lamh Leabhar Taidhbhse Oidhche 5> 55 Mwilre (the proper name, Miles), fowar (autumn), blian (corn), farul (manly). Droida (Drogheda, the bridge of a ford). A Worre ! (O Mary !). A Wirra ! (O Blessed Mary ! the familiar “ Wirra Wirra ! ”). Mawurnin (O my darling! — Mavourneen). A woher (O mother). Lov (the hand). Luar (a book). Taivshe (a ghost). Ihye (night). Ban, a woman, is pronounced like the English word, van ; Mnd, of a woman, is pronounced Mro (0 = 0 in store) ; Mnaoi, to a woman, is pronounced Mn. Gaelic (the Irish language) is written gaedhilg, and pronounced “ Gwelig” or “ Gwolg.” An Irish- man is “ Gaedheal,” pronounced “ Gwel.” Then there are the difficulties over grammar, mainly manufactured by monkish scribes and modern grammarians. At the least there are five declensions, but you might count eight if you based them on the wholly unnecessary vagaries of the genitive. There are nineteen ways of forming the plural nominative. The genitive has literally uncounted juggleries ; I believe some thirty-four ways of form- ing it have been set forth by Irish grammarians. The article (an plur. na, but often pronounced ’# 84 VIEWS AND REVIEWS or o ) knows something to the disadvantage of many initial letters of nouns, which change colour and form at its approach. Prepositions have the same dread power over pronouns, and every preposition insists on shaping each one of the seven luckless pronouns to its own liking. If you leave out one preposition from your calculations it comes in like the overlooked bad fairy and spoils everything. Just imagine, if in English the pronoun “ us ” became “ bus, cuss, fuss, dussy, jus, hus, prus,” and so forth, according to each preposition that liked to interfere ! The brain reels before the Irish verb. I will not attempt an analysis : but anyone desirous of wrestling with intellectual puzzles should try the “ consuetudinal present ” and the “ consuetudinal past.” Irish must be learnt by ear, and with complete disregard of grammatical artificialities. It is a musical- sounding language, of no practical use ; a language of the latest Stone Age, supremely interesting to the philologist, because it enshrines in its structure remains of pre-Aryan tongues, mainly Iberian. In many points of its grammar, in fact, it offers remarkable resemblances to the Berber tongues of North Africa, in its phonology and a few of its roots to the Iberian language of Spain (possibly the Basque), which preceded the Latin dialects. It should be studied most carefully by scientific men, and there should be Chairs of the Keltic tongues at every University in Great Britain and Ireland ; but to revive it as a spoken and a practicable language is as wise as though the members of the Gaelic League insisted on their PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 85 wives reverting to bone needles while they them- selves used razors and table knives of chipped flint. Yet — as I have already written — it is a matter for shame and regret that the dominating English people, since the revival of learning in the fifteenth century, should have ignored the two Keltic languages1 remaining in these islands (Goidelic and Brythonic) represented by the Irish, Gaelic, and Manx dialects ; by Welsh and Cornish. They are as interesting as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and more so than Hebrew. In their syntax and vocabu- lary is locked up much cc pre-history,” a faintly sketched outline of the social conditions of Britain and Ireland from the end of the Stone Age to the coming of the Romans. By reason of this neglect Welsh has remained as transcribed uncouthly in Roman letters by medieval scholars, and its spelling — unlike that of English, which is constantly under- going revision — is practically unaltered since the days when the Anglo-Saxons were still ruling England and speaking an absolutely German language un- influenced by Norman French and the schoolmen’s Latin. Those who re-wrote the old British tongue after the Roman civilisation had completely vanished, employed the medieval Roman characters then in vogue in northern Europe, but used them in some- what of an Anglo-Saxon sense. This is how the w came into Welsh in place of the Latin u, and how 1 Queen Elizabeth was an honourable exception. Her order to translate the Bible into Welsh saved the old British language from passing out of the people’s speech. 86 VIEWS AND REVIEWS the y stood in old Welsh for a sound like the French or classical Greek u — a sound scarcely heard now in modern Wales. The / was and is pronounced as a v, and when a true f was wanted later on for foreign words, it was represented by ff, a symbol which of late has become extraordinarily fashionable among silly people who, to show their Welsh origin, insist on spelling their names with an initial and see to it that they appear in fashionable announcements as Mr or Mrs ffrench, ffoulkes, ffrangcon, fforest, etc. The gutturalised / (^1) was rendered by //, and the dh (d — English th in “ the ”) by dd. In course of time, especially after the Frenchification of the English language between 1066 and 1485, the spelling of Welsh came in our eyes to have a very frightful and deterrent aspect, with its y’s, w’s, ll’s, dd’s, IF s ; and to this day it keeps many inquirers at arm’s length and is an unfailing source of merriment in Punch and in Parliament. As a matter of fact, Welsh is not very difficult to pronounce and would soon be learnt by any intelligent person if it were spelt in a clear and logical manner by the Lepsius Standard alphabet, or, if you prefer it, by the orthography adopted by the India Office. But it really seems to me as though the Welsh wished to remain isolated from the Saxon and purposely kept up this frightful spelling, much as timid savages or the old-style Chinese soldiers donned ugly masks and alarming helmets. I have said that Welsh is not very difficult to pronounce : I should say “was not,” for of late years Welshmen seem to have been trying in how many catchy ways they could utter the #and they (as in the word ty, house). PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 87 One phase — at any rate in Anglesea — is almost unrenderable by any known letter and resembles the most difficult of the- Russian vowels, that which has been compared to “ the low bellow of a bull.” I see nothing to be proud of in such achievements, any more than there is merit in employing esoteric alphabets. The various normal sounds of the Welsh u and y can be transcribed with sufficient exactness by the letters z, <?, 0, and perhaps U. 1 would strongly urge the importance of appoint- ing a Royal Commission of linguistic experts to decide (1) what shall be the standard pronunciation of Welsh — whether the dialect of Gwinnedh, Powis, or Dinevor should prevail — and (2) the correct, modern, phonetic spelling of standard Welsh (which indeed ought no longer to be termed Welsh — a cant name of the Teuton for all strange people — but British 1). The findings of the Royal Commission should then be put in force in all Welsh schools and in all institutions outside Wales wherein the Imperial government had any control. And in the case of Welsh the best authority to control this investigation would be Sir John Rhys. Similar steps might be taken in regard to Gaelic and Irish. It would be an immense relief to all of us who love Scotland to be able to tell at a glance how to pronounce the four thousand or more Gaelic geographical names on the maps. Some form of Gaelic has been spoken in these islands continuously 1 The local name for the language is, of course, Cymry, pro- nounced Kamri. But the term Brythoneg (Brathoneg, or Britoneg) is also known. 88 VIEWS AND REVIEWS for something like two thousand six hundred years, and British for a period of time only four hundred years less, dating from about 200 b.c. A dialect of British is still spoken in the north-west corner of France, introduced there by refugees from Devon and Cornwall. With that exception the British Isles have the monopoly at the present day of the Keltic languages, which are amongst the most ancient forms of living Aryan speech. We should be proud of having in our midst a link with the past which goes back perhaps as far as the Swiss lake villages and the Iron civilisation of Hallstatt ; and interested to know that the preachers and farmers of Wales speak, in a not-greatly-altered form, the language in which Brennus flung his taunts at Infant Rome. A million people in Wales still use the language of our British ancestors as their mother-speech ; and for the study of this strangely interesting tongue classes should be formed at all our larger English colleges and schools, for it enshrines eight hundred years of early British history in its syntax and its words. An examination of Irish and British phon- ology, for example, throws much light on the origin of the pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon, English, French, and Spanish, especially so as regards Anglo- Saxon and early English. The Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Danes who invaded Britain borrowed very few words from the Kelts, but in course of time and by much intermarriage with the preceding peoples insensibly they acquired a Keltic pronunciation. They adopted from Keltic influence the d and t (dh and th), the change of a into 0 (aw), and the peculiar sound of u in “but,” the weakening of the PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE OF IRELAND 89 broad a into as (most characteristic of Anglo-Saxon 1 and of English down to the middle of the eighteenth century, when the broad Scandinavian a of the north came in again — contrast the father of the modern child with the father of a hundred years ago, the Londoner’s kas/> and the Irishman’s kassl for “ castle ”). In Welsh we see early in its develop- ment that peculiar diphthonging of the Latin S into oi (or wi ), so marked a feature in modern French ; and French was manufactured by Belgic Britons out of soldiers’ Latin. Again, the changes of sounds which occurred when Latin was transmuted into Spanish are singularly reminiscent in some cases of Irish, notably the development of mn into mr (Irish, Mna is pronounced mrO ; the Spaniards turned the Latin accusative hominem — homne — into homre, hombre). Nay, more, the phonology of Goidelic Irish not only recalls traits in the Iberian pronuncia- tion of Spain, but of the Berbers in North Africa. There, also, exists the tendency for a to displace the broad a. Modern North African Arabic has been quite infected by this change, which is very marked in Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, and is apparently due to Berber influence — an influence which in the Neolithic Age seems to have reached even to Ireland and West Britain. 1 In Anglo-Saxon it was very prominent, and represented in ancient spelling by ea, and in modern by a?, and pronounced like a in “fat,” “ cat,” “batter.” This sound was retained by the English of the United States of Ireland much more than in the Scottish and English modern speech. Thus an American still says “ faest ” for “fast,55 “maest 55 for “mast,55 and “ chasnce 55 for “chance55 : as do the Irish. CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY I GERMAN INFLUENCE ON EUROPE IN THE PAST An ethnologist passing in review the salient features of ancient and modern history is apt to ask himself whether the German-Gothic peoples have not been ever and again the regenerators of the civilised world. And a corollary to this question is another wider inquiry : is not the Teutonic type in its physical features and mentality closely akin to that original Aryan race with long heads, fair or red hair, and blue eyes which was evolved early in the Neolithic Age in eastern Europe or western Asia ? These Aryans spread out over Europe and Asia at the beginning of the Age of Metal and laid the foundations of nearly all existing European languages and of the dominant forms of speech in Armenia, Persia, and Hindostan, bringing also to these regions religions, myths, political, social, and scientific ideas, and — it may be — some of our domestic animals and cultivated trees. By “Teutonic” type is not meant the round-headed or Alpine, the broad-cheek-boned or Mongoloid people often seen in eastern and 90 THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 91 central Germany and northern Scandinavia, but the long-headed, blond Saxon, Frisian, Dane, Swede, Pomeranian, Swabian, and Bavarian. A convenient term for the pure Aryan type of Europe, in respect of its physical distinctness from other races, is Nordic ; since its birth and subsequent history seem to be so much connected with regions of Europe lying to the north of the domain occupied by another great branch of the White sub-species — the Iberian or Mediterranean man. The “ Alpine ” race, associated at one time with the speaking of non-German languages, would almost seem to be the outcome of early intermingling between the dark-haired Iberian and the fair-haired Aryan, modified by residence on the mountains, and perhaps not without a further infusion of Mongolian blood derived from the numerous prehistoric in- vasions of Europe by the round-headed, lank-haired, high-cheek-boned nomads of the Asiatic steppes. The pure Nordic race occupied about five thousand years ago a broad belt of territory (with perhaps some interruptions) stretching from south - west Russia to middle Sweden and southern Norway, and extending southwards to the Carpathians, the Elbe, the lower Rhine, and the Maas. The actual birthplace of the Aryans was probably in Russia, whence one great migration went west- ward through north-central Europe, and another — perhaps ten thousand years ago or even earlier — eastward to Turkestan. The Asiatic invasion was continued for centuries, until the antecedent popula- tions of the Caucasus, Persia, and northern India had been considerably “ Aryanised ” in regard to their 92 VIEWS AND REVIEWS languages, myths, religious beliefs, social economy, and even physical appearance ; though in this last respect it is very hard to find at the present day any examples of the pure Aryan type in Asia. The early conquests and colonisations of the Nordic Aryans in central and western Europe produced the Keltic group of languages, of which it has been said that they combined an Aryan vocabulary with a Berber grammar. The speakers of these Keltic tongues were sometimes purely Nordic in appearance, so that the Romans were unable to distinguish physically between Keltic Gauls and Teutonic Germans ; indeed, the very term “ German ” is said to be the name of Keltic tribes living on the north side of the Rhine.1 But other peoples, associated anciently with a Keltic speech in the upper Rhine valley, Bohemia, modern Austria, and Hungary, were of the Alpine composite type, with shorter stature, dark brown hair, and grey eyes. On the other hand, Kelts — Galatians — who migrated about two thousand years ago to Asia Minor were quite blond, and so were the Brythonic and perhaps the Goidelic Kelts that invaded Britain and Ireland. Other interminglings with the northern fringe of the Mediterranean and Armenian races produced the Slavs, a people of most mixed physical elements, some of them, like the earlier Kelts, being thoroughly Nordic in appearance (fair-haired, blue-eyed), others presenting in their facial features obvious traces of a Mongolian intermixture, and even of their being the 1 And even to have still older and more widespread connections as an Aryan tribal name, being connected with Krim (Crimea) Cara- mania, Kerman (in Persia), and other variants of K-r-m-n. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 93 residuum of peoples far more ancient than the Aryan development and difficult to classify by any other term than Neanderthaloid.1 The fact that not a few Germans of the north and east, like a good many Scottish and Irish folk, offer a very marked re- semblance in their physiognomy to North American Indians, probably arises from this cause : that before the development of the Aryan peoples — the per- fected type of White man — there was a mingling in Northern Europe and Northern Asia between the ancient, unspecialised Caucasian stock and that of the early Mongols (represented to-day in a modified form by the Eskimo). The amalgam produced was 1 This term implies resemblance if not affinity to the extinct species of Man {Homo ftrimigenius) typified by the calvarium of Neanderthal. A number of discoveries of human remains during the last hundred years in southern Germany and northern Austria- Hungary, as well as in Belgium, France, and Spain, have shown that there existed in Central and Western Europe, down to a period perhaps not more distant than thirty thousand years ago, a very remarkable form of human being, with a cranial capacity not only equal to the cerebral development in savage races to-day, but even on a par with the brains of some civilised peoples. Yet the form of the face and of the limb-bones indicates an affinity with anthropoid apes much more decided than anything which can be traced in any existing human race to-day, except amongst the Australoids of Australia. Although Homo ftrimigenius (I put on one side as foolish the unnecessary multiplication of specific names — heidelbergensis , kraftinensis , mousteriensis, etc.) was supplanted by a superior type of generalised Caucasian — a type which was in existence in Great Britain alone more than a hundred thousand years ago — it is improbable that the lowlier Neanderthaloid race was completely exterminated, but much more likely that its women were spared to become the wives of their conquerors. In a modified form Neanderthaloid Man survives in Australia and Ceylon ; and has left traces of his intermingling in the peoples of India, Northern Japan, and North Africa ; and even of Russia, Germany, Denmark, and France. The Neanderthaloid features of modern skulls in Denmark and Germany were pointed out many years ago by Huxley and others. 94 VIEWS AND REVIEWS evidently for its time a very potent race, and it seems to have ranged all round the northern regions of the habitable globe from Ireland eastwards across Bering’s Straits to Newfoundland. To return, however, to the consideration of the Nordic Aryans, who in later Neolithic times occupied so much of southern Scandinavia, western, northern and eastern Germany, Poland and western Russia. They were emphatically the Men of Iron — of “ blood and iron,” as one of the principal creators of modern Germany said in characterising his policy. They were amongst the tallest of human races, and they evolved (or they received from Asiatic experi- menters) the industry of iron-smelting and forging.1 1 This association of iron with the advent of the Nordic or Aryan tribes is in contradiction with theories held in some quarters and recently expounded, but I adhere to it nevertheless (following in the wake of English and German ethnologists) and believe it will ultimately prove to be correct. Iron appears in the remains of ancient Egypt about 2000 B.C., but this metal was never in great use till after the relations with Assyria in the seventh century B.C. So far as we can trace the history of the use of iron — and the indications prior to 1500 B.C. are very faint — it would seem to have been invented by the (extinct) Aryans of Turkestan and to have penetrated thence to the shores of the Black Sea, to Persia and Northern India, perhaps from 3000 B.C. onwards. The use of this metal was rapidly developed by the European Aryans, who introduced it into the Mediterranean world. It has been argued recently that iron was first worked in Negro Africa, whence the knowledge and use of it spread to Egypt. The process was (I believe) reversed. From the little we know of the archaeology of Negro Africa, that continent south of the Sahara was living in an age of stone and copper down to the beginning of the Christian era, when from Roman North Africa and Roman Egypt and Nubia the practice of smelting and manufacturing iron spread over Negro Africa, some parts of which, however, remained in an age of stone and wood until the nineteenth century. Curiously enough, just as iron seems to be associated with the expansion of the Aryan peoples and languages in Eurasia, so in Negro Africa it is closely connected THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 95 Armed with iron or steel swords, spears and arrow- heads, they descended on the Alpine, Iberian, Lydian, and iEgean peoples of Southern Europe with irresistible strength. It was iron against bronze, copper, and stone ; and iron won the day. Probably the Aryan conquest of Europe, Asia, and North Africa (for it is possible that prehistoric Aryans ^overran Spain, settled in the Atlas Moun- tains ; and passed from Sicily over into Tunisia) would have been far more complete, the Aryan type of man would have survived in a much purer form, had it not been for the effects of climate and the transmission of germ-diseases. The theory suggested within the last few years that the Greek and Roman Empires crumbled because of the dying out of the races which had founded them, and that this decima- tion of a superior people was caused by the spread of malarial fever (derived from the veins of the pre-existing negroid and Iberian stocks), is not wholly fantastic. The Nordic peoples are splendid colonisers, farmers, herdsmen, gardeners, soldiers, sailors, buf they are not persistent as townsmen, at least not for generation after generation in large centres of population. They want great spaces, pure air, plenty of elbow room. The evidence collected by Dr F. C. Shrubsall and others goes to show that the tall, blond, blue-eyed men and women die out with the similar migrations and linguistic conquests of the Bantu, Songhai, Hausa, and Mandingo negroes. From the reasearches made in the prehistoric burial ground at Hallstatt, in Upper Austria, by Baron von Sacken and others, it is concluded by Professor W. Ridgeway that the iron culture of German and Keltic Europe “ must have originated long before 1350 B.C.,” probably two thousand years before the Christian era. VIEWS AND REVIEWS 9 6 by degrees in the bigger English towns and give place to citizens not quite so tall, and with a marked nigrescence in eyes, hair, and even skin - colour. The tall, fair-haired type is far more susceptible to tuberculosis and other germ - diseases than are the shorter, darker races. When the Nordic peoples spread over the warmer parts of Europe and Asia, they were only able to preserve their physical superiority if they avoided too much interbreeding with the darker races, and if they could obtain in the regions of the south a mountain climate that not only reproduced the bracing cold of the north, but was unfavourable to the existence of germ-carrying insects. Thus we find Nordic types surviving in Afghanistan, in Northern Persia, in the Caucasus, and in the Atlas. These are the blond Berbers, the red or brown-haired, grey-eyed Afghans and Khorassanis, the “fair” Jews and Druses, for example. Prehistoric invasions of the Balkan Peninsula brought in the fair-haired, blue-eyed Greeks, the semi-barbarian conquerors of the Mukenaian and Mindan kingdoms. Tribes nearly allied to the Ancient Greeks diverged from them in Illyria, invaded the Italian Peninsula, and became the ancestors of the Sabines, Oscans, Latins, etc. The parent ancestral speech of the German tribes about four to five thousand years ago was probably closely approximated in syntax, and in the form and pronunciation of words, to the other progenitors of European Aryan languages, especially the Lithuanian, Slav, Greek, and Italic dialects. Keltic speech was perhaps a little more different owing to its absorption THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 97 of non- Aryan elements ; but if we can judge of prehistoric German from what its eastern sister, the Gothic language, was like as late as the fifth century a.c., we can, without too much straining of facts, say that the prehistoric Greeks, when they passed across Hungary into the mountainous regions of the Balkans, and equally the early Italic invaders of Italy, were simply another branch of the Teutonic peoples later in separation than the Kelts, with whom, however, both the Italic and the Hellenic tribes were much interwoven. The dark-haired, sallow Iberian, Ligurian, and Lydian-Etruscan peoples have left an ineffaceable impression on the physical type prevailing in Italy and Sicily, though they lost the use of their own non- Aryan languages and adopted various Italic dialects, of which Latin, Italian, and Sicilian are the only survivors. But even as late as the foundation of the Roman Empire the dominant physical type in Italy — the natural nobility, so to speak, of the country — was Nordic in body as well as in speech. Julius- Caesar has the facial lineaments of a Nordic Aryan, though he is said to have had “ black ” (i.e. brown) eyes. Very English or German in physiog- nomy were also most of the notabilities in the palmy days of Greece, to judge by their portrait-busts and the types of male and female beauty most in favour — as far south as Cyprus — in the periods when Greek art had become realistic and was released from the influence of an iEgean standard of beauty. And inasmuch as the Nordic type to-day is still the dominant one in Great Britain and Ireland, in Southern Scandinavia, Holland, and much of Ger- 7 98 VIEWS AND REVIEWS many, we understand why the “ Greek ” type appears so frequently amongst these peoples, as well as in Norman and Frankish France, German Switzerland, and North Italy. Pass through that superb gallery in the British Museum with the busts and statues of Roman emperors, empresses, and statesmen on either side, and, with a few exceptions (patently due to the fact that the in- dividual represented was a Spaniard, a Syrian, or an African), you will seem to see the sculptured representations of well-known English and Irish personalities of the present day.1 The gradual dying out of the superior Aryan type in Greece and Italy coincidently with (but not caused by) the introduction and spread of Chris- tianity, led to the slow decline of these regions as lands of dominant culture and administrative power. In came the barbarians (who were mostly only semi-barbarians, and three-fourths of them of Nordic race). After they had settled down in their new homes, the renaissance of Gaul, Italy, and the Byzantine Empire began, to be frustrated in the last-named area by the fatal invasions of Mongol and Turkish hordes. The north of Italy was largely repopulated by Germanic peoples, who, with the Scandinavian Normans, at a later date, were 1 Good examples of a fine modern type of Aryan face to be met with in England and America, as well as in Ireland and Germany, may be seen on pp. 4 and 6 of my book on the Negro in the New World. I am not arguing that perfect beauty, from an aesthetic point of view, is the prerogative of the pure Aryan ; on the contrary, it is probably in the cross between Aryan and Iberian that such a result is achieved, as may be seen in modern Greece, Italy, Albania, the Berbers of central Tunis, and the people of northern Spain. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 99 the real originators of the rebirth of Greek and Latin culture and of the arts and sciences. The ideal type of human being painted by the great North Italian artists during the twelfth, thirteenth, and two succeeding centuries, especially in women, was a Teutonic type of golden or flaxen hair and blue eyes. The saints and angels began to be once more of the ideal Aryan type reproduced in the art of classical Greece and Rome, and far more beautiful than the sallow, black-avised, much bedizened, oriental virgins, martyrs and seraphs of late Roman and Byzantine art. Many of the great names in the literature and art of the early Italian Renaissance were obviously German in origin. Dante was certainly of German descent on his father’s side ; his great-great-grandmother was an Aldighieri, a patronymic derived from the Teutonic Aldiger, and afterwards corrupted into Alighieri. One has only to pass in review the Christian and clan names of North Italy (more especially) during the period between 700 and 1500 a.c. to resolve most of them back into German elements ; and where the hero has sprung from the humbler classes the German type of name may persist to our own day, as in the case of Garibaldi (Gerbald). After the revival of classical learning, however, from the close of the fifteenth century onwards, many Italians really of German descent disguised that fact by assuming Greek or Roman names. The real vigour of France began with the invasion of the Franks, who gave their own German name — Francia, in its Latinised form — to the Romano-Keltic IOO VIEWS AND REVIEWS provinces of north-eastern Gaul. The Germanisa- tion of the Lyonnese, Narbonnese, and Aquitaine, of Brittany and Normandy was earlier and later carried out by Goths, Burgundians, and Norsemen. Goths and Germans turned the Roman-Keltic-Iberian Spain into a Teutonic empire, and contributed a large quota to the population of northern Spain and Portugal. Though they lost to the first Moorish invasion of 711 a.c. what they had won from the decaying Roman power in the fifth century, they were not, as rulers, entirely extirpated, and from the mountains of northern Spain in the course of centuries the Gothic kings — at first fair-haired and blue-eyed and with Teutonic names — slowly won back from Arabs and Berbers the whole of the Spanish peninsula, till Ferdinand of Castile (whose name meant in the old Teutonic speech “life-risk- ing ”) saw the last of the Moorish kings depart from Granada to Morocco — that Morocco wherein his far-off successor, with another Teutonic name — Alfonso (Hildefonso) — is striving to establish Spanish rule. Meantime, a French - Burgundian nobleman, Henric 1 de Besan9on, descended from the Frankish Dukes of Burgundy, had married an illegitimate daughter of the King of Castile and Leon, and had been invested by his father-in-law with the Countship of Portugal, a fief which, under his 1 This was probably the form of the name (derived from the old German Haimric, and meaning a home ruler”) which this great- grandson of a Capetian King of France introduced into the Spanish peninsula. It is interesting to note that his son, the first king of Portugal, was styled “ Affonso Henriques,” as who should say in Teutonic style “Alfonso of Henry.” THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY ioi son, Affonso, became the Kingdom of Portugal. This kingdom, from 1855 to 1910, was again ruled over by a dynasty (the Coburg-Braganza) emanating from a Teutonic prince. But in some respects the earliest and the most complete German colony was England ; and the settlement of England and eastern Scotland by Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, beginning in 449, ended in the seventeenth century by imposing on Great Britain and Ireland a population predominantly German in origin, character, and language. It has even been thought by some ethnologists — deriving the idea from Tacitus and from other suggestions in Roman descriptions of Scotland — that the Caledonians were of German or Scandinavian origin, and that the Teutonic invasion of Great Britain had begun before the Romans came there. Apart from the historical Norse and Danish settlements in Scotland, Ireland, Man, and England — settlements which have con- tributed a most important and valuable element to the Irish population — the Germanisation of all these countries — and additionally of Wales — was continued and intensified during the reigns of the Plantagenet kings by the importation of “ Flemings ” (really Hollanders and Frisians, for the most part), who were planted in East Anglia, on the Frith of Forth, in south Wales and in eastern Ireland, mainly for the purpose of introducing useful arts and manu- factures. The Frisians of course spoke a kind of continental Anglo-Saxon, which survives as a living language in Dutch and German Friesland to the present day ; whilst the Hollanders (one people with the Flemings farther south) were none other than 102 VIEWS AND REVIEWS modern Franks, descendants of those Franks who retained their Low German speech instead of adopt- ing the romance dialects of Gaul. When the term “ Fleming ” went out of use in England in the sixteenth century, it was succeeded by the word “ Dutch ” (Duitsch, Deutsch), which was at first applied to all the German peoples, High and Low, without distinction, but in the next century became restricted to the natives of the United Provinces of Holland, Friesland, and Zeeland. The Dutch were helped to gain their independence from the Spanish Empire by German princes of Nassau. A descendant of these, virtually the president of the Dutch republic, became King of England and Scotland, and conquered Ireland mainly with the aid of Dutch, German, and Danish troops. The Dutch persons of his household became im- portant members of the British nobility, and under the reign of William III. the English language adopted many Dutch words ; the English navy, English industries, commerce, architecture, and horticulture borrowed many excellent ideas from the painstaking Hollanders. The English King’s Stadhoudership of the United Provinces involved him in continental wars, with the German Holy Roman Empire as his ally. German troops were taken into British pay and rendered right good service in our foreign expeditions. For example, Gibraltar was captured by a German force under Prince George of Hessen-Darmstadt, with the support and co-operation of the British Navy. The accession to the Throne of the House of Hanover renewed the Germanisation of England and THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 103 of the British Empire generally. Under George I. the only standing army in England was a German force. Whenever Britain found herself henceforth engaged in foreign and colonial wars, German soldiers were recruited or subsidised to reinforce the very slender British Army, the bulk of which had to be kept at home till the middle of the eighteenth century to repress Jacobinism. There is scarcely one of our possessions beyond the seas acquired during the eighteenth century which has not at one time or another witnessed the landing of German troops in British pay. The part played by the brave German soldiers in the war which followed the rebellion of the United States is well known, and practically led to that German colonisation of the United States which has had such huge results — a quota of 13,000,000 in the United States population of to-day speaking German and being of German descent. So it was likewise in the Napoleonic wars, the Germanising of the British Army being facilitated by the union under one monarch of Hanover and Britain. There were German contingents in nearly every foreign war of importance down to the Crimean War, the last over-sea fight in which German troops took part as a portion of the British Army. Moreover, few of these contingents, when these wars were over, returned to Germany. Some of them settled down in England, their names by some slight change soon assuming an English sound ; others went out as colonists to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the West Indies. The marriage of Queen Victoria gave a fresh io4 VIEWS AND REVIEWS impetus to the Germanisation of Britain. Notable Germans were more or less directly brought to this country’s service by those far-seeing helpers of England, Leopold and Albert of Saxe-Coburg. They explored unknown lands for the British Empire, founded colleges of music and chemistry, schools and museums of art, studies in philology, ancient and modern ; improved both theatre and drama, extended horticulture, and assisted to make Kew Gardens and Herbarium what they are and have been to an empire in which economic botany is a matter of necessity, not a pretty luxury, as some of our home-bred statesmen have imagined. Glance through the eminent names which have become famous during the nineteenth century in British Colonial and Imperial history, in British exploration, biology, metallurgy, painting, music, journalism, banking, law-making and expounding, soldiering and seamanship, and note how many are of recent or immediate German extraction. For example : the Barings (including Lord Cromer), the Rothschilds, the Schusters, the Goschens, the Goldsmids (not forgetting that excellent engineer officer, and public servant in India and Persia, General Sir Frederic Goldsmid) ; Sir Julius Wernher, Alfred Beit, Sir Ernest Cassel, Sir Edgar Speyer, Baron von Schroder, Sir Felix Schwann ; Sir William Herschel (the astro- nomer) ; Lord Herschell (the Chancellor) ; Heinrich Barth, Adolf Overweg, Eduard Vogel (explorers of what is now Northern Nigeria) ; Ludwig Krapf (the discoverer of Mount Kenia), Johann Rebmann (the first to sight Kilimanjaro), Karl Mauch (the dis- coverer of Zimbabwe, and principal pioneer of THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 105 Rhodesia), Dr F. W. L. Leichardt of Australia — all great explorers, and all chiefly concerned in exploring regions which were or which became part of the British Empire ; W. Gifford Palgrave (the orientalist and diplomatist) ; Sigismund Koelle (Polyglotta Africana), W. I. Bleek (the Bantu languages), C. A. L. Reichardt (Fula language), J. F. SchSn (Hausa), Friedrich von Max Mailer (Aryan languages), all of them great philologists ; Sir William Siemens (the electrician), A. von Hofmann (the celebrated chemist in the middle nineteenth cen- tury), Frederick Seebohm (the ornithologist), H. F. Gadow and R. F. ScharfF of Cambridge and Dublin (well-known zoologists), Gustav Mann and Dr Otto Stapf (government botanists), Dr Albert Gunther (once Keeper of the British Museum Galleries of Natural History and a great authority on the classi- fication of fish), Sir William Schlich (Indian forestry), Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mailer (the explorer- botanist of Australia, who introduced to the notice of the world the therapeutic properties of the Eucalyptus globulus ), George Mailer (the orphanage- philanthropist of Bristol), Sir Julius Vogel (New Zealand statesman), Sir Hubert von Herkomer (painter), and Sir Edgar Boehm (sculptor), Sir H. Beerbohm Tree (actor), Prince Louis of Battenberg (admiral), Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, Sir Ernest Satow, Sir Maurice de Bunsen (ambassadors), and Sir Everard Im Thurn (the Americanist and Colonial Governor). The foregoing indeed are only a selection from a very long list. They are all persons of German origin (most of them born in Germany) who served 106 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Great Britain or her colonies in one way or another, either as members of her Government, employes of the Church Missionary Society, notabilities in the finance of London and Manchester, leading men in British science and scholarship, persons of distinc- tion in the diplomatic or colonial services, and in those arts and industries which have played a great part in the recent development of British wealth and influence. Of course, to such a list might be added a catalogue of the benefits conferred on Great Britain by the immigration of notable Frenchmen, especially the Huguenots and their descendants of the eighteenth century : and not a few Italians in England and Ireland, Greeks, Asiatic Jews, and even Armenians, have become noteworthy citizens of the United Kingdom. Part of the world-wide power and influence of these two islands in the Northern Atlantic arises from their inherent cosmo- politanism, their faculty for utilising alien talent. Nevertheless, I have little doubt that if the whole subject could be reduced to a mathematical formula, it would be found that Germans have done more than any other nationality on the Continent of Europe to assist their English brothers to found and maintain what is at present the foremost Empire in the whole world for population and wealth. Similarly, long after the Gothic, Frankish, and Burgundian invasions which turned Gaul into France, people of Teutonic race have continued to make France powerful at home and abroad, to infuse energy, uprightness, and industry into her peoples. The original Kingdom of France THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 107 became the ruler of Provence and Gascony largely through its Norman, Picard, and Lorrain soldiers. After the annexation to France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of all Alsace and Lorraine, we find German names becoming more and more prominent amongst the notabilities of France, especially in the army, the legislature, and finance. Some of the best of Napoleon’s marshals bore German names, , and in the war of 1870-1 the frequency of German names amongst the officers and men of the French Army was a source of great confusion to those who followed the progress of the war in newspapers. Subsequently even though France has lost these two provinces, she has retained many subjects with German names and speaking the German language, who preferred French citizenship to a home within the German Empire. Several thousand of these have established themselves in Algeria, where they have been amongst the best elements in the European settlement of that region, and where many of them still retain the use of the German tongue amongst themselves. Some of the most noteworthy feats in recent colonial achievements and African wars under the French flag have been carried out by men of German names. Equally remarkable is the Germanisation of Russia, which has been going on with occasional interruptions since the beginning of the eighteenth century, though, of course, a considerable substratum of the Russian people is of Teutonic type and is descended from ancient Gothic and German settle- ments. German colonies, now populous, have been 108 VIEWS AND REVIEWS planted by Russian emperors or empresses in the south-east of Russia. Prominent personages in the Russian diplomatic service, in the army and the navy, bear German names ; the Russian dynasty, like the royal families of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, the British Empire,1 Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, and Rumania, is mainly of Germanic origin. There is scarcely a member of these ruling houses which cannot speak German with complete fluency, and cannot call each other cousin in the strictest sense of the word. If the Duke of Orleans were to become King of France, or Prince Victor Napoleon be placed at the head of a French Empire, either of these personages would be found to be almost wholly Germanic in composition, so far as a preponderance of ancestors went. Of course, I include under the term Germanic the German family of the Habsburgs. Germany, in fact, has sent out her sons and daughters for many centuries to rule and settle the world, either as princes, or soldiers, mechanics, peasants, or men of science. She has been a most fruitful breeding-ground of peoples who in the course of history have quitted her shores or her frontiers in hundreds and thousands at a time to become English in Kelt-Iberian Britain, French and Burgundian in France, Lombards in Italy, Transylvanians in Hungary, and natives of the Baltic, Polish, Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, and Don 1 The sovereigns of the dynasty which has ruled over Great Britain and Ireland for nearly two hundred years have derived their origin from the royal or princely houses of the Rhenish Palatinate, of Brunswick, Hanover, Ansbach, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and Wurttemberg. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 109 Cossacks Provinces in Russia. Through the Habsburg union with Spain we find German sea-captains, artillerymen, mechanics, doctors, sur- veyors, and colonists proceeding again and again to the West Indies, the Philippines, the Spanish Main, and South America, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries ; and before and after these regions became republics there arrived many Germans to explore them for science,1 or settle in them as patient cultivators struggling — and finally with success — against all the seven devils of tropical nature — insects, floods, droughts, blights, lightning, hurricane, and germ-diseases. 1 The names of Alexander von Humboldt, J. B. von Spix, Carl von Martius, and Prince Max zu Neuwied will at once occur to the memory of an Americanist. CHAPTER V THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY II THE FOREIGN RELATIONS AND COLONIAL ASPIRATIONS OF MODERN GERMANY One result of this schwarmerei , this continual boiling over of the German pot in constant outpouring of German people, has been, since the third and fourth centuries of the present era, to leave great gaps in Germany itself, which have been filled up by Slavs, Mongols and Tatars, and by the immigration and multiplication of Jews since the ninth century a.c. ; so that at the present day in Central and Eastern Germany there is a considerable sprinkling, or there are solid blocks of non-Germanic peoples. In Posen, for example, the German-speaking population is in a minority, and this province is more discontented with its German nationality even than Frenchified Alsace- Lorraine. Yet the people of Posen are, without knowing it, largely Teutonic in blood. But more than a million of them speak a Slav language, and the sympathies of these Prussian Poles are with the Slavs and Lithuanians. Bohemia, once Keltic and German, is now Slav and German ; and so self- no THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY hi assertive is the Slavic element, that foreigners who do not know Bohemia are apt to think of it as a country with a uniform Chekh population of Slavic speech ; whereas more than one-third of the popula- tion of Bohemia is German in descent and language. Attention has been drawn recently to the Polish immigration into the industrial regions of Rhenish Prussia and Westphalia, but this is no menace to German unity, for physically many of these Poles are indistinguishable from the Nordic type of Teuton, and their children, born so far away from German or Russian Poland, nearly always grow up speaking German. Still, the German Empire cannot be regarded as absolutely homogeneous so long as it contains such considerable Slavonic elements, which for a long time to come will be a source of weakness and divided counsels, until the day when, under the Austrian as well as the German monarchies, Slavs agree to unite with the pre- ponderating German element in a common foreign policy, provided that in home matters they possess a reasonable measure of self-rule. There are something like 590,000 avowed Jews at the present day in the German Empire ; but the actual Jewish element in the population (chiefly in the towns) is, as in Holland and Belgium, far greater. During the nineteenth century quite 50 per cent, of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Belgian Jews (as also in France and Italy) quietly abandoned Judaism and became Christians, usually Roman Catholics. This change of religion, often effected by the children being brought up as Christians, opened to the still-disliked Israelite all I 12 VIEWS AND REVIEWS careers ; and, if there were money to back their aspirations, all alliances and social circles. Conse- quently in the town populations, on the stage, in the concert room, in the learned professions and the universities, the laboratories, the banks and shops, there recur, ever and again, that undying Aramaean profile, that melting Assyrian eye (or its less common alternative, the blue eye with the large pink cornea), those hirsute cheeks and full lips which reveal the fact that German towns [like London, Chatham, Rochester, Portsmouth, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, and Hull, like Amster- dam, Marseilles, and Lisbon, Salonika, Venice, Warsaw, and Odessa] are permeated through and through by that marvellous race, that com- pound of Mediterranean man, Armenian, Dravidian, Medic Aryan, and Elamite negroid, which was generated chiefly in Mesopotamia and western Persia ; and which, though for some undiscovered reason it inspires dislike among the Arabs and Berbers, and most of all among the Nordic Aryans, has brought into the European world and Neo- America music, an appreciation of beauty, a dexterity in manufacture, a suppleness of intellect, a skill of hand and eye, an eloquence of tongue, a genius for mathematics and finance which are all present in Germany in a high degree. Germany, like the British Empire and the United States, owes her great position in the modern world to the Jews in her midst, quite as much as to the fighting quality of her soldiers and sailors, and the steady industry of her artisans. Spain, on the other hand, has never yet recovered from her expulsion of the Jews : THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 1 13 Russia is fettered in finance and thwarted in her alliances by her hatred of the Israelite. The very exhaustion which overmuch emigration into surrounding countries — north, east, south, and west — had produced, made Germany an inarticulate power without national force for centuries. Such nationality as there was massed itself for a time under the Holy Roman Empire, which directed its efforts persistently towards the' Germanising of Italy, Hungary, and Croatia. In consequence of the states of Austria becoming the Emperor’s appanage and the deflecting of Austrian interest away from Germany proper, the power of Brandenburg-Prussia arose in the north and brought about a great cleavage in German nationality. In imitation of Brandenburg, all the other electoral divisions of the Holy Roman Empire aspired to become kingdoms, or at any rate independent grand duchies and principalities. This condition really lasted down to 1866, when Austria ceased — somewhat unnaturally — to be a part of the German Confederation (in 1806 the Holy Roman Empire had changed its name to “ Austrian ” ), and Prussia, after two victorious wars, definitely assumed that leadership in Germany which grew into the German Empire of 1870. It is almost amusing, in glancing through volumes of treaties and diplomatic negotiations prior to 1866, to see the number of independent sovereign states into which Germany was divided in her foreign as well as in her home affairs. If the Kingdom of Hanover or some minute Saxon or Thuringian duchy wished to make maps of its territory, it was most careful in its surveys to ignore completely the intervening or 8 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 114 intrusive lands belonging to some other German Power. In the conclusion of any European conven- tion or bargain which required the adhesion of other States besides the six great Powers, there would be the signatures of the plenipotentiaries of some twenty-five different German States, each appending his signature by the authorisation “ of his august master.” So long as this condition of affairs prevailed, any idea of German colonies or possessions beyond the seas under a comprehensively German flag was out of the question. Austria had attempted fitfully to create an East India Company in the eighteenth century, but with a complete lack of sea-power had found the project impossible. Brandenburg, before it became Prussia, had tried to obtain a foothold on the west coast of Africa, and Frederick the Great founded a Prussian company (the Bengalische Handelsgesell- schaft), trading from Emden (Ost Friesland) to the East Indies, but for the same reason had found such projects unsustainable. In the middle of the fifties of the nineteenth century the idea began to arise in the minds of a few Prussian explorers or persons interested in over-sea trade, that Prussia might become a colonising nation. But these aspirations were not expressed with any coherency or backed by any intention until the following decade, when Baron von der Decken, a Hanoverian explorer, had at his own expense conducted an important scientific expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro, the loftiest of the African Snow Mountains, which had been discovered in 1854 by the two Wtlrttemberg missionaries, Krapf and Rebmann. Von der Decken was greatly struck THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 115 with the possibility of founding a Prussian East African Empire in the Zanzibar territories, and there is no doubt that he originated a notion which has since borne fruit. The Prussian Government in 1869 seems to have had some vague intention of African enterprise when it despatched Dr Nachtigal to the Sheikh of Bornu in the Central Sudan with presents and a letter of thank's for the kindness shown to German travellers attached to the British expeditions of the fifties. But for some reason, after the definite founding of the German Empire in 1870-1, when at last a single flag1 covered all the foreign relations of Germany, no immediate attempts were made in the direction of colonial enterprise ; even, in fact, the projects of traders and journalists in that direction were somewhat snubbed. Yet all the time between 1871 and 1883 German commercial interests were being rapidly developed in the Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of Africa, at Zanzibar, in South Africa, and in the West Indies. Between 1882 and 1884 a number of adventurers were visiting little known coasts or islands of the tropical world, or passing beyond coast barriers into unknown Africa, and feeling their way towards the creation of German colonies by treaties with native chiefs. At this period it had been tacitly assumed by the British Government that all parts of the world which did not belong to recognised European and Asiatic Powers were possible future possessions of the British Empire. At the same time, the expense of 1 It was in 1868 that the black, white, and red flag was adopted for the shipping of the North German Confederation. VIEWS AND REVIEWS 1 16 seizing or acquiring, and afterwards administering and defending savage lands, was fully realised, and in the desire to avoid outlay in this direction, which perhaps would not be permitted by the British Treasury or Parliament, it was thought preferable that there should be no hoisting of the British flag over all the islands or coasts in proximity to a British colony. The emptiness or the native inde- pendence of such quite suited our purpose, so long as it was not interfered with by other European or Asiatic Powers. Thus, though we were actually invited by the native chiefs to take over Damara- land and add it to British South Africa, we declined. Similarly, we cancelled the Queensland annexation of New Guinea and made no attempts to unite our scattered colonies in West Africa, or to give a more definite shape to the consular control which we exercised over the Lower Niger. We really ruled through our agent at Zanzibar all the east coast of Africa which was not Portuguese, and we regarded all the Pacific Islands not taken by the French in the spasm of colony-making which distinguished the reign of Louis Philippe as potentially British, and quite sufficiently governed by the visits of men- of-war and the establishment of missionaries. Therefore, when this placid contentment of the early eighties was rudely broken by the hoisting of the German flag at the Cameroons, on the South- west African coast, in the hinterland of Zanzibar, on the north-east coast of New Guinea, and in Micronesia, we were thrown into a frenzy of jealous anger. The rivalry of France in colonial matters we had been accustomed to for centuries, and the THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 117 sea-power gained during the Napoleonic wars had enabled us to take from France and Holland all the more covetable amongst their over-sea possessions. We feared the advance of Russia in Asia and shaped our foreign policy to meet it, but that it could ever be Germany which might not only contest with us the supremacy of the seas, but aspire to rank with us as an African and an Asiatic power, was scarcely conceived by any politician at home, and was only thought of by one or two British diplomatists abroad. This colonial expansion of the new German Empire was followed by an immense development of the German mercantile marine, so that whereas prior to 1870 the steamers bound for foreign parts under German flags (chiefly from Hamburg and Bremen) had probably a gross tonnage of only 85,000, in 1910 this had risen to a total of 2,200,000 tons, and the German mercantile marine had become the third in the world, only the British Empire and the United States being ahead — and still very much ahead. Then, although Germany in her new colonies upheld the principle of free trade and low customs duties, in Germany itself the policy of protection came into force in 1879. Whatever may have been the ultimate results of such a policy, the immediate effects were to create and sustain German industries to an extent which not only enabled Germany to manufacture many things that she had hitherto bought from Britain, but to flood Great Britain, British Crown Colonies and Protec- torates and India with goods which competed closely with our home manufactures, because they were cheaper and yet not always inferior in quality. For VIEWS AND REVIEWS 1 1 8 a time it was thought this influx might be stemmed by stigmatising the goods with a mark “ made in Germany,” but this soon ceased to be a disadvantage. No one is deterred now from purchasing things proclaimed as of German origin by the thought that they will be inferior in quality or make, as compared with the home-made article. Tawdry, shoddy, adulterated, and ill-finished some of these German manufactured goods may have been in the early days when Germany was trying her ’prentice hand, but they soon came up to the sound British standard : nay, in some ways surpassed our occa- sionally old-fashioned wares. Herein came into play another factor : the splendid, practical education which Germany, like Scotland, had been imparting for three-quarters of a century to her industrious people ; all the time that in England and Ireland the clergy of all denominations, the squirearchy, the ladies-bountiful, the municipalities, the Sabbatarians were striving to stifle, thwart, block, and misdirect the education of the masses — ah, and of the classes too. Protection and a fine technical education at home enabled Germany to rival us with her industrial products in our home markets and abroad. As we are the exporters or the transmitters of enormous quantities of raw products, and as we still manu- facture some things better than the Germans are able to do — for climatic reasons, amongst others, as in the case of cotton goods — British export trade to Germany has still held its own, and at present stands at about an annual value of £37,000,000/ 1 This is for the United Kingdom only : the total value of goods from the British Empire imported into Germany in 1910 was about THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 119 while we have not scorned to learn from German methods and processes, and by waking up in regard to technical education can now beat Germany some- times in her own field or actually drive her out of foreign markets where, from one fair cause or another, we possess some local advantage. Never- theless the trade rivalry which began to make itself felt after 1880 added spleen to the vexation caused by rivalry in steamship lines, in colony building and protectorate founding. For a long while our people writhed under the inability to fight Germany with her own weapons, to put import duties on German goods equivalent to the protective duties which the German tariff imposed since 1879 on British goods. Many politicians and writers forgot the different geographical and economic conditions of the two countries. We must import food and raw materials cheaply, and cannot grow such things in sufficient quantities on our limited home soil. Germany is a large country and to a certain extent is able to grow a good many things at home which we must import. Moreover, she had industries to create, and we had them already created when this rivalry began. Yet all these factors combined to arouse an inimical feeling on the part of the British people towards Germany from 1884 onwards — chiefly over colonial expansion — a feeling which was appeased by the East African pact of 1890, yet quickened again ^47,000,000. The value of our United Kingdom imports from Germany during 1910 was ^62,000,000, in round figures, making a total trade of ^99,000,000. Our total trade with British India during the same period was ^89,000,000. 120 VIEWS AND REVIEWS by the Jameson raid and the Emperor’s telegram of 1895-6. Since then a British dislike of Germany has been matched by a growing anger in Germany against Great Britain. The conclusion of the South African war, if not commensurate with the desires of the Jingo party in Britain, at any rate founded a united South African nation and left no room or possibility for a great colony dependent on Germany: in fact, German South-west Africa became henceforth as much a menaced possession as Spanish Florida was after the foundation of the United States. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, the success of the Japanese, the need for Russia to come to terms with Britain in Asia, the consequent drawing together of France and the United Kingdom, and finally the parcelling out of the weak, disorderly, barbarous parts of the world into spheres of Russian, Japanese, French, British, Belgian, Italian, United States’ influence somehow left the German Empire and its Austrian ally a little side-tracked. Watchers in these countries saw the world narrowing into a few great empires and con- federations which might in their tariffs differentiate against Austro-German commerce,1 or at any rate deprive it of great opportunities presented by the development of new lands. Yet more than ever Germany was in need of an outlet for her enormously developed industries. She wanted — as also Austria — lands in which vast quantities of raw products could be found or grown 1 For some time past Germany has felt it to be a growing grievance that when France takes possession of a country (Mada- gascar, Tunis, Algeria, Indo-China, etc.), she at once tries to shut out foreign commerce by a tariff or other conditions specially favouring French goods. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 12 1 — especially cotton, iron, and coal — and to which manufactures could be sent. And, further, there was that vaguely defined desire which comes to all successful peoples — the wish to extend the home empire over other kingdoms, to subjugate, control, educate other peoples. Where could Germany look to found such an empire if she did not strike soon ? All North Africa would soon be Spanish, French, Italian, and British ; Northern Asia was Russia’s ; Southern Asia was the appanage of Britain, France, and Holland ; the Americas were forbidden to Germany by the United States ; the best parts of Tropical Africa belonged to someone else. And in all this it seemed to Germany that more than any other obstacle the veto of England lay across her path (her vision was distorted, but her guess was mainly right) : England who at conferences and by treaties and understandings was willing to agree to Belgium, the United States, Spain, France, Russia, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria getting, annexing, occupying something, but never Germany or Austria, except with a tremendous outcry and veiled threats of war. At one time it seemed that the only sphere of operations left open to Austria and Germany was the Nearer East, the Turkish Empire. The first feint made in this direction was the Baghdad Railway, but this enterprise was crippled in 1904 by the refusal of France and England to agree to those modifications of the Turkish customs’ tariff which would enable money to be raised for the subsidising of such an expensive work ; and later in 1910-11 by British opposition to German-Turkish control of the 122 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Persian Gulf outlet of this line — in other words, to the eventual extension of German influence to the western end of the Persian Gulf. Germany is still very poor in capital. She cannot, like Britain, France, or the United States, finance great operations outside her own country with her people’s own funds. There are various ways in which France, and in a lesser degree Britain, might facilitate the obtaining of money by Germany for developing the Turkish Empire, and some of these ways lie in Turkey itself, over the home finance of which Britain and France are able to exercise enormous influence through their connection with the Turkish debt and the Imperial Ottoman Bank. They will not let Germany into these concerns ; France because she is very jealous of maintaining French influence in the Levant (Smyrna and Syria), and still more wants to make things as difficult as possible for Germany so long as Germany withholds from her some satisfaction in regard to Alsace-Lorraine ; Britain because she has very large commercial interests in the Turkish Empire (or thinks she has) which she is loath to give up. In fact, to the almost morbid imagination of Germany it would seem as if Britain and France contrived to gird her and Austria about with a ring of Scandinavian, Latin, and Slav nations, and by putting her in a financial strait-waistcoat, to prevent her expansion in any direction not pleasing to them. It is sometimes hinted that in this policy the two great Western Powers not only have all the support that Russia can give them, but have even engaged the sympathies of Hungary. Indeed, I have been told in Germany that the Hungarian obstacle — from THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 123 the Adriatic to the frontiers of Rumania — in the way of an overland Drang nach Osten was such a serious one that Germany must approach Asia Minor by a sea route. This, again, could only be by favour of the Western Powers, so long as the Germans were not supreme on the sea and had no foothold on the coast of Morocco which might force the Straits of Gibraltar, or — to follow quite another line of advance — no possession of Trieste and Corfu by arrangement with Austria and Greece. Some German visionaries have thought that the dream of the Near East should be abandoned, and that the best outlet for German energy lay in North Africa. German explorers had figured very pro- minently in the exploration of Tripoli, southern Tunis, and, above all, Morocco. It was known that the Turkish hold over the Tripoli taine was very slight, and might be made use of at any time either by the substitution of an Austro-German concessionaire company or by some more direct form of German control. The French position in Algeria was not without its flaws and weak- nesses. If only Germany could get a foothold in Morocco — such a share as had been proposed to her by Mr Chamberlain in 1899 — from such a base as this she might shoulder France out of North Africa and lay the foundations of the German over- seas empire in Mauretania, with an eventual extension over Senegambia and French Nigeria. Stranger things had happened than that in the coups de foudre and coups d'audace which had built up the British dominions across the seas. But in thus marking out for herself an Atlantic 124 VIEWS AND REVIEWS future in preference to a Levantine Empire, Germany was coming into a sharper antagonism with Britain than ever before : a German establishment on the Atlantic coast of Morocco in conjunction with the German hold over the North Sea coasts might crush the British naval power in home waters between two fulcra ; the German establishment on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa might threaten the Mediterranean route to India and the Far East and undermine the British control over Egypt. It is, of course, often denied that Germany had any intention whatever of seeking a territorial foot- hold in North Africa, and that the Emperor’s visit to Tangiers in 1905 and the despatch of the gun- boat to Agadir in 1 9 1 1 were only protests against the threatened absorption of a new trading area into the protectionist circle of French possessions without any compensation or any negotiation with Germany. Also, that the Agadir demonstration was made more with the view of forcing France into an arrangement regarding the French, and possibly the Belgian Congo, which would give Germany some chance of finding in the creation of a vast central African empire consolation for her many disappointments and frustrations else- where. Personally, I think German diplomacy did believe there was a chance of getting a port — Mogador — in Southern Morocco, and that before a resolute attitude France, in order to have nearly all the rest of Morocco and to avoid a war with Germany, would give way. The absolute determina- tion of the French, in what for them was a life-and- death issue, not to tolerate the presence of any THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 125 other European Power in Morocco (besides the inevitable participation of Spain), and the equal determination of Great Britain to stand by France in such a contingency as a war forced on her by Germany, upset the calculations of the German Foreign Office,1 and a revirement of policy took place. The Congo question was taken up instead, and Germany, though she got very little in actual cession of territory, ear-marked the Congo, as it were, for future operations. Amongst German thinkers of geographical knowledge it has always been a grievance that Germany, whose noteworthy explorers — Pogge, Bttchner, Boehm, Reichard, von Wissmann, WolfF — revealed in a series of wonderful journeys so much of the southern half of the Congo basin, should have come out of the Berlin Conference of 1884 with not a particle of Congo territory. Neither did we, although Stanley was a British subject, together with Livingstone, Grenfell, Cameron, Thomson, Grandy, and Tuckey. But Great Britain, though she lost to that astute fox, Leopold of Belgium, the richest domain of all tropical Africa, emerged from the Conference with 1 The atmosphere of the Imperial Foreign Office in Berlin is too Prussian, too much out of touch with maritime affairs and the world beyond Germany. You could still find in Berlin a German preferring to evolve a camel out of his inner consciousness in preference to obtaining a report on camels and their ways from an expert like Carl Hagenbeck. You do not, however, to-day find this class of mind in Hamburg, Lubeck, Bremen, Cologne, Stuttgart, and Munich. The best foreign and colonial minister whom modern Germany has possessed has been the Emperor William II. himself. Otherwise the regrettable blunders and mistakes of the Imperial Foreign Office have been due to the almost exclusively Prussian nationality of its officials. 126 VIEWS AND REVIEWS the protectorate of the eastern Niger. Germany now caresses the idea, if not of supplanting Belgium, at any rate of replacing in northern and western Congoland both France and Portugal by purchasing the Portuguese possessions north of Ambriz and obtaining from France the cession of the Gaboon, French Congo, and access to the Mubangi river of Northern Congoland. It is known to be probable that France might be willing to surrender these far-away appanages of her great Sudanese empire in return for some rectification of her eastern frontier, to which I shall allude later. As to the Belgian Congo, it is now considered in German commercial circles that if the old Leopoldian concessionaire and privileged regime is completely done away with and the whole Congo basin is as much open to German enterprise and commerce as it is to the subjects of any power, including Belgium herself, there would be no reason to impinge on Belgian political rights in that direction ; but if there were any weakening of the Belgian hold over these regions, then Germany would be a most eager claimant for the reversion of nearly all the former Congo Independent State, only taking into consideration British claims to the districts alluded to by Sir Edward Grey as being in contiguity with existing British possessions. In 1898 the British and German Governments are credibly reported to have concluded an arrange- ment for the devolution of the Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia in case Portugal found herself obliged to part with them. And in such case it has been said that Germany would claim Angola THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 127 down to the present German frontier of the Kunene-Zambezi rivers, and the province of Mofambique proper, from the Ruvuma River and Lake Nyasa to Quelimane and the Zambezi Delta. But since those days of 1898 the relations between Britain and Portugal have changed, and assurances have been given to the smaller Power that no policy of enforced liquidation of the Portuguese Empire beyond the seas would receive encouragement from Great Britain. On the strength of such assurances a good deal of British capital has been invested in railway projects in Angola, more especially that of connecting the mining regions of southern Congoland with the Atlantic at Lobito Bay near Benguela. Portugal, moreover, since she has become a republic, has announced most firmly her intention not to part with a square mile of her dominions in Africa or Asia. Such pride, however, may be of the false species. Without any derogation of national honour or efficiency, Portugal might find it convenient to sell to France, Germany, and the British Empire portions of her colonial domain — such as Portuguese Guinea, Congo, Zambezia, the coast- lands south of the Zambezi, and the northern- most province of Moyambique (Ibo) — and still remain with 500,000 square miles in Africa, Asia, and Australasia. If she adopted such a course as this the creation of a compact empire over the western and north-western Congo and the enlarge- ment of German East Africa might become possible and German territorial ambitions be allayed in Africa. 128 VIEWS AND REVIEWS In regard to Oceania, Germany would have liked to increase her holding of Pacific islands (in view of the opening of the Panama Canal) by acquiring any that France was willing to part with. But here she has been# rebuffed. As to the Dutch East Indies, she has no more intention of inter- fering with them than with Holland herself so long as they maintain Free Trade and are ruled by the Dutch. German capital is yearly penetrating more and more the Dutch Indies : so also, it must be observed, is British capital. There is no reason why this pleasant state of affairs should be spoilt by aggression from either Berlin or London, any more than that Germany should interfere with the independence of the Netherlands, provided she is assured that Great Britain has no intention of making use of Holland as a base from which to attack Germany. No considerations but those of national safety could excuse the German Empire for incorporating the Dutch kingdom, but this attitude of respect would at once disappear if there were any danger of the Netherlands joining Belgium, and thus coming within the powerful attraction of the Anglo-French Entente — for towards that grouping Belgium and Luxemburg are both tending by the very force of circumstances. At the present day the sympathies of Holland are divided. The court and the present ministry (together with many other politicians) are Germano- phil ; the merchants, professional classes, and sea- faring folk are increasingly “ English ” in sympathies. In no European country outside Britain is English so widely known as in Holland, our language THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 129 having made great strides in popular use and favour during the last twenty years. Complete amity between the German and the British Empires may lead to the Netherlands becoming a sort of neutral ground for the two peoples to meet in, a trait d' union rather than a bulwark or an outpost. Here, then, we have sketched out, as definitely as such vague aspirations can be put into words at the present time, the ambitions' of the German people in regard to “colonial” expansion: (1) a free hand for Austria in the Balkans and for Germany in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia ; (2) a slice of Morocco, and perhaps the Cyrenaica — in other words, a share of North Africa — projects more or less annulled by the recent agreement with France and the forcible annexation by Italy of the Tripolitaine ; (3) a great African Empire, consisting in its smallest scope of French and Portuguese Congo, and an extended East African dominion in the direction of Lake Nyasa and Mozambique ; and, in its largest conception, of north Angola and much of the Belgian Congo as well. What will Europe say — what has she said — to these projects ? The establishment of Germany in any shape or form on the southern shores of the Mediterranean or (which is tantamount to the same thing) in Morocco would have arrayed against her a league of Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, obliged to defend the Atlantic - Mediterranean - Red Sea route from any danger of German inter- ference or control. Germany in Morocco or the Cyrenaica must have meant before long the expul- sion of the French from North Africa and the 9 130 VIEWS AND REVIEWS vassalage of Spain and Italy. We may well doubt whether such a scheme ever came within the practical politics of the Imperial Foreign Office. But the mere hint of it precipitated Italy into an unprovoked aggression on Turkey and drew France and Britain closely together. The third ambition — that which foreshadows a great Central African Empire — is only realisable in part by an agreement with France and Britain. No compulsion could be put by either of these Powers on Belgium or on Portugal to sell their West African possessions if they did not want to do so, but diplomatic pressure might be continuously exercised on both to make the trade conditions such that there was no discrimination against foreign or general commerce. If that were so, if, for example, in Angola and Portuguese Congo there was not a high tariff at the Customs and (in the first-named colony) a marked difference in favour of Portuguese imports ; and in Belgian Congo the Concessionaire and Domaine de la Couronne reserves and exclusive trading rights were abolished, a vast field might be opened for German (as for British and French) commerce. Perhaps with such results any change of flag might be unnecessary. But if through unforeseen circumstances the German Empire in Central Africa took an immense growth and included French Congo up to the Logon and the Mubangi, Portuguese and Belgian Congo as well (besides the northern province of Mo9ambique), then Great Britain might expect Germany to allow the Damaraland-Namakwaland districts to join the South African Union, and the Cape to Cairo route THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 13 1 to be assured by allotting to Great Britain Katanga and a strip between the north end of Tanganyika and Uganda. France, however, would never hear of giving up French Congo and the districts west of the Shari and Mubangi for any less price than a final settlement of her eastern frontier at home, a final exorcism of the German spectre in her home policy. She would ask — I am told — for the retrocession of French-speaking Lorraine (the Metz district) and the detachment of Luxemburg altogether from the German Customs’ Union and German system ; and substantial guarantees from Germany as to the com- plete neutrality and independence of Belgium. As to the first of the projects in my category — which in spite of fluctuations remains the great national ambition of Germany — the free hand for Austria in the Balkans and the recognition of a German sphere of influence over Asia Minor and Mesopotamia down to the Persian Gulf : this is strongly opposed by France — on the principle of blocking Germany wherever she can till she gets satisfaction over the Alsace-Lorraine question — and much disliked by Russia ; though it is doubtful whether, without the support of France and Britain, Russia would go to war to prevent the accomplish- ment of Austrian and German plans in the Near East. Germany, however, by her recognition of special Russian interests in Persia, and no doubt some further understanding as to the free passage of the Dardanelles, has secured from Russia a sanction for the Baghdad railway and all it entails in regard to the advent of German interests in the western end of the Persian Gulf. Russia would be very pleased 132 VIEWS AND REVIEWS to see any other power prevent the Austro-German control over the Near East, but is precluded herself from taking up arms. France has her commercial interests to defend at Smyrna, and reasons, practical and sentimental, for concerning herself with the fate of Syria. The French language, for example, is the principal means of intercourse for the educated classes in southern Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. It might be better in regard to Syria that this small country (south of the Aleppo district), which possesses such an important history, and which contains such a diversity of races and religions, should be formed into a separate neutral state under French protection. But, so far as Great Britain is concerned, I have never, since 1 first studied and wrote on the subject in 1904, been able to see why we should espouse Russian, French, or Slav interests in the Near East and oppose a Germanising of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia. This does not necessarily mean the abolition of the Turkish Sultanate, interference with the internal indepen- dence of Bulgaria, Albania, Servia, or Montenegro, but that Austria-Germany would alone be responsible for the foreign relations of all this region and for the maintenance of order and liberty within its boundaries. Greece and Crete would, of course, remain outside this Balkanic-Turkish confederation : Egypt, Cyprus, Syria, and Arabia likewise. As regards Arabia, about a fourth of that peninsula, from Perim Island on the south-west to the Bahrein Islands on the north-east, is — with the exception of the Imamate of Oman — under British THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 133 protection or British political influence, and must remain so because of its close connection with India. Though Russia may require to build a railway across Persia to a Russian port at the north-west angle of the Persian Gulf, and Germany control the delta of the Euphrates, Great Britain and Persia might be entrusted with the policing of the Gulf waters and alone have the right to maintain ships of war thereon. By consent of France (with whom we have a treaty regarding Maskat) the Imamate of Oman would come within the British sphere in Arabia, so that the trade of gun-running which is intermittently carried on between Maskat and Baluchistan (for Afghanistan and the Indian north- west frontier) might be efficiently stopped. The rest of Arabia, outside the southern British sphere which extends from Aden to Oman, could then be divided up into three independent Arab States : Nejd-al-Hasa ; the Hijaz ; and Yaman : the Hijaz especially being placed under a joint European international guarantee, since no one of the com- peting powers of Europe ruling over large numbers of Muhammadan subjects would in the present state of human enlightenment like to see the sacred places of Islamic pilgrimage in the keeping of or under the influence of any one European power. The affairs of Persia are necessarily interwoven with those of Turkey and the Nearer East, and the settlement of them cannot be concluded without some connection with the general agreement which is projected between Britain and Germany. Let us therefore consider them dispassionately. Persia has an area of 628,000 square miles, a large proportion 134 VIEWS AND REVIEWS of which in the centre and east is desert. But even discounting the desert regions, there still remains an area of about 400,000 square miles of cultivable country which could support a much larger popula- tion than the ten millions of the present day if there were some security for life and property, and if railways traversed the country. The Persian language is widely spread over this region between Turkey on the west and Baluchistan on the east, though Arabic has a very strong hold over the southern provinces. But the whole population is not Persian in the strict sense of the word. The west is peopled by Armenians, Kurds, Luris, and Arabs ; the south by Arabs and a negroid blend, the descendants of the old Elamites. The south-east — the British sphere of influence — is mainly Baluchi (i.e. Dravidian) in population, and the north-east mainly Tatar or Turkish. It is these Turkish invaders who have brought Persia to ruin. They supplanted the only national dynasty — the Sufis — which since the fatal Moslem conquest in the seventh century has wrought any good in Persia. The Kajar dynasty of Shahs has ruled since 1794, and has proved a curse to the land. It would be a political crime if the Russians were to restore the ex-Shah to the throne of a country which he and his ancestors have so plundered and degraded. These Kajars were never of the Aryan type which provided the famous dynasties of Persia’s glorious days, or of the Arab breed which produced the Sufi Shahs, but derived from a mongrel Turkish race of Khorassan. Russia’s claim to a special interest in the Persian Empire lies in the fact that the breadth of Persia THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 135 stands between the Russian Empire in Caucasia and the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. British political interests in Persia are chiefly based on the necessity of seeing that the Baluchi provinces (including Seistan) of the south-east shall not be used for the contraband traffic in arms between Arabia and Afghanistan, a traffic which, if not checked, might arm the Muhammadan fanatics of the Indian frontier lands against the British rule over India. Further, Great Britain, in safeguarding India, cannot see the north or the south shores of the Straits of Hormuz (the eastern outlet of the Persian Gulf) in the hands of any European power. Consequently the sphere of necessary and exclusive British interests (political, not commercial) was wisely and moderately drawn by the negotiators of the recent agreement with Russia. But the Russian sphere, on the other hand, was — partly to suit the mistaken British-Indian view of the matter — most stupidly delineated. Russia should have asked for and taken a narrow strip (inhabited chiefly by Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs) between the Caucasus and the north-west corner of the Persian Gulf, including the town of Tabriz. Over all the rest of Persia — real Persia — neither Britain nor Russia need have stretched out a hand. The Persian Government should have been allowed to engage whatever financial advisers it liked — American or European — and, provided it repudiated no loan and broke no treaty, it might have been permitted under its own chosen con- stitutional government to have worked out its own salvation. British interests of a vital kind were safeguarded by the British sphere, and Russia 1 36 VIEWS AND REVIEWS would have had control of the strip of territory necessary for her railway communication both with the Persian Gulf and with the future Baghdad- India line. “ Real ” Persia would have been left to herself ; and, provided she did not obstruct the laying down and working of a railway to India across her territory, nothing dissonant with her independence would have been asked of her. This plan, which has answered so well in Siam, may yet be adopted as the solution of the Persian difficulty. Whenever the question of the Baghdad railway is raised, or whenever Austria displays any intention to take the lead in composing the difficulties of Turkey in Europe, the factious opponents of an Anglo- German understanding immediately begin to cry out about the trade interests of the British Empire in the Turkish dominions. It may be well just to consider what these interests amount to. In 1910 the total value of the year’s trade between the United Kingdom and the Turkish Empire in Europe and Asia was £13,168,026. The whole trade of the British Empire with Turkey was only £13,854,942. This included the commerce between India and Mesopotamia that we sometimes hear so much about as a reason for keeping Germany off the Euphrates-Tigris — a trade worth a few hundred thousand pounds. On the other hand, the value of the United Kingdom’s trade with the German Empire for the same period (1910) was £99,000,000, and between India and Germany an additional £14,705,350. When we add the value of the trade between the United Kingdom and Austria- Hungary (£11,512,000) as a further item to be con- THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 137 sidered in the balance-sheet of the ct pro’s and con’s ” of an Anglo-German understanding, we shall hardly, with this total of ^110,512,000 against .£13,854,942 (British and Indian total trade with Turkish Empire for 1910), fail to realise which of the two interests is the greater — an understanding with Austria- Germany, or the danger of a European war if we strive to bolster up the Turkish Empire (to please France or Russia, or out of mistaken self-interest) against some degree of Austro-German penetration and control.1 Germany as she is at present situated must break out somewhere. In which direction is it to be ? Is she to be headed off from the Nearer East as well as the Atlantic coast ? Then (German writers threaten) she will pick a quarrel with France, occupy Belgium, 1 The following notes on the comparative aspect of British and German trade relations may be of service to the ill-informed persons who continue to write pompous nonsense about Germany in monthly reviews. The figures are mainly derived from the Statesman's Year Book , but are checked by other information. During the year 1910, the total trade of the British Empire with the German Empire (including German colonies) was ^142,500,000 in value (quoting round figures). Between the United Kingdom and Germany (leaving out colonies on both sides) the trade value was ^99,000,000. Germany, moreover, for that and some earlier years was our best customer in purchasing British goods. We sold more to her than to any other nation. Our total trade with Germany was greater in value than that with any other foreign country except the United States, and Germany buys more British goods than the United States. Our home trade with France was equivalent in 1910 to ^66,800,000, and our Imperial trade with France and the French Empire for 1910 was valued at ^96,000,000, our trade with the Russian Empire at ^57,000,000. More British books are translated into German than into any other language, and more are sold (untranslated) in Germany than in any other non-British country except the United States. Surely we should remember the services to English literature rendered by Tauchnitz and by Brockhaus of Leipzig ? f VIEWS AND REVIEWS 138 and mediatise Holland, and confront us from the coast of Picardy. Or she will break through the Swiss barrier and march down to the French Riviera, or come through the Tirol to the Adriatic. She is always wanting to get to the warm lands of the Mediterranean, and her present ferment is but a renewal of the migration movements of the early centuries of the Christian era. She may not begin to move at once, but the ferment will be there, poisoning all European politics with a hidden abscess. It should be from every point of view the desire of France and Britain to encourage this German Drang nach Osten. And it is also Germany’s line of least resistance ; for the fight against all the conjoined strength of France and Britain to obtain an Atlantic future, to absorb the Low Countries or obtain possession of Provence would ruin Germany for a time, even if it drove the two Western countries into bankruptcy. I doubt myself that Germany could possibly win, or that the fruits of victory would be worth the struggle. Yet she would prefer this to confinement within her present limits. And is it to the advantage of France and Britain to treat Germany badly ? She is one of our best customers in commerce on this side of the Atlantic. With France she does a trade of an annual value of ^46,500,000. She is a nation — fast increasing — of 65,000,000, with whom are allied nearly 52,000,000 of Austro-Hungarians.1 The two Empires together 1 Including the 2,000,000 of Bosnians, etc. The Austro-German Empires, therefore, mass together in one united foreign policy a people of 1 1 7,000,000. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 139 are in the forefront of civilisation, on a level with France, Britain, and the United States. Their government, like our own, is based on the will of the people. Like the nations to the west of them, they have both had the honour to belong in part to the Roman Empire, and have been united with us by the common use of Latin as a learned language. Their history is indissolubly linked with ours, as I have shown in the preceding chapter. Germany especially is the great bulwark against a Slavic in- vasion of that Roman Empire which cannot die, which exists always under the disguise of national and tribal names, but which is the germ of a future confederation of the white man'. The more the Englishman travels in the Germany of to-day, the more ardently he desires a complete understanding between that empire and his own land ; for with Germany and Britain united on a firm basis of policy there could be no world-wide war, scarcely even a conflict between any civilised nations. It would be far easier also to influence and to control the 800,000,000 of backward peoples who share the planet with us, and whom we of the white race have been trying to raise to our own intellectual level for thirty thousand years or more. And with no thought of war and mutual extermination between us we might unite in that really justifiable battle, the fight to a finish with recalcitrant nature — the real Devil which has unceasingly striven to prevent the conquest of the Earth by Man, the Devil which shows himself in microscopic germ, bacteria or flagellate, parasitic worm, disease-conveying insect or arachnid, uncontrolled natural forces — plutonic, 140 VIEWS AND REVIEWS meteoric, electric, and psychic. But do not let us imagine, with all our appreciation of German excel- lence in the arts and sciences, in physical develop- ment and love of knowledge, that it is only with narrow-minded publicists and incompetent politicians on this side that the fault of an Anglo-German misunderstanding lies. There are miscalculations, disproportionate ambitions, strange ignorances of British values on the other side of the North Sea, especially in Prussian Germany, and even in such a wide-awake town as Cologne. (Why Cologne should still be so anti-British it is difficult to under- stand : the feeling first grew up in the days when Cologne was more or less a French town, under the Napoleonic regime — it still retains a good many French words in its popular dialect — and was further stimulated by the intense Roman Catholicism of its inhabitants in the first half of the nineteenth century, leading them to regard England as the bulwark of the Protestant faiths. These causes seem fantastic, but they can be traced in the literature of the period.) The British anxiety to underrate and depreciate the efficiency of the United Kingdom, in the dread of living in a fool’s paradise of content with things as they are, misleads the German press often into making too low an estimate of our fighting strength, our generalship, our stubborn racial pride — the very qualities which come to us from our being so largely of German stock. And if we are underrated, so are the French. 1 admit that the Belgian Flemings (though not the three millions of Walloons) are or have become very German in their sympathies, and might not resist THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 141 very strongly the invasion of their country by a German army. But the wild ideas which have been discussed by Pan-Germanists as to another victorious war with France, leaving Germany in permanent possession of Picardy and Provence, are incompatible in probability with the teachings of history. Germany has had quite a sufficiently hard task of it retaining the conquered provinces of Alsace-Lorraine within her empire (namely, they are still kept against the wish of two-thirds of their inhabitants), and this though the Alsatians and most of the Lorrains are of German descent, speak German still, and were only severed from the older German Empire between 170 and 306 years ago. France is by no means in decadence, though she has social difficulties still to quell by the readjuscment of taxation and the shaping of wiser laws. The mis- takes in the next war — postponed sine die , we will hope — might be made by German generals and not by French ; size and strength of men is not such a potent factor in modern warfare as it was in the ancient days when Germany overran all Europe. Germany could no doubt inflict enormous damage on France and incidentally on Great Britain, but she would only be ruining her bankers, her best customers, and her natural allies. Similarly, the British or French politicians who imagine — or imagined — that Germany, with her steadily growing vigorous population, could be enclosed within a ring fence of alliances and pacts, that Turkey might be sustained against an Austro- Hungarian intervention — that Austria-Hungary which is going to supply the cement for the 142 VIEWS AND REVIEWS pavement of a Balkan confederation — are equally foolish. It is dangerous to compress a force like Germany. It may waste itself when it explodes, but it does terrible damage to its neighbours in its violent escape. Some, I know, count on the grow- ing force of Socialism in Germany ; but I believe this Socialism (which would be called a mild Radicalism in Great Britain) is not incompatible with a hearty German patriotism. It has a quarrel with the present system of internal government within the Empire, and perhaps no great desire to attack France ; but it shares to the full the opinion of the aristocratic party and of the theoretical Liberals that the 65,000,000 of German people have been treated unfairly by England in diplomacy and have been headed off whenever a policy of colonial expansion was attempted. The admirably ordered German Museums of Ethnography, Zoology, and Colonial products have not been without their effect on the Socialist mind. They have created a pride in the scientific research of their country beyond the seas and a desire to have more strange countries to explore. Then, while it has taken us — what is it ? — four years ? — merely to commence the organisation of a popular institute for the teaching of African and Oriental tongues, such institutes have come quickly into existence in Germany at Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Cologne, and other great centres of population. The reading public is taking a vivid interest in the non-Caucasian peoples of Asia and Africa, and through this interest is en- gendered a desire to administer their affairs, to train them in German ways of thought, and link them up THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 143 with the German policy. I much doubt whether, as some of our statesmen have believed in the past, we shall find the Socialist party in Germany dissuad- ing their fellow countrymen from colonial ambitions and inviting them to step aside whilst England, like the Carpenter (and his friend the Walrus) sorts out those of the largest size among the territorial oysters, and swallows them with tears and protests at the strain which is being imposed on the British digestion. It is our national hypocrisy, say even socialistic Germans, which revolts them rather than our irre- pressible instinct for taking the weak and waste places of the world under our wing. In defiance of the spirit of treaty after treaty which was to bolster up the inviolability of the Turkish Empire, we have, since the Crimean war, quietly nobbled Cyprus, Egypt, the Egyptian Sudan, the Sinaitic peninsula, and quite recently have pushed Turkey back a good distance from Aden, have latterly demarcated a line inland, and have made treaties with Turkey and along the southern coast of Arabia and the south shore of the Persian Gulf, which have thrown the British aegis over at least a quarter of Arabia. Yet when, in the same year (1909), Austria announces what all the world wondered she had not announced years ago, the definite incorporation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and offers Turkey a handsome sum in compensation for a changed formula of words, from no country more than from Great Britain came the shocked outcry of protest or a more earnest invocation of the god of treaties. Germany winces yet from the sermons in the British press whenever she has hungered after a 144 VIEWS AND REVIEWS naval station at Trieste, a port on the Euphrates Delta, or a Pacific island. And even while such sermons are being written the Anglo-Saxon mouth opens and englobes the Malay provinces of the Kingdom of Siam. But though the Germans writhe from time to time, they cannot help laughing good-naturedly at our slimness, at the yearly spectacle of a British Foreign or Colonial Minister rising to assure the world that our appetite for gold-fields, for new lands, new protectorates is not only slaked but annulled ; rather, that we would gladly yield up such and such a morsel, did not honour impose the burden of digesting it. And then soon afterwards comes the newspaper paragraph or the unwilling admission in Parliament of another annexation here and a further extension of frontier there. I join with my German friends in deprecating the constant repetition of these outworn and hypocritical assumptions of reluctance, but I am as ardent an Imperialist as I ever was in the first flush of our Colonial Renaissance in 1884 ; I believe as firmly as ever that the best fate which can befall an Egypt, a Persia, an Uganda — even a Somaliland — is to come under the British flag ; and that the extension of British sovereignty is a benefit under the Free Trade regime to the world at large. This is also the opinion of the leading European and American nations, and is the reason why a people which, until recently, was scarcely more than forty millions in numbers has been allowed with little protest to accumulate a larger empire than the world has ever known. But if any event so unhappy occurred as THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 145 the advent to power of a Ministry which imposed differential duties in the customs’ houses of India, the Crown Colonies and Protectorates, we should soon see the attitude of Germany, the United States, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan change towards us. It is one of the most important commercial interests of Germany that the British Empire over India should continue. The trade of Germany with that vast region of southern Asia has risen to an annual value of £ 1 5,000,000. Germany knows full well that if any native rebellion or foreign war expelled the British from India, no other European nation could take their place. I could well imagine, if Britain were really in serious difficulties over India, the German Empire coming specially to its assistance. Much the same applies to Egypt. Theodore Roosevelt appreciated this fact. When he was in London in 1910, he uttered the following phrase in a speech made to the Royal Geographical Society : “ The best guarantee for Great Britain on the Nile would be Germany on the Euphrates ” ; and to “Nile” might be added “Indus and Ganges.” So far from Germany’s advent on the Persian Gulf (or Russia’s, for the matter of that) being a menace to the British dominion over southern Asia, it would be a bulwark — so long as we gave a fair field and no favour to the commerce of all nations throughout the British possessions governed from London : that is, made no difference in the levying of import duties between one nationality and another. In our Daughter nations it is different. Germany and the rest of the world are aware that these former colonies now 146 VIEWS AND REVIEWS enjoy complete freedom from the metropolis, in fiscal questions as in others. We can neither compel them to discriminate in our favour at their customs’ houses, nor refuse to accept this not very substantial boon ; if they do lower the tariff in our favour it is frequently the only return made for our maintaining at the sole expense of the British taxpayer the general Imperial services. Personally, many of us would prefer to see this rebate on British goods abolished in favour of a direct annual subsidy towards the upkeep of the Imperial diplomatic and consular corps, Imperial cables, and the Imperial Navy. Despite this dis- advantage in the tariffs of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the trade between Germany and the British Empire (less the United Kingdom, but including India) for the year 1910 was not far short of 000, 000 in value. Her total trade with France for the same period (1910) was under £42,000,000. CHAPTER VI THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY III HOME INTERESTS AND INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION Germany has a population to-day of over 65,000,000 of people who are confronted with problems at home as well as abroad. They are, as I have pointed out in the previous chapter, the best clients of the United Kingdom ; they also do a very large trade with France (buying more from her than they sell), and an enor- mous trade — an average of £90,000,000 annually — with Russia. Therefore, if the governments of the powers who form the triple understanding are com- posed of business men, they will desire that Germany may solve not only her foreign difficulties, but her anomalies in home administration, as well as the social and fiscal questions in dispute, so that her toiling millions may increase in numbers and in wealth, and require larger and larger supplies of foreign products for their manufactures and their bodily consumption. So far as I can judge, as an eye-witness, after visiting most parts of Germany in 1910 and 1911, the most serious home problem in Germany at the 147 14B VIEWS AND REVIEWS present day is the cost of living. This has been brought about by the system of protective duties in force since 1879, which in the attempt to en- courage home agriculture and live-stock-rearing, and the exploitation of German mines, forests, and manu- factures, has, in conjunction with the rapid increase of population, greatly raised the price of food, of most of the other necessaries of life, and of house-rent. At one time, with the exception of certain parts of France and Switzerland, there was no country in the world where civilised existence could be led at such a low cost as in Germany. This fact had its ad- vantages, since it attracted to German capitals and university towns considerable numbers of foreign residents and tourists. The allurements and the solid advantages in education which Germany offers to persons of cultivated tastes are greater than ever, but, alas ! the cost of living for the resident and the tourist grows higher every year, and will soon rival that of the United States. Actual education ; books ; the delights of the best music and of an admirably developed theatre ; railway travel ; carriage hire ; public amusements ; and public means of locomotion in cities still remain cheap : but everything to do with food and lodging, firing, clothes, washing and chemistry is dear. The policy of protective duties has done much to create the industries that now make Germany such an im- portant nation, and the scientific agriculture and horticulture which are turning her many waste places into fruitful fields, rich pastures, and pro- ductive gardens (Germany even exports roses now, fruit trees, and bulbs, and this from soil which a THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 149 few years ago was regarded as worthless moorland). But these results having now been achieved, the manufactures and industries of Germany could not be affected unfavourably if the tariff was consider- ably reduced on articles of food (except alcohol), and on the foreign raw materials which are required by German factories and trades. A high tariff might still be maintained on luxuries, on certain classes of manufactured goods, and on foreign alcohol. But it has become a matter of urgent necessity that the necessaries of life should be cheapened in Germany and Austria. The dearness of living is the chief grievance which creates or rather accentuates Socialism ; and in Germany it is mainly the overwhelming predominance of Prussia which is the obstacle to a lowering of the Protection wall. The Prussian government is very much under the influence of the landowners of that large kingdom, whose views regarding the protection of agriculture and the breeding of animals for food are those of the English squirearchy. As regards Austria, it is the predominant policy of Hungary in fixing the customs’ tariff of the two states which makes food so dear in the Austrian states and in Southern Germany. In order to protect the graziers and farmers of the Hungarian plains, the Magyar government compels Austria to maintain restrictive conditions and a high tariff on the importation of live beasts and frozen meat, on grain and fruit at Trieste, a port through which such things might find their way to Bavaria, as well as to German- speaking Austria ; and of course at all other Adriatic ports besides Trieste. 150 VIEWS AND REVIEWS In spite of Sir William Harcourt’s vividly true saying in 1894 that “ we are all Socialists now” — from force of circumstances, whether we like the main theory of Socialism or not, a theory which first found its clear exposition in the sayings of Jesus Christ — one sees from the newspapers, and from printed appeals for help sent out to the nobility and gentry of the United Kingdom, that it is still possible to raise a shudder amongst fossilised, unreflecting, unobservant minds by the use of the word Socialist ; though in its essence it merely means “ good fellowship,” that is to say, elemental Christianity. So when one refers to the increase of Socialism, or the Socialist vote in Ger- many, most of one’s readers imagine this policy or party in the German Empire to be analogous with the insane anarchism of Russia or Italy. In actuality the German Socialists are equivalent to a blend of the Radical and Labour parties in England, only differing from these manifestations of public opinion in being rather better educated on general topics than are some of our Labour representatives in the House of Commons [this last, thanks to the excellence of the national educa- tion in Germany, as compared with that given to the poor and rich in England, Wales, and Ireland1]. The Socialist party in Germany contains many politicians of the new type : men of the merchant 1 Scottish education for the masses and classes equals that of Germany in efficiency and common sense. And what is the result ? Scottish Radicals or Labour leaders are seldom or never revolution- ary in their policy, but truly liberal, besides being conservative of what is good. And this is one reason why the United Kingdom is so often and so well governed by Scotchmen. THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 151 and industrial classes who are winning their way to power and influence by their very cosmopolitan training and education, which have enabled them — probably after some apprenticeship in England or the United States — to import foreign notions into German commerce, industry, and daily life, that have redounded to the improvement and happiness of modern Germany. Nothing struck me more forcibly, after an absence of twenty years, than the Americanisation of Ger- many. In their means of locomotion, the struc- ture of their houses, the sanitation and excessive cleanliness of their well-organised towns (I admit the Americans are less perfect in practice often than in theory), the Germans have copied much from the United States, to which country so many emigrate, and from which so many return with a competence. But they return as conscious or unconscious re- cruits of the Socialist party, yet preserving — or even having acquired in the States — an affectionate reverence for, and interest in the picturesque aspects of the fatherland, in its history, its scenery, and even in its pomp of government. But they have lost all patience with the policy which still bestows exclusive favours on the aristocracy and the pro- fession of arms, and which still maintains a really Aryan, Brahmanical theory as to caste : the division of society into those who are well-born and high- we^-born, and those who are not born at all — so to speak. [In fact, here one finds an additional proof that the Germans are very near the original Aryans (I imagine the Slavs were Sudras !) in their passionate clinging to these theories of caste laid l52 VIEWS AND REVIEWS down according to birth.] This impatience with old-time social ideas and prejudices, with the ex- aggerated respect for the fighting-man and the citizen whose forefathers have been nobles for many generations after their nobility had been earned by real service to the State, is also shared by many German Liberals and men of high stand- ing, who would be indignant if called Socialists. Such, like the Socialists, are disposed to look at Germany from a twentieth-century standpoint, and ask themselves and each other whether she should be any longer trammelled by ridiculous vestiges of the Middle Ages, and of that revulsion to the Middle Ages which occurred at the Congress of Vienna. Under the present system of Imperial Government, though the whole Empire returns representatives elected on the popular vote to the Assembly of the People or Reichstag (the members of the Imperial Upper House or Bundesrat are appointed by each of the component states of the Empire in proportion to population), these can have no voice in the selection or tenure of ap- pointment of the Imperial Ministers. Such are appointed by the Emperor, and hold office during his pleasure and without reference to the popular will. And the Emperor, being also King of Prussia, selects Prussian subjects for his Imperial Ministers, so that the other sovereign states of Germany have an insufficient say, an ineffective control over the foreign, colonial, army, navy, railway, postal, and fiscal policies of Germany. The Imperial Ministers or heads of departments are not responsible to the Reichstag, to the people THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 153 who pay the taxes — but to the Emperor. Their tenure of office need not bear any direct reference to the policy which the Reichstag has been elected to carry out. Of course, the three Emperors of the House of Hohenzollern having been wise and great-minded men, and much in touch with popular opinion, this theoretically most imperfect constitu- tion has worked so far tolerably well. Yet the Socialists feel — are Socialists because they feel — that lines of policy are shaped and carried out by Prussian bureaucrats on which the people have never been consulted, projects which may be pro- ductive of enormous harm, yet as to which the Empire is committed blindly, consequently feeling the humiliation when an impass6 is reached, or a withdrawal has to be made. Yet there is not much disposition to criticise the foreign policy of the Emperor. Where the new line of action has been due to him personally it has generally been proved to be right from a German point of view — as, for example, the taking possession of the Kiao-Chau territory in China, an action which has enormously strengthened the German com- mercial and political position in the Far East. But some mistakes have been made at the German Foreign Office which are attributable to the class of official or minister selected by the Emperor — Prussians of correct birth and social status, but narrow-minded pedants unacquainted with either England or the United States, acquiring their chief knowledge of the outer world in Austria, Rumania, or Rome, and believing that the adoption of a monocle is a sufficient concession to Anglo-Saxon 154 VIEWS AND REVIEWS modernity. Such men as these held the opinions that Germany might found a u colony” in Morocco, that the British army would be unable to subdue the Boers, that the Spanish fleet would beat the American, Japan succumb in her attack on Russia, and the Abd-al- Hamid regime get the better of Young Turkish aspirations. Yet even amongst the majority of the Socialists, and of course among all German Liberals, there is too deep a feeling of historical gratitude to the Hohenzollern dynasty for them to contemplate for one moment an empire without an emperor, or the emperor proceeding from any other house but that of Hohenzollern. But they chafe at the present way in which their home Empire is divided up into a medley of local governments with many diverse characteristics. They are people of sufficient education to appreciate and desire to preserve what is harmlessly picturesque and fruitfully original. But they would like to achieve two results by a bold policy of adjustment : to make Germany as much as possible one homo- geneous Nation, and yet to give due regard to the necessities of local administration and to the diversities of racial and physical type, of mental character and religious beliefs which range between the mouth and the source of the Elbe, the Danish frontier, and the Lake of Constance. They are quite willing to maintain Berlin as the Imperial capital of Germany, but they consider there is “ too much Prussia ” in the general government of Germany, and too little satisfaction given to the semi-national divisions of the German people. It is, for example, ridiculous in their opinion that the THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 155 government of Prussia should continue to administer the affairs of the little territory of Hohenzollern, which is really peopled by Swabians, and should properly form part of the Kingdom of Wtlrttemberg. Likewise, it is incongruous that the Frisian Olden- burgers should rule in Birkenfeld, a principality close to Alsace ; that Bavaria should send her officials across Wtlrttemberg and Baden to administer the Rhenish Palatinate ; that the uniformity of Westphalian interests should be broken by the little ducal or princely governments of Lippe, Western Brunswick, and Waldeck-Pyrmont ; that Thuringia should be split up into some five or six States mutually independent one of the other, and the Hessian people be governed by Prussia as well as by a grand duchy which is cut into two separate pieces. Discussing such questions with these advanced thinkers, or following the drift of their articles in reviews, it would seem as though the ideal redistri- bution of local government throughout the German Empire might be arranged as follows : — The Kingdom of Prussia (which is partly Polish in origin) would retain all her ancestral provinces in the north and east, and would in addition take over the government of the eastern half of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and of all the small States in Central Germany (except the westernmost part of Brunswick) which lie to the north of Saxe-Weimar, that is to say, Brunswick-Harzburg-Quedlinburg and Anhalt-Dessau. The western portion of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Lauenburg would be added to Mecklenburg-Schwerin ; Schleswig-Holstein 1 56 VIEWS AND REVIEWS would become a self-governing grand duchy ; a portion of East Friesland would be added to Oldenburg in return for the surrender of Birkenfeld to Rhenish Prussia ; and the republics or free cities of Bremen, Hamburg, and Lttbeck would have their territories enlarged as some reward for their truly meritorious services to the German Empire. The Hanoverian and Westphalian provinces, together with the little States of Lippe, West Brunswick, and Waldeck-Pyrmont, might be erected into a kingdom of Westphalia under a Prussian prince — possibly one of the Kaiser’s sons — while Rhenish Prussia under a similar monarchy would become the King- dom of Niederrhein and extend southwards so as to include not only Birkenfeld but a good deal of Lorraine. The two halves of Hesse should be united by adding to the lands of the Hessian Grand Duchy the districts of Wiesbaden, Homburg, and Frankfort. Alsace, Baden (less the Constance and Mosbach provinces), together with the Bavarian Palatinate, would form the Kingdom of the Oberrhein under the sovereignty of the present grand ducal House of Baden. Wilrttemberg, enlarged by Hohenzollern and Constance, would become the Kingdom of Swabia, while Bavaria would be compensated for losing the Palatinate by receiv- ing the Mosbach province of Baden, and perhaps the Karlsbad corner of German-speaking Bohemia — if Austria, for enlargements in other directions, could be induced to make the transference. The Kingdom of Saxony would be allowed to absorb the Saxon duchies of Altenburg, the south-east portion of Saxe-Weimar, and the little Reuss States (Gera, THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 157 Schleiz, and Greiz). The rest of the Thuringian duchies (with the exception of the northern half of Sch warzburg-Sondershausen-Rudolstadt, which would be annexed by Prussia) might be united to form a grand duchy of Thuringia under a Prince of the Saxe-Weimar or Meiningen or Coburg Houses. The ruling dynasties of all the absorbed States would of course be compensated monetarily, while in any reshaping of Eastern Europe or in the allotment of new functional posts within the German Empire their princes might be borne in mind by the Emperor. If ever such a redistribution of German adminis- tration took place, it might well be taken into consideration whether Germany should not offer to retrocede to France that small portion of French- speaking Lorraine which lies to the west of the Mosel and its tributary the Seille, and which includes the fortress of Metz and the town of Diedenhofen, such cession of course to be made in return for some transfer to Germany of French territories in Western Africa. If, at the same time, by some friendly arrangement with Austria regard- ing the Balkans, Germany could acquire for Bavaria the Karlsbad corner of Bohemia, the territory of the German Empire in Europe would be undiminished in extent ; French-speaking people would be re- stored to France, and German-speaking people in Bohemia would be detached from the rule of the Chekh. From a German point of view the continued association of Alsace with Lorraine, and the incorpora- tion of the two provinces conquered from France i58 VIEWS AND REVIEWS into a self-governing state, with distinctly republican sympathies, is a source of future danger. It is difficult to adopt the French point of view, that France has any racial claim to rule in the Rhine Valley, or should govern provinces the established language of which is German. On the other hand, it is difficult to withhold one’s sympathy from France in her desire that the French-speaking districts of Lorraine (Metz-Diedenhofen), which, indeed, have formed part of France for a much longer period than Alsace, should be withheld from reincorporation with the French Republic. The trade relations of German Lorraine all now lie in the direction of Coblentz and Cologne. On the other hand, those of Alsace are intimately allied with Baden and the Palatinate. Baden, however, would be a ridiculous name to perpetuate for the government of this portion of Southern Germany : a much more appropriate title would be that suggested by one or more German writers, t£ The Kingdom of the Upper Rhine.” Some such redistribution of the component parts of the German Empire as I have sketched out (following certain German theorists) would substi- tute for the existing twenty-six sovereign states, which are of most unequal size — ranging from Prussia with 134,616 square miles to Ltlbeck with 99 — sixteen kingdoms, duchies, or republics of less disproportionate area, each with a considerable measure of self-government, much like the states of the American Union, yet combining to secure a greater unification in matters of general policy than at present obtains in Germany. Bavaria might be THE PROBLEMS OF GERMANY 159 expected to adopt what now all the other states have submitted to except herself, the Imperial postal service (at present the Bavarian Post Office is quite distinct). The ridiculous farce would be dropped of Bavaria, Prussia, Wilrttemberg, Saxony main- taining independent diplomatic and consular repre- sentatives at the principal German courts and ports. Yet by the creation or revival of local nationalism in Schleswig-Holstein, Westphalia, the Lower Rhine- lands, the Upper Rhinelands, Hesse, and Thuringia local patriotism would be stimulated and local interests strengthened. The King of Prussia, by lending himself to what might be called the provincial reorganisation of the German Empire, and from the princes of his House giving dynasties to Schleswig- Holstein, Westphalia, and the Lower Rhine, would make himself more truly the Emperor of Germany than he is at present, when he is merely styled C£ the German Emperor.” CHAPTER VII EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM A great disaster befell the Roman world in the seventh century after Christ. This was the uprise of Muhammad and the launching of hordes of ignorant Arabs on the settled and civilised provinces of the Roman world which bordered the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. It was perhaps Nature’s revenge for the besotted silliness which had grown about Christianity, turning what should have been the freest and most enlightened of religions into an exaltation of ugliness and dirt, a mortification of the body, and a contempt for the researches of science. Yet it was only Greek and Syriac Christianity which wholly merited this characterisation ; Latin Christianity was striving to civilise the Goths, Franks, and Lombards and recover the lore of classical Rome ; nor was science by any means extinguished at Constantinople. The Greek spirit and Persian art together struggled to the surface after the Islamic flood had begun to settle, and during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries the lamp of science was relit in Saracenic lands, though always in danger of being blown out by fresh gusts of religious frenzy from the Arab EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 6 1 mind : a cerebral storm similar to that of the Hebrew prophet, of the hysterical nun, or of the Welsh miner who has got religion : a frenzy coupled with neurasthenia which owes all its impulse to the promptings of an uncultured, unbalanced brain, and nothing to reasonable deductions from well-sifted evidence. Spain attracted the Graeco-Syrian, disguised as a Saracen, and undoubtedly profited at first from the Islamite invasion ; but the Roman development of North Africa, which had done much ,to push back the Desert, to increase the habitability of Mauretania, received a check from which it has not yet recovered ; and although there were resumptions of the Roman work on a lesser scale by Berber dynasties which had freed themselves from the yoke of Arab Egypt, the Turk came on the scene at the beginning of the sixteenth century and completed the alienation and ruin of all North Africa from Tlemcen to Suez, while the fanatical negroid Arabs of the Western Sahara and the Nigerian Berbers simultaneously swamped the learning and art of Morocco. Anyone who has visited North Africa must be aware that the coast of Algeria and its eastern, Constantine province, the Regency of Tunis, and the littoral of Tripoli, were at one time as “ Roman ” a land as Italy ; in fact, it is doubtful whether Italy can supply as many ruins of magnificent Roman buildings as may be still seen in this part of Northern Africa. Such a town as Tebessa, for example, which is situated near the Tunisian frontier in eastern Algeria, and is a railway terminus, is little else than a Roman town (although dating mainly from the ii VIEWS AND REVIEWS 162 Byzantine Empire), almost unaltered in its architec- ture, with the Roman houses roofed and repaired, and just sufficiently modernised to permit of habita- tion by Europeans. Many of the towns in the south of Tunis and south-east of Algeria are of the same character, but of earlier construction. Roman ruins may be found as far south as Ghadames and Fezzan. It would seem as though there had been a consider- able immigration of Romans, Italians, and Greeks into Tunisia, Tripoli, and eastern Algeria during the seven centuries that these countries formed part of the Roman Empire. The Vandals brought a small contingent of Nordic Europeans and a host of Spanish camp-followers. It was no doubt largely this European garrison, between 100 b.c. and 650 a.d., that built and peopled the splendid Roman cities of Roman Africa, while the Berbers fell partly into a condition of serfage, becoming the agricul- tural peasants ; or else resumed a nomad life and remained in more or less permanent hostility to Roman civilisation. The main cause that led to the overthrow of Roman rule in Africa by the Vandal invasion in the fifth century ; that brought about the revival of Roman rule under the Constantinople Emperor ; and, again, the rapid overthrow of that Byzantine government after the Arab invasions of 647 and 673 : was the perpetual dissatisfaction of the Berber people of North Africa with the government of the European. I think it may be stated without much inaccuracy that between 146 b.c. and 429 a.d., during the whole period of Roman rule in North Africa — at any rate in the modern Algeria and Tunis EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 163 — no period longer than seventy years elapsed with- out a more or less serious Berber revolt. Seeing that the dominating Berber element in the population of North Africa belonged to much the same human stock as the peoples of Southern Italy, Greece, Spain, and even Southern France, and that before the invasion of Islam there was no national difference in religious views, it is curious that the North African should have fought so resolutely against the Empire which had its metropolis across the Mediterranean.1 The struggle was almost Iberian' against Aryan, Iberian languages and culture against the forms of speech and the civilisation developed by the Aryan. Nevertheless, if Arabia had not in the seventh and the eleventh centuries poured her two or three hundred thousand reckless fanatics into North Africa, I imagine that the Berber would have fallen into line 1 The dislike felt by the North African indigenes to Rome was, however, intensified by the introduction of Christianity. Many of the Berbers favoured a Monotheistic religion, and had been greatly attracted by the Jewish propaganda carried on when large numbers of Jews settled in North Africa at the beginning of the Christian Era, following the siege of Jerusalem, if not before. Just as the Irish became obstinately attached to the Roman form of Christianity from the time that England passed over to Protestantism, and cultivated this passionate attachment quite as much from a hatred of everything that was English as from any desire for theological consistency, so the North African Berbers grew to detest the Christianity of St Augustine. Under the Vandal rule they became eager Unitarians, and assisted the Vandals to attack and martyrise those who professed Roman and Trinitarian Christianity. They were therefore as ready for the reception of Islam as gunpowder is for the fulminating spark. In scarcely more than seventy years Roman (Byzantine) rule and the use of the Latin language were effaced in North Africa from Pelusium to Tangier, though Christianity and Latin survived at Carthage and Bona till about the tenth century, and a good deal of Egypt and Nubia adhered to the Greek Church. 164 VIEWS AND REVIEWS with his European brothers ; and although Byzantium might not have retained a permanent hold over the States of Leptis, Carthage, Cirta, Caesarea, and Tingis, Gothic Spain and Norman Sicily would together have governed North Africa and have continued the work begun by Rome. The Muse of History, pondering over the fortunes of this world, must have been asking herself during the last thirteen centuries when the devastating hand of Islam would be stayed, and when would the Roman Empire recover its position in North Africa, and resume its contest with refractory Nature. The watching Muse would have seen the stately Roman architecture succeeded by the picturesque but tawdry Saracenic — (that strange offspring sprung from the union of Byzantine architecture with the Arabian symbols of Phallic worship). She would have noted that buildings of stone were replaced by fanciful erections of stucco, lath and plaster, brick and whitewash, into which marble columns robbed from Roman temples were incongruously welded. She would have seen the Roman bath system maintained (so far as methods of cleansing the body were concerned), but the buildings and water supply of the baths going unchecked to gradual ruin and the drainage of towns by sewers completely forgotten. In many ways she would have observed the gradual dying of civilisation and culture ; Roman highways becoming overgrown with weeds, while no better road took their place than the track worn by the passage of pedestrians and horses’ hoofs ; irrigation works falling into abandonment, wells taking the EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 6 5 place of the magnificent water supply of the mighty aqueducts ; dams bursting and never being restored ; the sand of the desert creeping further and further north, and engulfing orchard after orchard ; the lion and the leopard once more increasing in numbers and ravishing flocks and herds ; the rainfall diminishing owing to the reckless destruction of forests, these being destroyed by unchecked bush fires, by constant cutting for firewood, and by the goats of the nomad tribes devouring the saplings. Every seven years or so the locusts from the Sahara would extend their ravages further and further north. North African man had accepted Muhammadan fatalism ; he had entered upon a life of polygamy and lethargy which made it almost a duty not to come into conflict with Nature, and was slowly reducing this magni- ficent country to the condition of an uninhabitable wilderness. Once, it is true, in the sixteenth century, the man arrived who seemed about to change the fate of North Africa and re-unite it again to Christianity and the Roman Empire : this was the Emperor Charles V. But, though the man had arrived, Fate had not yet struck the hour. Charles V. interfered in vain to prevent the Turkish conquest of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algeria ; while Portugal subsequently lost the results of her conquest of Morocco in the fatal battle of Kasr- al-Kabir (1578). Rome again baffled in these abortive attempts, the malign hand of the Turk stretched over all this region except Morocco, and galvanised the Muhammadan power into resistance against European civilisation for another three centuries. l 66 VIEWS AND REVIEWS French ambitions in regard to African dominion date from the end of the Crusades, from the landing of Louis IX. at Carthage. This best of French kings might have succeeded with his project of conquering Tunis, as an additional bulwark of the Angevin Kingdom of Sicily and Naples, had it not been for the outbreak of the plague, from which he died, amid the ruins still standing of the Roman capital of Roman Africa. Under the reign of Francis I. the bold plan was adopted (copied by Queen Elizabeth in the latter part of the same sixteenth century) of an alliance with the Turk and the Moslem, in consequence of which French fishermen and merchants acquired a better footing in the com- merce of Algeria, Tunis, and Egypt.1 Louis XIV. developed distinct designs on Egypt and Abyssinia owing to the reports which he received from French consuls and travellers as to the weakness of the Mamluk government of the Nile Valley. Although his projects came to nought, they did not die away completely, but gave birth in the second half of the eighteenth century to the exploring journey of Sonnini, a young Alsatian traveller patronised by Buffon. French designs on Egypt finally bore fruit in the great expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte, who by landing at Alexandria with 40,000 men in 1798 really began the modern European scramble for African dominion. The vital importance of Egypt to British schemes of empire over Southern Asia (together with the 1 In this period — about 1535 — was founded the fishing and trading station of the French at La Calle in Eastern Algeria, their first foothold on the North African coast. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 167 possession on the part of Great Britain of the requisite sea- power to enforce her purposes) brought about the French withdrawal from Egypt. But the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt achieved immense good, and was followed by no years of Egyptological research. It also resulted in the tracing of the Nile to its source and the eventual redemption of Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan from the appalling devastation caused by the anarchical rule of Moslem Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, Greeks and Nubians. Disappointed as to Egypt, and fearing to arouse a sharp conflict with England if Tunis or Morocco were touched, France, if she were to have an over-sea empire, must turn to Algeria. Her movement was precipitated by the fatuous behaviour of the Dey of Algiers ; but the French fishing interests on the eastern Algerian coast would sooner or later have led to intervention, since the power of the Turkish pirate-pashas was decaying and being replaced by Berber chieftains. By the close of 1830 the French expedition, which had captured the great stronghold of Algiers after a few days’ bombardment, had taken possession of all the leading seaports of Algeria between the frontiers of Tunis and Morocco. The liberal government of Louis Philippe being viewed sympathetically in England, British opposi- tion to a French North African Empire relaxed, and by 1834 the French Government had deliberately assumed the responsibility for conquering and ad- ministering Algeria from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. In 1844 the power of Morocco received a short, sharp, and wholesome lesson, and never again 1 68 VIEWS AND REVIEWS seriously attempted any interference in Algeria. Thenceforth and until 1904, only the opposition of Great Britain and of Spain stood between France and a conquest of Morocco. Great Britain also extended some kind of protection over Tunis until the Berlin Congress of 1878. The British occupation of Cyprus, Egypt, and the Egyptian Sudan, together with the establishment of a protectorate over the eastern half of Nigeria, led inevitably to a relaxation of British jealousy in regard to Tunisia and Morocco, and to various agreements by which Great Britain withdrew her opposition to the extension of French interests in those countries and agreed with France in ignoring the claims of Turkey to exercise any political rule beyond the southern frontiers of Tripoli, Fezzan, and Barka. Consequently, in 1904, by that agree- ment with Great Britain which recognised the privileged position of the United Kingdom in Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan, France believed herself to have (with the mental reservation of Italian aspirations in Tripoli and Spanish claims to the Riff coast of Morocco) a very free hand over North and North Central Africa ; from Wadai and Bagirmi on the south-east, to the Atlantic coast in the west, and the Mediterranean on the north. The intervention of Germany in the affairs of North Africa was not thought likely in 1904. It was believed then that Germany viewed with approval the creation of this huge empire in Africa as a pledge of peace, and an indication that France had tacitly turned her back on Alsace-Lorraine and would devote all her energies, wealth, and military EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 69 strength to the creation of a vast French dominion over the northern half of Africa. But there was a rude awakening for both France and Britain when the German Imperial Government insisted on the retirement of M. Delcasse, and gave, by the special visit of the Emperor in the spring of 1905, an almost aggressive German recognition to the independence of Morocco. The Conference of Algeciras in 1906 patched up an arrangement which saved the face of Germany, admitted to some extent the claims of France and Spain to interfere in the affairs of Mdrocco, and yet tied the hands of France very effectually in regard to the absorption within her own dominion of this most unruly Berber State. The Balkan crisis of 1 909, provoked by another advance of Austro- Germany in the inevitable march to the .ZEgean Sea, led to a relaxation of stringency in regard to French operations in Morocco : indeed, in most organs of the French Press it was believed in 1909 that Germany had handed over Morocco to France in return for a free hand in the Nearer East. But this apparently was not the case : neither Power had committed itself very far in either direction. Already, however, after 1909, the French frontier had for all practical purposes been advanced to the Muluya river on the north and the outskirts of the High Atlas range on the south-east. Spain, unable any longer to refrain from establishing her claim to Northern Morocco, had fought many battles round Melilla. The tribes rose against the Sultan, Mulai Abd-al-Hafid, who had already become a pensionary of France, and the French had to occupy Fez or VIEWS AND REVIEWS 170 see Morocco go to pieces. Then came the sudden coup d' eclat, the despatch of the German gunboat to Agadir, resulting finally in a German recogni- tion (accompanied by stipulations regarding Free Trade and equal opportunities for the commerce of all nations) of a French Protectorate over Morocco. It remains only for France and Spain to come to terms as to the delimitation of the Spanish sphere in Northern Morocco, which will probably be restricted to the Riff country and the coast of the Tangiers district, in addition, of course, to the relatively large Spanish protectorate (now styled colony) of the Rio de Oro to the south-west of Morocco. By this arrangement, four-fifths of Morocco comes under the control of France, a result which, to those unprejudiced Englishmen who know North Africa, is greatly to be desired in the interests of the natives ; because France, after eighty-two years’ ex- perience, is less likely than Spain to make mistakes in a problem which demands a deeply founded know- ledge of the Berber and the Arab ; a sympathy with these peoples, who have many fine qualities, physical and mental ; and a scrupulous regard for their rights. There are many waste places in North Africa open legitimately to European colonisation, but not on the lines of displacing the settled agricultural natives of the country. From the little I saw of the Spaniards on my visit to Morocco in 1911, and still more from what I have heard, they are embarking ignorantly on a very thorny task in North Morocco. The sphere which Spain aspires to control contains at least 2,000,000 people, nearly half the population of Morocco. They are for the most part Berbers, EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 7 1 not Arabs — a warlike, proud, a well-nigh indomitable people, singularly like the best types of Spaniard in southern and eastern Spain. Yet, at present, hardly any of the Spanish officers can speak Arabic. Of the Berber language (now assiduously studied by the French) they scarcely realise the existence, though Spain has held Ceuta, Melilla, and Alhu- cemas — outposts of the Riff country — for centuries. Any Spanish oppression of the people in her North Morocco protectorate will raise a hornet’s nest about her ears. She may be able to do much legitimate exploitation of the mineral wealth of this region, to the benefit of the inhabitants as well as of Spanish commerce, but she will have received a portion of North Africa in which there is very little room for colonisation. Spain is colonising North Africa, but it is under the French flag, in the Oran province of Algeria, where from one cause and another there are empty spaces to be filled in town and country. Far and away the best thing for Morocco and the people of Morocco at the present day will be the distinct and clear establishment of a French pro- tectorate over four-fifths of that country and the reduction of the Sultan to the same position as that now honourably occupied by the Bey of Tunis. Then, indeed, Morocco will go ahead. Its native population will increase by leaps and bounds, its incalculable natural riches be thrown open to commerce, while science should gain prodigiously by the examination of wonderful monuments of the past stretching back into far distant ages of pre- history. There will be revelations of a palasonto- VIEWS AND REVIEWS 172 logical fauna almost rivalling that of the Himalayan foothills ; fresh discoveries ought to be made in botany, in living zoology, and the evolution of human races exceeding in interest anything yet made known in Algeria and Tunis. The good days of Morocco are just beginning. “ Why,” one is sometimes asked, and by English- men of ail people, whose own Empire acts magnetically on all adjacent countries of weak government — “why could not France have contented herself with Algeria and Tunis, and left Morocco alone ? What will she profit from this barren protectorate over a land which Europe is determined shall be no close borough, but a Free Trade region ? ” The explana- tion is that a control over Morocco is an essential factor to the government which administers Algeria and Tunis. It is from Morocco that has come, or it is Morocco which has nourished all the serious insurrections against French rule ; it is Morocco where Nature is unchecked, that ever and again renews the locust plagues or the epidemics of horse or cattle disease ; while the steady disforesting of eastern Morocco is beginning to impoverish the rainfall of Western Algeria. To realise better the claims which France has on European consideration and gratitude for her work in North Africa, let us pass in review a brief summary of what she has accomplished since 1830. At the beginning of that year Turkish Deys, Beys,1 and Pashas ruled most of the great coast 1 “ Dey ” was a cant soldier’s term in Turkish for “uncle,” and was applied by the janissaries to the leader or representative whom EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 173 towns from Oran to the borders of Egypt, and held with their Turkish soldiery a few cities in the interior, such as Tlemcen and Constantine. Elsewhere the Berber and Arab tribes were more or less independent, and those of nomadic habits were constantly raiding the settled agriculturists, hindering all progress, incidentally aiding the advance of the sandy desert, keeping down popula- tion, and allowing their flocks and herds to destroy the forests and thereby lessen the rainfall and humidity. The condition of Algeria and Tunis in 1830 was lamentable, and offered the- most striking contrast to the times of the Roman or even Byzantine Empire, when North Africa far down into the Sahara Desert, and especially along the Mediterranean coasts, was almost crowded with stone-built towns and possessed quite a number of magnificent cities, the public buildings of which — as may be seen by their surviving ruins — vied in archi- tecture and beauty with those of Italy. The water supply was then carefully preserved in reservoirs, and was utilised for the maintenance of a prosperous agriculture and horticulture. Roads traversed Algeria, Tunisia, and parts of Morocco in all directions. Wild elephants still existed and were frequently tamed and exported to Europe, whilst their ivory was an article of commerce. Much of Morocco, it is true, remained a savage country ; yet it does not seem to have been as markedly hostile to European penetration as at the present day, and they elected (at first an elderly man) to represent their interests in the government of these pirate States. “ Bey ” meant military commander. 174 VIEWS AND REVIEWS the forests of the Atlas furnished a good deal of timber to the Roman world. In Algeria and Tunis there were fewer swamps and arid tracts than there are now, and consequently the country was far more densely populated and seems to have had little or no malaria. In Algeria France has drained innumerable swamps and planted millions of hectares of tree- less plains and bare hillsides. The climate here and there has become more humid and therefore has made agriculture or stock rearing more possible or profitable ; and in a general way it is far more healthy for Europeans and natives than it was seventy years ago. There are many districts at the present day regarded as sanatoria which, in the remembrance of the writer of this article, were seriously unhealthy in 1880. Far down in the Sahara Desert artesian wells have tapped the underground water supply which percolates through so much of that seemingly hopeless area. This has led to the great increase in barley cultivation and in the growth of date palms, and consequently of the indigenous population of Berbers, Arabs, and Negroids. The extinction of the lion, finally achieved about 1888 — regrettable though it may be from a naturalist’s point of view — and the considerable diminution in numbers of the large panthers, the chitas, and hyenas, have also operated favourably on the keeping of live stock. The French have battled with the locusts on a heroic scale, and in many parts of Algeria this once constant plague has become nothing more than a tradition, a remembrance of the bad old times in the minds of the middle-aged or old. Districts EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 175 which I saw as blank, hopeless, sandy desert in 1880 were flourishing gardens or orchards when I revisited them in 1897-8 or in 19 11 — growing oranges, figs, dates, pomegranates, lentils, barley, lucerne, and caroubs. Good carriageable roads where not one carriageable road existed in 1830 have been made throughout Algeria to the extent of about 1900 miles and extending as far south as Wargla in the Sahara Desert. In Tunisia in 1880 there were about 150 miles of carriageable roads. At the present date this French protectorate has about 1800 miles of well-made roads over which horse- carriages, motors and bicycles can pass with ease and comfort. In the wilder regions of the Regency excellent rest-houses for natives and for Europeans — clean, comfortable, and safe, and with simple wholesome food for men and forage for beasts — are maintained by the Tunisian Government. In 1880 I was unable to travel anywhere in Tunis at any distance from the principal towns without an escort, special permission and special facilities. At the present day Tunisia is as safe and as open to tourists as France itself, while, of course, the same thing can be said not only of Algeria, but of all those frontier regions in the east and south of Morocco which are in French occupation. The beautiful and picturesque oasis of Figig in south-eastern Morocco, the reaching of which some twenty years ago would have been a feat almost deserving a minor reward of a geo- graphical society, and which would have occupied some three weeks from London or Paris, is now a steamer and railway journey from either of those capitals of no more than five or four days, and 176 VIEWS AND REVIEWS requires no special permission or any more foresight than the writing a day or two beforehand to the Hdtel du Sahara to secure rooms. 670 miles of railways have been constructed in Tunisia, and over 2000 miles in Algeria, and on the whole these rail- ways, if not as speedy, are actually more comfortable in accommodation than the railways of Sussex and Kent. No town of Algeria or Tunis is without its one or more hotels, and the food, accommodation, and moderate prices of these establishments are deserving of well-merited praise in the tourist world. In fact, if Marseilles were a better-organised port than it is, and the direct steamship lines between Marseilles, Algeria and Tunis provided swifter and larger boats, with better accommodation and better food, Algeria and Tunis should absorb a large proportion of those European tourists who between October and April travel in search of sunshine and flowers. A glance at commercial statistics will show how the trade of Europe and the United States has increased with French North Africa during the last thirty years. No Congo policy has been followed here. The land has not been taken away from the indigenes, who continue to possess their due proportion of it and who have long since come to feel a marked confidence in the justice of the French courts, or, as in Tunis, in their native tribunals, reformed and controlled as these are by French oversight. The position of the Jews has entirely changed since the arrival of the French. They are now on the same footing as Europeans, and consequently of late years have shown a marked EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 177 improvement in morale, in education, and in physique. Under the direct encouragement of France, something like 295,000 colonists of French descent exist in Algeria and are at last beginning to prosper.1 About 35,000 French men and women are now established in Tunis, in which country also Italian immigration instead of diminishing has increased since the establishment of the French protectorate and can now show a total of something like 84,000 colonists. There are also 11,000 Maltese living happily and safely in the same region. In Algeria there are 40,060 Italians and 10,000 Maltese, more especially in the eastern part, besides another 30,000 or so Italians and Maltese that have become French citizens and a part of the French-speaking community. In the western parts of Algeria there are 1 60,000 Spaniards, and another 40,000 colonists of Spanish descent who are naturalised French citizens. An increasing proportion of the Spaniards in Algiers are becoming French subjects, and their children, I have noticed, are bi-lingual, speaking French with as much fluency as Spanish. No matter what gibes may be cast by French and English at the somewhat barbarous manners of the Spaniards of Oran or the Italians of Bona, it is clear to the present writer that the descendants of these other Latin colonists are rapidly assimilating in character with those of French 1 In 1861, there were 112,229 French settlers in Algeria, and 80,517 Italians, Spaniards, Maltese, Germans, and Swiss — 192,746 European colonists as against about 650,000 in 1910. It is a typical British mistake to suppose that the French are not good colonisers, or to underrate the material value of the 340,000 French settlers now established in North Africa. 12 VIEWS AND REVIEWS 178 descent, and before more than one or two genera- tions are past will, together not only with the Jews, but even a proportion of the Berber population, become fused into a homogeneous French-speaking population of North Africa. The French of late have done much not only to realise the importance of the Berber element in North Africa and the great difference of character and value between the Berber and the Arab, but to bring home these differences to the Berbers them- selves and induce them, as far as their unhappy attachment to Islam permits, to throw in their lot with that of the European world in the future. In Tunis and in Western Algeria the principle of monogamy is spreading amongst the Berbers, always well inclined to it in principle ; for amongst the unspoilt Berber peoples woman holds a far higher position than among the Arabs or Turks. There is, of course, this qualification of the benefits which the civilised world has derived from the French work in Algeria and Tunis : that it has so far been purely selfish, the commerce of other countries than France being placed in as disadvantageous a position as possible where it comes into competition with the products and industries of France, except where protected by special treaty provisions. But this is a drawback which affects all trade with the French Empire and all trade with Germany and Austria- Hungary. However, as Germany is situated she was quite right to make a stand for Free Trade conditions in Morocco (only she must be as firm with Spain as with France in this respect). In regard to Algeria and Tunis, Germany has EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 79 nothing to say, since the present arrangements were recognised or not disputed by her many years ago : but she is loath to give up what claims she may possess to equality of treatment in Morocco without either marked compensation in other parts of the world or some clear understanding with France that if the French flag is to wave over Morocco the whole of that country is nevertheless to enjoy a free trade regime quite different to what prevails in Algeria and Tunis. £C Then,” say the Germans, “ under the pro- tection of the French flag we can perhaps become the strongest commercial Power in Morocco. We believe in that country and in its resources, and Germans prove to be very successful there as commercial agents.” On the other hand, those forces which are behind the French Government in the commercial world of France still dislike very strongly the abandonment of protection for French interests. They ask why France should go to the great expense in men and money of conquering and administering Morocco and maintaining law and order in Algeria and Tunis mainly for the benefit of the commerce of other nations. They declare that if the present restrictions in Algeria and Tunis were not in force (and as regards Tunis they would like these restrictions strengthened and amplified when existing commercial treaties come to an end) the bulk of the commerce would not be French, but would be British and Maltese, Italian or German.1 1 At present France and the French Empire do an annual trade with Algeria and Tunis of a combined approximate value of ,£31,000,000 (taking the figures of 1909 as a sample) : the German trade with French North Africa for the same annual period is only about ,£673,000 ; that of Italy about ,£1,400,000. The approximate value of the trade between the British Empire 1 80 VIEWS AND REVIEWS As regards British commerce with Algeria and Tunis, it has increased very considerably since the full establishment of French control ; and it might have multiplied with these countries at an even greater rate under a free trade regime ; still, we may be grateful for and sensible of the fact that it does so well under existing conditions. We are entitled to surmise that it will not fare badly when the French similarly rule Morocco. Much the same may be said in regard to the trade of Italy with French North Africa. As regards concessions : it strikes me from actual observation that there are not a few British concessionaire companies in Algeria and Tunis engaged in boring for oil, in digging phosphates, in lead, zinc, and iron mining operations and in varied manufactures. But more important than any foreign protest against French monopolies and privileges in North Africa is the provincial feeling arising in both Algeria and Tunis which is resenting with ever- increasing strength the holding in tutelage of those countries to French merchants and capitalists. This feeling is the more noteworthy since it is voiced and Algeria and Tunis for 1909 was ,£2,300,000, nearly twice as much as in 1880 ; British trade with Morocco for the year 1907 was about ,£1,714,000 in value ; French trade with Morocco for the same period was ,£1,635,000; German trade with Morocco for 1907 was ,£652,000. The total value of the trade of Morocco with the outside world in the year 1908 was approximately ,£5,600,000 in value. Yet Morocco has an area of about 219,000 square miles and a population of at least 5,000,000. The area of settled Northern Algeria (distinct in administration from Southern or Saharan Algeria) is 184,500 square miles, and its population is about 4,800,000 ; but after eighty years of French rule there, less than five millions of Algerians do a trade with the outside world of an annual value of about ,£31,500,000. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 8 1 chiefly by Frenchmen or colonists of French descent who are asking that Algeria and Tunis may have free trade and unfettered steam transport with all the world. Angry protests are being uttered as to the mauvais outillage of Marseilles as a port and the poor speed, poor accommodation, and other defects in the lines of French* steamers which connect the Algerian and Tunisian coasts with the South of France ; and when I was in North Africa in the early part of 1911 I noted with some surprise the exaggerated enthusiasm with which the French colonists of Tunis and Algeria w'elcomed in their Press the establishment or extension of German lines connecting North Africa with Genoa. I believe myself that what remains of protection and privilege for French commerce and French capital in Algeria and Tunis is on the road to extinction, and that these countries will prosper so greatly under a complete regime of free trade that not only will their loyalty to the French nation increase, but their very prosperity will indirectly enrich France in many ways, while it will greatly add to her power in Europe. Just as France is obliged to tolerate Spain on her left flank in Morocco, so for the last ten years she has been accustoming herself to the eventuality of an Italian occupation of Tripoli. Not long after the unity of the Kingdom of Italy was effected, the Italian Government began to take a great interest in the affairs of Tunis, towards which in 1871 and afterwards there had set in a marked emigration of Sicilians and Italians. Italy, however, lost all hope of bringing the Roman province of Africa (or, at any i82 VIEWS AND REVIEWS rate, its western portion) under her flag when the French protectorate was declared in 1 8 8 1 . Fearing to lose the Tripolitaine likewise after Germany had in the summer of 1 9 1 1 shown her desire for a foot- hold in North Africa, and certain Germans and Austrians had discussed the question of concessions in Tripoli to an Austro-German syndicate, Italy in September 1911 declared war suddenly on Turkey, and landed by degrees an army of 80,000 on the Tripolitan coast, afterwards annexing the Turkish provinces of Tripoli and Barka from the frontiers of Egypt to those of Tunis. The Ottoman Empire in reality had never properly asserted its ownership over Tripoli and Barka till 1835, 111 which year the dynasty of Karamanli pashas was dethroned ; and these North African provinces (otherwise threatened by Muhammad Ali of Egypt) were definitely incorporated in the Turkish Dominions in 1845, after ten years of guerilla warfare. So that what Turkey took by force she is losing by the arbitrament of force, and as she proved herself a bad steward when in possession,1 and chiefly valued Tripoli and 1 The sole and only use which Turkey has made of the Tripolitaine has been as a recruiting-ground for negro slaves. From this region caravan after caravan has found its way with arms and ammunition supplied from Turkey to devastate or assist in devastat- ing the regions of the Central Sudan in order that convoys of slaves might be sent across the desert for distribution over the Turkish Empire. Not a single one of the still discernible magnificent public works of the Roman Empire has been restored to utility, no fresh well has been dug along the desert route, and many an old water place has been allowed to crumble and disappear under the desert sands. Tripoli, as a town, contains a few very beautiful mosques, but these date back to the more or less Berber rule and civilisation of the Karamanli pashas ; the public buildings actually constructed by the Turks themselves being ugly or paltry. Morally speaking, Turkey has no claim whatever to the Tripolitaine. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 183 Barka for their access to the slave markets of the Sudan, she merits very little pity now that Cyrenaica and Leptis are once more to be ruled from Rome. For the honour of Europe and Christianity it is to be hoped that the Italy of the twentieth century will show herself a fit daughter of Rome, and produce soldiers and administrators, engineers, chemists, and agriculturists who will do for Tripoli and Cyrenaica, the Saharan hinterland and the Tibesti Mountains what France has already achieved in Algeria and Tunis, and British officials in Egypt and Nubia. At any rate, Italy, whether or no shp has made a false step, must now go on with the task to the bitter end at no matter what cost in men and money, for if she were to confess failure and withdraw, the results would be catastrophic throughout Africa and the Orient. The victorious expulsion of the Italians from North Africa by the Turks, Arabs, and Berbers would quite probably be followed by a native rising against British control in Egypt, by revolts against the French in Tunis and in Morocco, by an aggressive attitude towards Christians in Syria and Asia Minor, which would compel the intervention of the great Powers, and by similar movements in Nigeria, the Sudan, Arabia, Afghanistan, and India, such as would tax severely the resources of the British and French Empires. Nor would either Austria or Germany profit eventually by such a renaissance of Muhammadan independence in Asia Minor and Constantinople or in Mesopotamia ; and Russia would feel the effects in Central and Western Asia and in Northern Persia. It is very hard to have to write in this style 184 VIEWS AND REVIEWS against the 230,000,000 of people — many of them of Caucasian race1 — who profess the Muhammadan faith. Sixty millions of these people, physically speaking, are quite as well worthy of regard as the handsomest and most vigorous peoples of Europe. Some of them are of the same racial stocks as the Christian Europeans with whom they are in conflict at the present day : they are Goths, Italians, Greeks, Albanians, Circassians, and Slavs, whose forefathers have had Islam forced upon them as a compulsory religion, but who, though retaining in an improved form the physical beauty or superiority of the European, have the warped mentality of the Asiatic and the African. In India it may be said nearly without exception that the best-looking, strongest, most warlike, and in some directions most enter- prising element in the native population, and that which is the least fettered by foolish customs, is the Muhammadan. With the exception of 2,300,000 of Sikhs and 100,000 of Parsis, the really go-ahead, advancing tribes and peoples of that marvellous empire belong to the Muhammadan faith. Sixty -four millions of Muhammadans in India occupy a position of wholly disproportionate importance to the 210,000,000 of Hindus, though if a truthful aspect of the Indian problem is to be presented, it must also be mentioned that 2,300,000 Sikhs count in our purview of the future 1 It may be roughly computed that there are 230,000,000 Moslems at the present day, of whom about 80,000,000 in Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, and North-West India belong, more or less, to the Caucasian sub- species, 44,000,000 to the Dravidian mixed race, while 70,000,000 are Mongols, and 36,000,000 are negroes and negroids. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 8 5 of India for more than, let us say, 20,000,000 of Muhammadans. Nevertheless the loyalty, the friendship, the co- operation of the whole mass of the Muhammadan citizens of the Indian Empire — some 64,000,000 in number — is a most important asset and may well count for much in the cogitations of British statesmen when they weigh the advantages or disadvantages of siding with Turkey or against Turkey, or by an impeccable neutrality gaining no friend in either direction. Yet it would indeed be a pity to purchase the assured loyalty of the Muhammadan Indians by restoring anywhere the uncontrollable political pre- eminence of the Muhammadan religion, or by taking any step which should diminish the power for common action of Christianity against the non- Christian world. The only hope of ultimate re- conciliation between Christianity and Islam and between the raising of the peoples now Muhammadan to absolute equality, intellectual and social, with the leading Christian peoples, lies in “ the defecation of Islam to a pure transparency ” through which may penetrate the only real value yet discovered in religious development : the actual teaching of Christ and of some amongst His immediate disciples. The greatest foe of Islam is undenominational secular education, and at present this is impossible of attain- ment in any professedly Muhammadan school, college, or university. All human knowledge, especially the most marvellous developments of the human mind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have to be subjected to the intolerable sieve of the narrow mentality of Muhammad, an 1 86 VIEWS AND REVIEWS illiterate, uneducated, bandit-mystic of the seventh century a.c.1 The mind, the outlook and the enunciated principles of Muhammad and of those immediately around him during his lifetime and after his death are illustrated by the Koran. The Koran has been translated into English several times since the first version published by Sale in the eighteenth century,2 so that any one of my readers not content to accept my appraisement can read through the Bible of the Muhammadans for himself and judge of its merits as a sacred book. In the original Arabic it is written in a kind of doggerel verse scarcely superior in music, in clarity of utterance or beauty of thought to the crude translations by Burton in his Arabian Nights of the Arab poems woven into that miscellany (which is not to say that the Koran is without some passages of real poetic beauty). But the desire of Muhammad and of all other Arab poets of his period to end up each sentence with a rhym- ing syllable governs to a great extent the direction of the thought and the quality of the utterance. The Koran traditionally represents the words of Muhammad as heard and taken down by various 1 Objection may be taken to the author’s definition of Muhammad as a cc bandit-mystic .” Yet let any impartial student read the latest, most accurate, and not unsympathetic summary of the life of Muhammad in the nth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (besides the standard biographies of this religious reformer) and then ask himself if the term bandit-mystic is unfair. 2 Sale’s translation, first published in 1734, is rather a paraphrase and abridgement than a scrupulously faithful translation, such as that by E. M. Wherry in four volumes, finished in 1886. E. H. Palmer’s translation, in two volumes, published at Oxford in 1882, is a useful rendering. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 187 scribes, prominent among them a Christian Abyssinian slave. Muhammad was an entirely uneducated man so far as first-hand knowledge of the then existing literatures of the world was concerned, or any experience of the world outside the limits of Western Arabia. He derived his knowledge of the Hebrew Bible from oral information imparted by Arabian Jews, and his conceptions of Christian tenets from Ethiopian slaves. He was a man, if you will, of an original genius, and not without great thoughts and great ideas, even though he was probably unable to read and could barely write his name. But he was a dreamer and a self-deceived mystic, who, while on the one hand wanting to make a position for himself in Arabia, and, later on, to transform the successes of a bandit into the foundation of a kingdom, never- theless really desired to promulgate a new gospel to his Arab kinsmen and their slaves. Like many of his fellow-countrymen at that period, he was repelled by the puerilities of Greek and Egyptian Christianity, and was in no mind to adopt the negation of the flesh so strongly characteristic of the odious trans- formations of Christ’s Gospel which took place in North Africa and Syria under the influence of Greek, Persian and Syrian casuists. On the other hand, though greatly inclined towards Judaism, which at that date was receiving into its fold those North Africans and Arabians who were turning against Greek and Latin Christianity, he disliked the personal character of the Jew — that character which has so frequently in the history of the last two thousand years marred the spread of Jewish influence, often of a very noble and purifying nature, in sociology and 1 88 VIEWS AND REVIEWS religion. So Muhammad promulgated a religion which was neither Jewish nor Christian, but apper- tained mostly to the faith and teaching of the Jews. The Koran, like the book of Mormon, was an un- conscious parody of the Old Testament, combined with the first public utterance of Arab and Babylonian variants of the Jewish myths and genuine historical records. If the question could be submitted to the arbitra- tion of an international court composed of impartial agnostics (many of them nominal Christians, nominal Muhammadans, or religionless Japanese), I do not hesitate to say that the verdict would be that there were very few sentences in the Koran which deserved quotation or which shone with that striking, con- vincing beauty of truth and practical application which characterises — whether we wish to admit it or no — so much of the wording of the gospels and epistles on which the Christian faith is founded, or the Psalms and the prophetical and poetical utter- ances gathered together in the Hebrew Bible. If there is any gem of undoubted lustre in the Koran it is borrowed more or less from the sacred books of the Jews or the Christians, or, much more rarely, from the Magian religion of Persia. At its very best Muhammad’s teaching only inculcated a modified form of personal cleanliness, almsgiving to the poor, abstinence from wine, and honesty in trade. Incidentally, it led to some improvement in the treatment of children, as its influence abolished cruel customs of abandoning unwanted female children ; but its view of the position of woman was lower than that taken by the EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 189 Hebrew teachers, and far inferior to that expressed by Christianity. In Islam lustful man was to find for thirteen centuries a warrant for polygamy and an excuse for uncontrolled sexuality. The greatest disadvantage which attaches at the present day to Islam as a world force is the inferior position to which woman is relegated ; and as the woman is the mother of the man, so this unequal position of the sexes in religion and society inevitably influences the mentality of the man to whom the woman gives birth. The Jewish religion still assigns to woman an indefinite and scarcely honourable place, since women are excluded from the public functions of religion. But Muhammadanism is far worse in that respect, and it is very doubtful whether Muhammad believed or taught that women had souls equally with men. In a general sense they are excluded from the public manifestations of religion, except when they come forward to be married to a man or to be divorced from their husbands. It goes almost without saying that the whole story of the Koran and the bulk of its teaching are incompatible with the pronouncements of modern science. So also — a Muhammadan reader of these sentences may observe — are the earlier books (or the books which are assumed to be earliest in com- position) in the Hebrew Scriptures ; so likewise are most of the dogmas of Christianity, which, though finding little or no place or justification in the New Testament, nevertheless now form an integral part of almost all manifestations of the Christian faith. I admit these impeachments at once. But somehow or other Jews and Christians have found a way of 190 VIEWS AND REVIEWS evading the trammels of their religious beliefs where these, in process of time, grew to be inconvenient or out of harmony with the enlargement of man’s outlook and the firmly based revelations of science. The Roman Catholic Church has persecuted here and there, intermittently, the too daring speculators of the Middle Ages, and even of the later centuries down to the twentieth ; and yet this religion encouraged learning of a sound order, was not incompatible with the founding of astronomical observatories, anatomical schools, geographical, botanical, linguistic, and zoological research. The Popes of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries did much to encourage the exploration of Asia, America and Africa and to secure the publication of travellers’ reports. I should not like to argue that the Roman Church has always acted throughout its history with a twentieth-century outlook, or that it has not often checked the advance and freedom of scientific investigation, has not occasionally punished with imprisonment, torture, death, or social ostracism thinkers that were too advanced for the age or the area in which they lived. But similar cruelties and stupidities can be laid at the door of the Protestant branches of Christianity — Calvinists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians — who made a fetish out of the Hebrew Bible, who were just as much opposed — perhaps even more than the Latin Christians— to sanitary and social reform, while they attempted from time to time to strangle the arts, to introduce and to maintain a tyranny in the limitation of man’s pleasures which was nearly as bad as the intentions and accomplishments of the Wahhabi sect of the EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 1 9 1 Muhammadans. Yet the Roman Church from the sixteenth century onwards steadily set itself to dis- courage and to alleviate slavery ; it gave an enormous impetus to painting, sculpture, architecture, and music ; and it founded hospitals, encouraged the study of languages, created museums, and laid the foundations of the modern drama. From out of the Protestant Churches came such splendid achieve- ments in philanthropy as the work of the Moravian missionaries, of the Quakers, and of the Baptists — work which has really been the foundation of all modern reforms in social and international philan- thropic legislation. The Greek Church, indeed, has had a poor record beside the civilising work of Western Christianity. It wages no war against alcoholism, and it stimulates the persecution of the Jews. Yet Christian Russia, with all its drunken- ness, its political faults and shortcomings, stands on a much higher level of civilisation and well-being than Muhammadan Turkey. In short, judged by the test of output in the way of science and art, literature, material well-being, control of disease, sexual morality, public works, subdual of recalcitrant nature, can any comparison be sustained between the countries professing the Christian religion or governed by Christian nations and the lands which still remain more or less independent under the sway of Muhammadan rulers ? On these lines is there any sustainable plea of equality between Hungary and European Turkey, Spain and Morocco, Greece and Asia Minor, Italy and Tripoli, Afghanistan and British India, modern Persia and modern Caucasia ? The language of the 192 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Christian Magyars and that of the Muhammadan Turks are nearly related in origin, and the Magyars and Turks came from the same ethnic stock ; but in the course of history one became Christian and the other Muhammadan. Can any impartial critic maintain that the two peoples at the present day are on the same level of civilisation, or place alongside Hungarian achievements in art, music, architecture, literature, biological science, engineering and political government similar achievements on the part of Turkey ? I do not overlook the fact that when Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian Christianity was stifling science and killing all the arts but architecture, the Arabs, Persians and Berbers under the flag of Islam saved some branches of Greek and Roman culture from perdition, revived and extended Greek researches into medicine, chemistry, and mathematics, preserved some Roman notions of engineering and hydraulics, and developed from out of Byzantine architecture exquisite designs in building and in mural decora- tion. But it must be remembered that most of the great names in the golden age of Islam between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries were not those of people of Arab or Turkish descent, but of Jews, Persians, Berbers, Copts, Greeks and Italians, whose conformity with the Muhammadan religion was that of more or less unwilling converts, if indeed they did not by special favour retain the profession of Judaism or Christianity. The Arabs and Turks by degrees killed all that was noteworthy in Islamic culture. The Arabs have remained to this day as ignorant, arrogant, EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 193 and semi-barbarous as they were in the days of Muhammad. It is true that in contrast with naked and absolutely savage negroes they have appeared to be a civilising element in Tropical Africa, to which they have conveyed several useful domestic animals and a variety of cultivated plants, besides elementary notions of decency and comfort. But in matters of architecture, for example, the Arabs have done little or nothing to help Africa. The beautiful Saracenic architecture of the north was almost entirely de- veloped and spread by Copts, Berbers and Persians ; and it is only since the seventeenth century that this architecture has penetrated at all into the Sudan, the remarkable “Fula” (Songhai) style of building which prevails throughout Nigeria from Senegal to Lake Chad being of pre-Islam ic and possibly Egyptian origin. When the rule of the Arab in North Africa had come to an end (a change which really began to take place in the eighth century) the Islamised Berbers, with many checks and interrup- tions caused by Arab invasions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, revived the arts — especially archi- tecture— and civilised amenities of life till they had raised the North African kingdoms between Tunis and Morocco to a state of well-being and efficiency nearly equal to that of contemporary Spain and Italy ; just as Persia had a remarkable revival under the Sufi dynasty of Shia Muhammadans. But in both cases the Turks — more especially the Ottomans — came on the scene and spoilt everything. Greek, Latin and Slavic culture throughout the Balkan Peninsula, the Greek promontories and islands, was drowned in blood by the Turks during the fifteenth 194 VIEWS AND REVIEWS and sixteenth centuries. In the same period the revived civilisation and art of Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia (developed by the Persians, Armenians, Seljuks, Circassians, the European crusaders, and the Genoese and Venetian traders) were laid in ruins by the same bloody hand. The history of Egypt from the Turkish assumption of sovereignty in 1518 to the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 is practically a blank so far as human achievements go, a miserable period, during which public works fell into ruin, population de- creased by millions, and the desert gained steadily on the cultivated land. Equally dreary is the history of Greece under Turkish rule, from the time when the Venetians were driven out of the Greek islands and the Morea to the proclamation of independence in 1821. The same can be written of Servia under the Turks, of Bulgaria and Mace- donia, of Syria (until Napoleon rudely called the attention of Europe to that historic land), of Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, and Asia Minor. What happened to Algeria, Tunis and Tripoli after they were conquered by Turkish pirates and became dependencies of the Turkish Empire ? Complete alienation from contem- porary advance in Mediterranean civilisation (except as regards shipbuilding), a relapse into semi-savagery of life, a further decay of irrigation works, a steady increase in the destruction of forests, a diminution in horticulture, and a serious advance of the desert sands. It is true that Morocco fared little better under the Sharifian dynasty of negroid sultans, but Morocco has been a semi-savage country from prehistoric times onwards, large portions of it never having EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 195 been conquered or assimilated by the Romans, Arabs, or Islamised Berbers. Yet in some respects independent Morocco prior to the French conquest of Algiers in 1830 remained more in touch with European civilisation than the adjoining parts of North Africa ruled by Turkish pashas, colonels, and soldiers. Tripoli, like Tunis, had in the early eighteenth century detached itself almost completely from Turkish domination under dynasties which, though of Turkish origin, had in course of time and intermarriage become practically native to the soil. Under the Karamanli princes Tripoli in the early part of the nineteenth century entered into very friendly relations with Britain, and through this friendliness British expeditions were enabled to penetrate easily across the Sahara into Bornu and Nigeria. Islamic fanaticism still attains its culmination in the western and eastern extremes of the Muham- madan world ; in Morocco and in Afghanistan. In Tunis, perhaps owing to the deep-seated influence of Rome in this most Roman part of Africa, there has never been quite the same hatred of Christian Europe and Christian civilisation as elsewhere in North Africa; and since 1881 the peaceful pene- tration of France and her wise and well-planned measures for the administration of the country and its restoration to prosperity, have been little, if at all, opposed or interfered with by Muhammadan fanaticism. But in Algeria the struggle has been long and obstinate and is still not at an end, though there has been a perceptible amelioration since the beginning of the twentieth century. Mons. Edmond Doutte in his interesting work on Morocco, 196 VIEWS AND REVIEWS published in 1905,1 points out that, in spite of optimism based on consciousness of well-doing, Frenchmen would be rash in concluding that their presence in Algeria or Morocco was really desired by the Muhammadan natives of those countries, still less that there was any widespread wish on the part of the Moroccans for a French protectorate. He points out, for example, how unpopular for a long time was the law of compulsory vaccination in Algeria, though its steady maintenance has almost extirpated smallpox from that region. The Algerians believed it to be a crafty plan for sterilis- ing them sexually and thus arresting their increase ! Though if they had glanced at statistics they would have seen that under French rule the native popula- tion increased from 2,340,000 in 1861 104,418,000 in 1907. The laws for the establishment of per- sonal property, for the registration of births, deaths, marriages, and testamentary dispositions, for taking a census of the population, for establishing insur- ance and mutual-benefit societies — in fact, every measure to increase the welfare of the masses — were viewed at first and for long with the profoundest suspicion. Even now, in such of the Muhammadan schools of Algeria as are not under the control of the French Government, the pupils are taught systematically that the Christian is trying to warp their social life into a denial of Islam and conse- quently is bringing them within danger of Hell-fire in the next world. Yet Mons. Doutte has written his definite conviction “ that a slow but sure movement is growing which draws us and our Moslem fellow- 1 Merrakech , published by the Comite du Maroc, Paris. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 197 citizens in Algeria together into a community of feeling, and that this movement is undoubtedly strengthened by the good administrative measures of recent years. It is a movement which cannot be hastened by impatient advances on our part, nor can it be seriously delayed by the existing fanaticism of middle-aged Muhammadans, but it is as irresistible as the progress of a glacier. . . . Actually our entry into Algeria, by the suspicion and terror of the foreigner which it aroused, hastened or accentuated the Islamising of not a few Berber peoples and tribes who had hitherto almost remained in a pagan state, while it sharpened the fanaticism of the Muham- madans in the great towns of Algeria and Morocco.” My own impression is that Muhammadan fanati- cism is distinctly lessening both in Tunis and Algeria, while the Christian propaganda is becoming more urbane and less insistent. The mass of the people in the towns of northern Tunis and Algeria are drifting towards an easy-going agnosticism which is entirely robbed of hostility towards the Christian faith, and which leaves out of Muhammadanism all that is fanatical, irksome, or foolish in precept or custom. Unfortunately in Algeria the de- Muhammadanised natives are taking not merely to the drinking of wine — the local wine does no one any harm — but of a bad French brandy which, despite protests from the local authorities, is being almost thrust on them by the action of the French Government — a government which is too much under viticultural influence. But Muhammadan food tabus are likewise disappearing. Pork finds its way into the Algerian dietary disguised as 198 VIEWS AND REVIEWS “ wild boar,” the Berbers having always refused to believe that the meat of the wild boar could have been seriously condemned by Muhammad. Costume is also being Europeanised. The Turkish breeches are being displaced by the tight blue cotton trousers of Southern Europe. In fact, many Algerians now dress just like the peasants of southern France, with the difference that they wear a tarbush or fez, or wind a white cloth sparsely round their heads. In some districts a distinct fusion of races is taking place, and this also has begun in the Regency of Tunis. The fact is that undistinguished by a special national costume there is not very much to differentiate a Berber man or woman in physique, appearance, and colour from the inhabitants of southern France : both alike are largely of Iberian stock. Dress a Kabail woman of Tunis or Algeria in French clothes, and you would consider her a comely Frenchwoman, coming from Provence or Languedoc. No civilised man or woman wishes to revive any idea of religious persecution or disability, except it may be in regard to such religions or religious tenets as by international opinion are voted to be inde- fensibly cruel and harmful to human development. There is some good in Islam and there is a great deal of nonsense and rubbish attached to Christianity. No European Power that has achieved predominance over a country essentially Muhammadan has, since the eighteenth century, persecuted Muhammadans by forbidding polygamy or compelling them to abandon any of their rites or ceremonies. Muham- madans are free to travel all over Christendom. EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND ISLAM 199 They may without danger, even without insult, enter any Christian place of worship. Can the same be said for the holy places of Islam whither at the present day no Christian may go except in great personal danger and disguised as a Muhammadan ? What about the attitude of the Muhammadan Egyptians towards the Copts of Egypt, the Turkish treatment of Christian Armenians, Christian Syrians and Macedonians ? We can never hope to make Muhammadans Christians by employing force in any form, even by the application of conditions of social disability. Perhaps, indeed, Islam may never precisely range itself under the banner of Christ, just as the Jews will go on for a century or so longer pretending to ignore the greatest Jew in history. Similarly, during the same period much that is excrescent, outworn, pagan, and open to doubt, will drop off from European Christianity. At the rate at which the world is now advancing all civilised peoples in the Old and New Worlds may be agreed fifty years hence on a common basis of religion, the Service of Man ; but in the meantime it behoves Muhammadans throughout the world to look closely into the tenets and practice of their faith, and ask themselves whether Islam has conduced to the ad- vancement of their forefathers and to their own present political and social well-being, and whether — however superior it may be to the moonshine of Buddhism and the nightmare nonsense of Brahman- ism, the ancestor-worship of China, or the fetish idolatry of Africa — it is a religion which can maintain a people at the same high level of civilisation as that which exists throughout Christendom. CHAPTER VIII RACIAL PROBLEMS Compared to other mammals, Man has been the greatest of colonisers for something like half a million years, possibly longer. Each fresh revela- tion of the New Bible — the Book of the Earth — which is being painfully construed from the reading of geological, palaeontological, archaeological evidence, puts back in time the period at which the perfect man was evolved from an ape-like progenitor, till we are now forced to think that the human genus must be a million years old, and the human species to which all existing races belong — Homo sapiens — have been in existence since the end of the Pliocene period, perhaps five hundred thousand years ago, possibly more. All the faint indices we can discern still point to Asia, Syria, or possibly India, as the region in which the genus Homo was born from out of some anthropoid type like the Pithecanthropus or Ape-man of Java ; but the most recent researches would suggest that Homo primigenius , the Man of Neanderthal, of the Pleistocene Rhine valley, France, Belgium, and Austria, or at any rate his ancestor, the Man of Gibraltar, first colonised Europe and North Africa from his birthplace in 200 RACIAL PROBLEMS 201 South-west Asia. Meanwhile, incomplete, arrested Pithecanthropus straggled eastward and got as far as Java, where seemingly he was afterwards followed up by Homo sapiens and exterminated.1 The Man of Neanderthal has not so far been traced to Britain, or to Italy, nor have his remains been found as yet anywhere but in Central Europe ; yet in the famous Gibraltar skull we seem to have the outline of a creature which may have been near the ancestral form both of Homo primigenius and Homo sapiens , with a very big nose, however (quite un-negrolike in that feature), and a brain lower in capacity and perhaps in structure than that of the Neanderthaloids, and inferior to the average brain of any existing human race at the present day, though the Veddahs of Ceylon and certain Australoids come near it in smallness of size, and in some individuals occupy a more lowly cranial development. Apparently Neanderthaloid Man became a specialised form which coexisted in Central Europe with the “ Galley Hill” or generalised type of Homo sapiens (who must have resembled strongly the extinct Tasmanians, and have had Australoid and Negro features in his skull). The Neanderthaloids developed large brains, but they must have been hideous-looking savages, with a bowed, shambling gait, short-necked, pulled-back 1 The evidence collected by the expedition of Frau Selenka in 1907-8 makes it seem possible that true Man, probably of an Australoid type, coexisted for a time in Java with Pithecanthropus , who no doubt outstayed his welcome at the hands of Nature, as the existing anthropoid types have done. For notes on this question see Dr Arthur Keith’s Ancient Types of Man, 1911. Keith considers Pithecanthropus to belong to the genus Homo . A. W. D. Robertson ( Proc \ Roy. Soc. of Edinburgh, vol. xxxi.) thinks Pithecanthropus “ decidedly nearer the anthropoid apes.” 202 VIEWS AND REVIEWS heads, eyes glowing under projecting, bristling brows, long arms, and no doubt hairy bodies. Probably it was war to the death between the two species, though it is not impossible that the women of Primigenius were sometimes captured and taken to wife by Sapiens, and that mixed races arose through the mingling of the two species ; but this must remain a moot point till we can decide mathematically what constitutes “ specific ” difference, and whether any two valid species of mammals produce hybrids which in their turn are fertile. Personally, I think there is little doubt on this point. Take the case of the oxen, for example : what could constitute more clearly a specific difference than the gap between buffaloes, bibovine, bisontine, and taurine oxen ? Yet all these forms readily interbreed, and their offspring again are fertile (as has been proved repeatedly in the London Zoological Gardens) : so much so that the bison of America have been revivified by the introduction of taurine blood. Again, jackals and wolves will breed with dogs, and their offspring again prove capable of carrying on a mixed race as an independent type, or of fusing once more into either of the parent stems. The same thing occurs between the quite distinct small cats of Asia and Europe and the cats of Africa (Felts catus and its allies arid Fells maniculata ), and from such inter- mixture have arisen the many breeds of domestic cat. So also, I think, has it been with various species of sheep — mostly extinct — so is it indeed to-day with allied species of wild sheep and wild goats. And this intermingling of species — a fact which is too much overlooked by biologists — has, RACIAL PROBLEMS 203 to my thinking, not only accounted for bringing into existence several clearly defined, and now quite separate species of goose, duck, pheasant, antelope, wild dog, and monkey, but may have permitted the two divergent branches of the human stem — Homo primigenius and Homo sapiens — to mingle their blood and produce persistent types which have been great colonisers. Either such a hybrid, or a very early form of Homo sapiens like the Galley Hill man, overran Europe and the Mediterranean basin (surviving in an attenuated form in the Mogods of north-west Tunisia; also in Sardinia, here and there in Alsace and Germany, in Ireland, in Russia), and pushed on through Asia till it outran Pithecanthropus and reached the Australasian region, where it survives to-day more or less mixed with the Negro, in the Australoid and Melanesian. From the basal type of Homo sapiens must also have arisen the very specialised Negro, whose place of origin, like that of the human genus, seems to have been southern or south-western Asia. Negroids had penetrated to France at least thirty thousand years ago, and thence apparently to western Britain and southern Ireland. From the early skulls of Algeria, it would seem also that North Africa, and, it may be, southern Spain, became in time a domain of the Negro, who probably absorbed or displaced any antecedent Neanderthaloids. Similarly, Arabia — possibly also Egypt — had a Negro popula- tion at one time, somewhat of the Bushman type ; and, generalised, Asiatic negroes (historically known as Elamites — the modern Laris) undoubtedly popu- lated southern Persia. From India spread out the 104 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Negritos over Burma and Malaysia to the Philippines and New Guinea, the Burmese negroes finding a last refuge in the Andaman archipelago, anciently a peninsula stretching out from Lower Burma. (There is, however, much negrito blood in the modern Burmese and Annamese.) The White man — it is perhaps better to call him Caucasian, since he may only have won his way to whiteness of skin within the last fifty thousand years — almost certainly originated in Europe : quite possibly in Russia, which country Dr Arthur Keith regards as a great breeding ground of racial types. Indeed, when in these chapters I venture to refer to the “ Russian ” variety of white man, I mean that prevailing and usually handsome type of central and western Russia which seems to occupy in physical features a median position between the blond Nordic man, the long-nosed Armenian, and the oval-faced Iberian. Prior to his evolution, Europe seems to have been inhabited by races that were “ Proto- Caucasian ” — of Tasmanian or Melanesian affinities, like the Galley Hill and Brttnn 1 men, or, much later, of Mongoloid and Amerindian relationships like the tall Cro-Magnon race. The Cro-Magnon people of central and southern France, who no doubt succeeded the Negroids of the Grimaldi type, were in many aspects like the Caucasian, and yet in the shape of the skull and face bones recall the taller Mongolians of north central Asia and the Amerindians (Red Indians) of North America. Traces of such tall Mongoloid tribes linger to-day in the populations of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, and the VBriinn in Moravia, Austria. RACIAL PROBLEMS 205 Indian borderland. They differ from the Nordic (Aryan) and Iberian (Mediterranean) peoples in being far less hairy about the face and body. The sometimes remarkable hairiness of both the blond and dark-haired Europeans, Berbers, Syrians, and northern Arabs is not improbably a legacy from the Galley Hill or Tasmanianesque ancestor of 100,000 years ago, who himself derived it from the progenitor of Homo sapiens. The tall Cro-Magnon people may also have penetrated Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, and thence permeated the Hamitic populations of ancient Arabia (the ancestors of the dynastic Egyp- tians) and East Africa, imparting to them at once the element of tall stature and smooth, hairless bodies. The Caucasus region seems, like Germany and Russia, to have been another fertile breeding ground of racial types. Here were perhaps engendered the ancestors of the dark-haired, yellow-skinned Mukenaians, of the Lydians and Etruscans ; and also of those Dravidian invaders of India and Persia, whose languages to-day evince faint, far-off sugges- tions of affinity with the isolated, class-governed 1 Lesgian group of the south-west Caucasus. From this district likewise may have come the early civilisers of North Africa, the ancestors on one side (the other being negroid) of the Fula and similar pristine white invaders of Mauretania, Egypt, and the Sahara, who introduced into West and Central Africa the class and concord families of African speech — Temne, Wolof, 1 Namely, having the nouns divided into classes or categories with appropriate pronouns and concord : categories which are quite unconnected with sex distinctions. These “class” languages of the Caucasus, India and Africa do not possess sexual gender in their pronouns and syntax. 206 views and reviews Fula, Bantu, Kordofan, Nilotic, Hottentot, Masai, etc. Certain French students of African philology- think that the long- established Libyan- Hamite family of languages were preceded in North Africa and perhaps Egypt by a “ white man’s ” language of the class and concord type akin to Fula. The evidence they adduce is very slight, but the idea is not an improbable one. From the same direction — the Caucasus — seem to have come the ancestors of the Iberians, the Libyan-Hamites, and of the allied Semites. Syria (it is thought) was at one time occupied by a people of Libyan speech and affinities — the Amorites — who passed into northern Egypt, and so westward to Mauretania, Spain, and the Sahara. In Arabia the Libyan family probably differentiated into Libyans (Berbers) and Hamites (ancestors of the dynastic Egyptians, Galas, Bisharin, Hadendowa, etc.). Libyans and Hamites were closely followed up by the allied Semites, who took possession of Mesopotamia and Arabia, who turned the Libyans eventually out of Palestine and Midian, and who frequently invaded Egypt, in prehistoric as well as in historic times. All these peoples were emphatically white men, except after they — the Hamites and Semites — had mingled in Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt with Mongoloids, Negroids, and Dravidians. The dynastic Egyptians, who seem to have come from south-west Arabia and to have entered Egypt from northern Galaland, were a particularly fine race of noble appearance, even if their skin colour had been darkened by the absorp- tion of some small element of the Negro in very ancient times. Egyptian and Hamitic influence RACIAL PROBLEMS 207 spread from about ten thousand years ago widely over Eastern Africa, and reached by degrees the very heart of the continent, perhaps even extending along the eastern coast down into Mashonaland as far as the river Sabi. Even after the Christian era had begun and Egypt proper had long lain supine and unenter- prising under the spell of Grasco-Roman culture, the influence of old Egypt was penetrating across the Sudan from the White Nile to Bornu and Lake Chad, to the Shari and Benue, to the Niger and even to Senegambia. The effects of these trading caravans from Egypt and Nubia, and the adven- turous journeys of run-away soldiers, criminals, slave-traders from about 300 b.c. onwards, reacted profoundly on African affairs, introducing oxen, goats, sheep, fowls, and Egyptian food crops, and the working of iron to the knowledge of the Sudanese negroes, and bringing about tribal movements which convulsed the southern third of Africa and the basin of the Niger, and which led amongst other things to the great Bantu invasions of Central and Southern Africa. The Libyans similarly spread themselves over North Africa and the Sahara, driving southward the preced- ing Caucasian peoples (such as the Fula), but also absorbing both Fula and Negroids to some extent ; for the ancient “ nigrification ” of North Africa must never be overlooked as a factor in its race formations. Libyan-Hamites and Semites have between them the bond of a common language family ; for although the difference in syntax and even in word-roots between the two groups is very profound, they possess sufficient features in common to make it 208 VIEWS AND REVIEWS certain that ten or more thousand years ago they might be traced back to a common parentage perhaps in some part of Asia Minor. One such feature characteristic of both Semitic and Hamitic speech is the dividing of nouns into two classes, masculine and feminine, and of associating the consonant “ t ” with the feminine gender (the concord, the pronouns, are all indicated by a syllable formed with “ t ” and a vowel, or by “t” alone).1 In the recognition of sexual gender — that is to say, the dividing of noun- concepts into two or three classes — those that were male, those that were female, and those that were neuter (though there is practically no conception of a neuter class in the Semitico-Hamitic tongues) — they resembled the Aryan group of white men’s languages. But it is a mistake to attribute exclusively to these two important speech families this feature of sexual gender. It is also known to the Nilotic-Negro family, especially the Masai group, and again appears in an unclassified Sudanese language, the Bongo, to say nothing of the Hausa and Musgu, which have probably borrowed the concept from the Hamitic or Libyan languages ; or the far- away Hottentot of South-West Africa ; 2 and there are dim reflections of this sexual discrimination in the Bantu. Only in the Nilotic and Bantu tongues the feminine particle is never associated with /, but is na (and in Bantu, also, ka). It is further noteworthy that there is a sexual gender-discrimination in some 1 In course of time the t has sometimes changed to h or z. 2 The phonology of Hottentot is Bushman, as are certain word- roots. The numerals are related to unclassified East African tongues ; but the syntax, concord, genders, and suffixes recall the Hamitic languages of North-East Africa, RACIAL PROBLEMS 209 Papuan tongues of South-East New Guinea, and per- haps other Papuan or Melanesian languages, and that the feminine is usually indicated by the syllable na. Whilst the repeated invasions and general per- meation of Africa by Caucasian or semi-Caucasian peoples were taking place between — let us say — fifteen thousand to one thousand years ago, similar mouldings of Asia were also being effected by the Caucasian races. As regards Northern and Central Asia, the movement eastwards of the European may have begun earlier than the penetration of Africa. A Proto-Caucasian type (the Ainu) has been left behind in Sakhalin, Northern Japan, the Kurile islands, and has left traces of its former presence in Korea and Northern China. There is little doubt in my own mind that these primitive Caucasians did not stop at Kamshatka, but crossed over by the Aleutian chain of islands into Southern Alaska and expanded over British Columbia, till at last they had again added a Caucasian element to that most ancient hybrid between Mongoloid and Caucasian which is represented in varying degrees by the Amerindian peoples of the New World. Proto-Caucasians mingled early with Negroids and Australoids, and laid the foundations of the principal races of India before these were further Caucasianised by the arrival of the Aryans three or four thousand years b.c. They also pushed south- wards through China, down into the great Malay island of Sumatra, and here or hereabouts en- gendered that remarkable Polynesian race which not only spread itself over many of the Malay islands, and by a mingling with the Negro formed the 210 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Papuan, but colonised all the Polynesian islands, including New Zealand, and may quite possibly have reached Central or Southern America in its adventurous voyages, thereby bringing to the New World some of that Neolithic civilisation invented by the white man. In short, in our dim readings of the past history of man, the Caucasian sub-species — a very ancient but not an unmixed type, composed mainly of an Australoid stock mixed with Mongol, Negroid, and Amerindian strains — seems over and over again to have been the world’s redeemer, regenerator, in- ventor, conqueror, prophet, and teacher ; to have walked with God before any other human race cared about religion ; to have realised and wrestled with the devil of recalcitrant Nature, instead of succumb- ing to her cruelties of frost and drought, her snares of gluttony and lust, her trials of hunger, her Circe- like temptations to forsake the heights and revert to the placid animalism of the tropical lowlands. Caucasian man in his restless wanderings over the world has been unable to leave alone the other sub- species of Homo sapiens , but has thrust himself into their homes and hordes, sired their children, mingled his blood with theirs, till at the present day there are very few negro tribes absolutely pure of Caucasian intermixture, and not many Mongolian races without some element of the European man in their composition. This Caucasianising of the world has had its fluctuations, its failures and retreats, and its repeated periods of renewed emigrations. One such period has been in progress since the fifteenth century, RACIAL PROBLEMS 21 I entirely changing the fate of Asia, Australasia, Africa, and America. We can also see that there were great racial movements throughout the world between 200 and 800 a.c., and again about 400-200 b.c., 2000 b.c., 7000-6000 b.c., and perhaps 10,000 b.c. This last suggested date might be coincident with Neolithic civilisation leaving its original home in Eastern Europe or Western Asia, and extending its cult of the Stone, its arts and industries, domestic animals and cultivated plants from Ireland to Japan and Easter Island, from Sweden to the Sahara. From out of all these movements have arisen the Racial problems of the twentieth century. I. First in the list comes the question of Racial Superiority. Is there a “ superior ” race of man dominating the earth at the present day ? In the opinion of most anthropologists there is ; and this superior race is the White Man of Europe and of recent European Colonies in the other Continents. We may take it that there are to-day four im- portant sub-specific divisions of the one species, Homo sapiens. The White, or Caucasian ; the Yellow, or Mongolian (to which last may be re- ferred the Amerindians and Malays, though the Amerindians display undoubted signs of ancient hybridism with the White stock) ; the Brown mixed races — Hamites, Dravidians of India and Ceylon, Malagasy, Melanesians and Polynesians ; and the Negro, or Black sub-species. To these divisions might be added some two hundred thousand Austra- loids of Ceylon,* Australia, and some of the Melanesian islands, who represent very nearly the basal form of Homo sapiens and the Eolithic men of 212 VIEWS AND REVIEWS Europe in the early Pleistocene. But these surviving Australoids, precious as they are to the scientific anthropologist for their affinities with primeval man, count for too little in the world’s future history to be worth discussing from the political standpoint. They will either die out, or they will fuse into the Brown or Black groups. The Mongol-Amerindian division of Yellow- skinned men leads in numbers, for it may be roughly calculated at 612,000,000(586,000,000 Mongoloids in Asia, 16,000,000 Amerindians, and about 10.000. 000 European Mongoloids). The Whites, or Caucasians, of Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas follow next, and amount to about 570.000. 000. There are some 300,000,000 hybrid Brown types, such as the Southern Moors, Tuaregs, Teda, Egyptians, Abyssinians, Somalis, the bulk of the Dravidian inhabitants of India and Ceylon, the Polynesians, and the peoples of Madagascar ; and lastly, there are approximately 135,000,000 Negroes and Negroids (109,000,000 in Africa, 24,500,000 in the Americas, and 1,500,000 in Southern Asia and Oceania).1 The Negro does not make a bad fourth in these divisions, for his 135,000,000 are by no means a negligible quantity as a world-force, and count for more at present in world-politics than the 433.000. 000 of Chinese. The Amerindian tribes, or aborigines of America (excepting the Eskimo, a primitive Mongolian race), partake almost of the nature of hybrids, being certainly the result of an ancient fusing between the 1 These figures are, of course, only careful guesses based on such statistical information as is available, RACIAL PROBLEMS 213 Proto-Caucasian and the Proto-Mongol, with a pre- ponderance of Mongolian characteristics and an evident, though as yet unexplained, relationship with the Polynesians, Malays, Dayaks, and other similar Mongolians or Caucasian hybrids of the Malay Archipelago. (It is interesting, by the by, from both an anthropological and political standpoint, to note the readiness with which the Chinese and Japanese immigrants into North-west, Central, and South America fuse maritally with the Amer- indian aborigines, as though both stocks felt in- stinctively their underlying affinities. In Yucatan, Guatemala, British Honduras, the Chinese are in- fusing new vigour, physically and mentally, into those Maya Indians, whose ruthless treatment under the closing years of Porfirio Diaz’ rule was a blot on that great Mexican’s administration.) The White, or Caucasian, division is at present divided into two main camps, almost completely severed by religious prejudices ; namely, those who are, or profess to be, Christians, and those who are Muhammadans, Buddhists, or Hindus. There are so few Buddhists or Hindus belonging emphatically to the White race, that for all practical purposes we may consider the Caucasian opponents in thought and practice of the Christian white men to be of the Muhammadan religion. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the Jews all over the world have made common cause with the Christians. In countries of high - culture, such as most parts of Europe, North America, Algeria, and South Africa, the Jews have become insensibly little else than Unitarian Christians, who are rapidly fusing into the 214 VIEWS AND REVIEWS national community of the countries they inhabit, becoming very English in England, very American in the United States, typically French in France, indistinguishably Italian in Italy, Teuton in Germany, and Hungarian in Hungary. Opposed — I fear, doggedly and bitterly — to the thought and action and the ways of life of some 510.000. 000 of white Christians, are about 64.000. 000 white Muhammadans in Turkey-in- Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, Arabia, Syria, Circassia, Russia, Persia, Tartary, Afghanistan, and Northern India. The natural leaders of these 64,000,000 recalcitrants are 12,000,000 of Turks in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. These Turks, once mainly of the Mongol race, have long since (like their kindred in language, the Magyars and Finns) become white “ Europeans,” and consist very largely of Iranian, Armenian, Gothic, Circassian, Greek, Slav, and Italian elements, with very little of the Tatar left in their ethnic composition. With the exception of about 4,000,000 of blond “ Nordic ” Turks in Europe and Western Asia Minor (the descendants mostly of Thracian, Gothic, and Slav tribes who became Islamised), and a few blond Berbers of Morocco, it will be noted that all other white Muhammadans belong to various sec- tions of the Mediterranean, or dark-haired, brown- eyed group of the Caucasian sub-species, and that this religion has found very few supporters among the Nordic, or Alpine peoples ; the fact being that the shaping and the success of the faith of Islam were due to an unconscious revolt by the Southern Mediterranean folk against the overbearing attitude RACIAL PROBLEMS 215 and oppressively orderly civilisation of the European. Although the marked scission between the two great sections of the White Race did not begin till the success of the Muhammadan movement in the seventh century, a.c., the germs of this dissidence were there long before, and were probably created largely by the breach of the Bosporus and Hellespont and the Straits of Gibraltar, which separated to some extent the White men of Europe from those of Africa and Asia. This severance in sympathies was further manifested in the wars between Greeks and Persians, Carthaginians and Romans, Romans and Numidians and Mauri, Romans and Jews, Romans and Parthians. At the present day these 64,000,000 of Muham- madan White men almost require, for ethical and political reasons, to be ranked apart as a separate division of the Caucasian sub-species, so diametrically opposed are they (with the exception, perhaps, of some Syrians and of the Indian Muhammadans) to the social customs, religious ideas, marriage laws, dietary, and dress of the Christian Whites. These non-Christian white peoples — Berbers, Libyans, Arabs, Syrians, Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Persians, and Afghans — melt almost insensibly into the heterogeneous Brown races of Northern Africa and India ; and may, to some extent, in the future strive to induce the latter to make common cause with them against the never-ceasing advance of Europe. These Brown races come nearest to the White man in physical beauty, strength, enterprise, and mentality ; and are, of course, hybrid types per- meated anciently by the white element in varying degrees. 2l6 VIEWS AND REVIEWS A dogmatic statement that the White, or Caucasian, sub-species is superior to the other variants of Homo sapiens requires some definition and justification before it can be allowed to pass. Superior in what, and in how many degrees ? (1) In Brain development. The average (relative) size and weight of the White man’s brain is a little greater than it is among the Japanese, Chinese, and Eskimo, who represent the “ brainiest ” among the Yellow peoples ; much greater than among Negroes and Australoids, and many of the Brown races, except the civilised peoples of India, who in brain develop- ment are almost on a par with Europeans and white Americans. Apart, however, from material tests of brain bulk, there is the indirect proof of the mental superiority enjoyed by the White man in his literature and science, his inventions and discoveries. (2) In Physical development. The White man, especially of the Nordic variety, is, when averages are taken, taller and stonger than any other division of the human species. As regards stature he is vied with here and there by the tallest negro tribes, by Polynesians, and North and South American Indians. It may be even that no White community or clan of a hundred thousand individuals can match in average height of men and women the Turkana of Lake Rudolf (East' Africa), the Madi people of the Lado province, or the Ba-ila of the Shukulumbwe district in Northern Rhodesia. But against these exception- ally tall negroes (in some tribes of whom there is evidence of ancient Caucasian intermixture, through the Hamite) must be set many millions of short- statured black men, just as tall Amerindians of RACIAL PROBLEMS 217 Central North America or of Patagonia and Chile are far exceeded in number by the short Amerindians of Central and South America. The tall Polynesians are partially of ancient White descent, as are the splendid-looking Sikh and Panjabi soldiers of the Indian Army, coming from North-West India. The weight-raising strength and muscular develop- ment of the White race throughout the world probably attain a higher average than those of the other divisions of the human species. The stature, physical development, and weight and size of brain in their womankind is markedly superior likewise : and I believe it will be found, on a careful examina- tion of such statistics as exist, that the disproportion in size and brain-power between men and women in the White race is less than in the other sub-species or varieties, while as regards physical beauty, it is really only amongst the White people of the world that the women are more comely than the men. Amongst the savage races the women are almost invariably ugly and ill-formed. This statement brings us to a phase of superiority in the White race which is perhaps the most evident, and yet the most difficult and delicate to assert : its supremacy in regard to physical and, most of all, facial beauty, as judged by aesthetic canons which are really common to all races of mankind, in spite of stories to the contrary. The man or woman in any Yellow, Brown, or Black race who is locally regarded as good-looking ox handsome nearly always strikes the European observer likewise as being at any rate relatively handsome as compared with his or her fellows ; while any specially good-looking White 2l8 VIEWS AND REVIEWS man or woman will as much appeal to the fancy and admiration of savages, or people of non-European races, as to his or her fellow-countrymen. All over the world, in some cases openly, in others un- consciously or grudgingly, white people are admired and envied by the coloured races, not only for their white skin, but for the shape of their features. It is true that the Chinese may affect to jeer at them, and very rightly to caricature whiskers, green eyes, red noses, and long upper lips ; and yet the physical types that are most admired amongst Manchus or Chinese are those which to our eyes appear most like Europeans, and which are, in fact, derived from the ancient permeation of Mongolia and Northern China by White or Caucasian immigrants who have left their traces in the Ainu of Japan, and even in the North American Indians. The whole history of Indian marriage laws, caste regulations and religious rites connected with marriage indicates the inherent desire amongst the Dravidian mass, or the Mongol or negroid savage tribes of that peninsula, for the permeation of white blood and the obtaining of children of partly white parentage. The same passion has existed in Africa and amongst the Negro races of America. In fact, the ethnologist, looking back over the recent past of Man’s history, cannot but detect and realise the constant tendency at work for the non-White races to get themselves impregnated with “ white ” blood. So far as we can read Pre-history and History, the European of Caucasian race seems to stand revealed as the originator of Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and early Metal-Age civilisation. Putting aside for the RACIAL PROBLEMS 219 moment the perhaps separately evolved culture of the Americas, we can trace to the White man’s home in Europe, North Africa, or Western Asia the oldest indications of new and uplifting ideas in manufactures, art, building, religion, speech-con- struction,1 letters, agriculture, and the taming of the wild. Improved stone implements occur earlier in the geological horizons of Europe and western Asia, and, have spread thence north and south and around the globe. The principal domestic animals of the modern world are mainly of Eurasiatic or North- East African origin, and were first tamed from the wild stock by the White man. This seems even to have been the case in India and Malaysia, as it was subsequently in America ; and although China and Japan might appear to offer an exception to this theory, it must be remembered that these empires have been permeated from ancient times with “white” blood, and that most of their domestic beasts and birds are not of local origin, but in common with much of their civilisation came from the West or South- West. At first seeming the two American stocks — the Eskimo and the Amerindian — rose to degrees 1 The principal languages of the world, in its past history and now, are derived from the two leading speech-families of the Caucasian Race : Aryan and Semitico-Hamitic. These are (or have been) Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian ; Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Libyan. It is doubtful whether the clumsily constructed, excessively difficult Chinese and Japanese, the barbaric Turkish, or tedious Magyar and Finnish will be able long to persist in a civilised world in rivalry with the Aryan and Semitic languages. The only negro languages in Africa which exhibit vitality and stay- ing power are precisely those — Fula, Hausa, and Bantu — which are accused of being “ non-negro, and more or less directly connected in origin with the White man’s ancient invasions of tropical Africa. 220 VIEWS AND REVIEWS of culture above that of the Eolithic and early Palasolithic savages by their own local genius. But is that so ? The Eskimo came to America via Siberia, bringing with them many notions invented by the Proto-Caucasian in semi-glacial Europe and Asia. Much later they certainly borrowed their stone-kettles or cauldrons from the Norse invaders of Greenland and Labrador. The Amerindians would seem to have had a considerable element of Proto-Caucasian in their blood and brains. This is not surprising when we realise that a characteristic “ Proto-Caucasian ” type, the Ainu, still extends his range to the Aleutian Islands, and formerly inhabited Kamshatka and all Sakhalin, and traditionally knew “ better days ” of higher culture and greater enter- prise than are experienced now by his degenerate descendants in northern Japan. It may, indeed, be due to the element of Proto-Caucasian in their blood that the Japanese — many of whom are really white in complexion — have felt impelled during the last fifty years gradually to separate in sympathy from the Mongol community, and to range themselves alongside the civilised nations of Europe and America. II. Can the White Race colonise the Tropics ? I have attempted to indicate the points in which the White race may be taken to be superior to the other divisions of humanity. Does this superiority extend likewise to the resistance of disease, mastery over environment, race fertility, and staying power ? The answer to this cannot be quite . so conclusive. It would seem as though Europe and Western Asia had been a great cauldron of White humanity, per- RACIAL PROBLEMS 221 petually boiling over and sending streams of “ white ” blood to fertilise the rest of the human world. It was in Europe and Western Asia1 that Man first attained undoubted mastery over Nature, as a result of which he was able to take up a similar lordly attitude in Egypt and North Africa. From this Eurasiatic centre the White race has penetrated in prehistoric and historical times to the heart of Africa, to all parts of Asia, to North America, and thence to Central and South America, to the Malay Islands and those of Polynesia. But though the penetration has left its traces in the creation of mixed types (betraying a more or less distant relationship to the White man), in forms of language and in arts, customs and religious ideas, the White race has failed to remain pure and distinct as an ethnic type outside the limits of its original home and of the great colonies founded in America, Africa, and Australasia since the be- ginning of the sixteenth century. The mass of Africa (south of Mauretania), nine-tenths of the Asiatic population, and all America in pre-Columbian days, remained outside the White domain, peopled by the Yellow, Brown, and Black divisions of 1 There can be little doubt but that Western, and even Central, Asia played almost as considerable a part as a home and focus of development for the White race as can be historically attributed to South-west Asia and to Europe. At some period not at all remote so far as human history is concerned — i.e.y about 2000 to 3000 years ago — a great diminution in rainfall and increase of aridity dispersed this Central Asian White people, who were almost certainly the speakers of Aryan languages. Note the remarkable discoveries of an ancient, 10,000 years old, Neolithic civilisation in Turkestan : obviously the Aryan nidus of development, and chief place of origin of the domestic animals. 222 VIEWS AND REVIEWS humanity. Yet in North-eastern Asia, in islands off Sumatra, in parts of India and Ceylon, in islets off New Guinea, and elsewhere in Polynesia ; in the Fula people of Nigeria, the Bahima and other aristocracies of Central Africa, in certain tribes of North-west America, there are still to be found evidences of a former White colonisation. In some cases these stranded types are quite light in skin- colour and of strikingly Caucasian physiognomy, with hair of the White man’s quality, and even with grey or green eyes ; but in other instances there is evidence of much intermixture with the surrounding coloured peoples. Where the type has remained relatively pure in the case of one or two islets of the Bismarck Archipelago (German New Guinea), contact brought about with Black races through the intervention of the European has led to a rapid extinction of the White type from germ diseases introduced by a mosquito agency from the blood of coloured men. In short, it would seem as though Nature has established a rule which may long persist, that the White race may not colonise the tropical regions of the globe, and remain long in possession of its physical attributes or of its stamina and vigour. It is as well, of course, not to bind oneself to any hard-and-fast theory. The Spanish people, where its colonists have for generations kept free from any intermixture with the Negro or the Amerindian, has, it is true, retained physical beauty and bodily vigour in a few Cuban towns, and, I am told, in some parts of tropical South America. We hear and see a good deal of Brazilians, of Portuguese or French RACIAL PROBLEMS 223 descent, who are emphatically White men — might, indeed, pass muster in a London or a Paris assembly as scarcely differing from English or French people, while many Brazilians who settle in Portugal after making money, cannot be distinguished at a glance from native Portuguese. But 1 have generally found, when 1 have been able to trace the past history of such types, that they came from the southern and more mountainous regions of Brazil, and not from the valley of the Amazon, or the regions lying to the north of Rio de Janeiro. The Boers of South Africa have been reared in a country which lies for the most part beyond the Tropics, and which, owing to its great elevation, has a more or less severe winter. Egypt and India have been invaded over and over again in human history by White races, or comparatively White races. Yet the mass of the population of these regions at the present day is brown in complexion, even though it may retain to a large extent the physiognomy of the Caucasian ; brown in complexion, and with hair that is essentially un-European, black, and often coarse in texture, round in section like that of the Mongol, or flattened and wiry like that of the Negro. The Berbers, or Libyans, only remain white-skinned and European in aspect along the coast fringe of North Africa, or on the slopes of the High Atlas. Even living under the extraordinary artificial conditions which the United States has arranged at Panama, White men, women, and children cannot be said to support easily the exhaustion of 'an equatorial climate, while the instant they leave their mosquito-proof houses, or attempt to perform hard physical labour under a 224 VIEWS AND REVIEWS tropical sun, they go down with disease. Yet the germ -diseases and climate of this region do not prevent other non-White types of humanity from flourishing — hybrids between Spaniards and Amer- indians, pure-blood Amerindians, Negroes and Negroids. The coloured indigenes of pure or mixed race in Tropical Asia, Australasia, Africa, and America, have become quite inured to climatic conditions, and can support them in any case better than the incoming Europeans or the descendants of European colonists of pure blood. They are perhaps also, in some cases, more immune from germ-diseases, such as yellow fever and malarial fever. But even these indigenes are liable to be swept off- as rapidly, or more rapidly, than the White man by new or revived germ-diseases which spread through the Tropics ever and anon, slaying hundreds, thousands, or millions in their path, and which, unhappily, have wrought far more harm throughout the tropical world during the last century than before. This is the fault of the White man, by his instinctive attempt not only to penetrate everywhere himself, but to bring into close associa- tion all the other human types. He transports Indians or Chinese to Africa, and thus conveys to the Negro deadly germ-diseases hitherto only known in Asia ; he does the same by the West Indies and Tropical America. He has carried yellow fever in the blood of negroes from Africa to Tropical America. He has conveyed blackwater fever from Africa to Madagascar, India, and Panama. Malta fever was probably unknown in Malta until infected goats were introduced from North Africa. It is RACIAL PROBLEMS 225 quite possible that malarial fever was unknown in Europe until the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Mace- donians, and Romans brought North Africa, Egypt, and Tropical Asia into direct communication with the peoples of Southern and Western Europe. There is good ground for supposing that the Romans introduced ague and similar malarial fevers into England, various forms of gnat being there present to act as transmitting agencies. At the time of writing a great horror is slowly developing under the gaze of those whose attention is concen- trated on Tropical Africa, namely, the spread of a peculiarly deadly form of sleeping-sickness by means of a transmitting agency, not merely of tse- tse flies confined in their distribution to Tropical Africa, but perhaps of other flies that probe the skin with their probosces and pass, infected with Trypano- somes, from one human subject to another. The science of the White man will, nevertheless, enable him (I believe) to cope far more effectually with these germ-diseases than the — at present — less civilised peoples of coloured skin. The elimination of transmitting agencies — mosquitoes, midges, flies, fleas, ticks, bugs, etc. — is quite possible to his resources. But will his science enable him likewise to resist climatic influences and still to remain a pure-bred, vigorous White man ? This seems to me much more problematical, and it may be there- fore that he must resign himself to a colonisation of the sub-tropical and temperate regions of the globe. What about staying power and race fertility even in these cool climates ? At present, if we could 15 226 VIEWS AND REVIEWS obtain the necessary statistics, we should probably find that the rate of increase amongst the White peoples of the world was fully equal, if not superior, to that of the other divisions of humanity ; not, perhaps, in an accurately registered birth-rate, but resulting from the much less mortality amongst the children. The Negro, as a race, is very fertile, possibly most fertile when he is living under nominally monogamic conditions,1 as in the United States, British West Indies, etc. But, owing to carelessness and lack of knowledge on the parents’ part, his children die at a greater rate than those of the average European family. The same is the case, above all, in India, where also the great rate of increase is checked by periodical famines, by mis- taken religious ideas, or stupid customs. The mortality amongst the children of Amerindians, even living under relatively happy conditions, is remark- able, especially in Brazil, in which country also the ratio of still-born children is high to a noteworthy degree. So that at the present time we may regard the slight diminution in the number of children born to each married couple in Europe, White America, White Australasia, and White Africa, as fully com- pensated by the greater proportional number of children who live to reach maturity. But when a civilisation and knowledge equal to those of the White race exist throughout the coloured world, and infant mortality is checked, may there not arise a greater proportional increase in these coloured 1 Polygamic conditions of life in Africa do not conduce always to the bearing of many children, for reasons given in my book George Grejifell and the Congo . RACIAL PROBLEMS 227 races which will turn the tables on Europe and North America ? That is a contingency so far removed from our generation that it need not trouble us much at the present day. Very likely when the infant mortality has been diminished in the tropical world there will come about an elevation in the status of woman, a universal adoption of monogamy, and a lessening in the racial increase. III. What about intermixture of races ? Ever since the existing human species diverged into its four or five existing varieties or sub-species, there has been a constant opposite movement at work to unify the type. Whites have returned southwards and mingled with Australoids and Negroids, and have produced Melanesians and Papuans, and these, again, have mixed with Proto-Caucasians or with Mongols to form the Polynesian. The earliest types of White man have mingled with the primitive Mongol, or directly with the primitive Negro. There is an ancient Negroid strain underlying the populations of southern and western France, Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Evidences of the former existence of these Negroid people are not only to be found in the features of their mixed descendants at the present day, but the fact is attested by skulls, skeletons, and works of art of more or iess great antiquity in France, Italy, etc., dating back to a time which may be as remote as 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. There is something of the Red Indian in the peoples of Scotland and Ireland, of Germany, Northern Russia, Tatary, and Siberia, due to the continued existence in these regions of a very ancient intermixture 228 VIEWS AND REVIEWS between the Proto-Caucasian and the Mongol,1 which assisted to people not only Northern Europe and Asia, but also North America. There are very few Negro peoples at the present day — perhaps only the Bushmen, the Congo Pygmies, and a few tribes of forest Negroes — which can be said to be without more or less trace of ancient White intermixture. Emphatically, there is but one species of man living on the earth at the present day, and the utmost rank which can be given to his divergent types is that of the difference of one sub-species or variety from another. This statement is proved by the complete fertility between all known types of existing Man, and the continued fertility, again, of their mixed descendants. There are no human mules. Nature may be laughing at our prejudices about interbreeding, prejudices loudly vaunted often by White men who have married and abandoned native wives, or who keep native mistresses in the tropical countries in which their work lies. There is a far greater tendency to intermixture in this direction than there is between coloured men and white women. We white men are, or affect to be, shocked at the latter, whilst we shrug our shoulders at the former, and with some justice ; for the coloured woman by her union with the white man is raised more or less to his standard of living, which is a superior one, whereas the white woman marrying the coloured man is in her new surroundings sometimes brought to a lower level of life. But if the white man is to continue to form temporary or permanent unions with the women of 1 Query ? the Cro-Magnon type. RACIAL PROBLEMS 229 other races, he cannot be surprised if, as education increases, his womenkind should see no harm in marrying coloured men, or coloured men aspire to possess white wives. It may, of course, be more advantageous to the world at large that there should always remain a stock of White people to represent the highest development as yet known, physically and mentally, of humanity. At the same time we should bear in mind that nowhere in the world exists a pure White race, in whose ancient ancestry there has been no intermixture whatever with the Mongol, the Negro, or the Dravidian, and that perhaps a White race which receives no rill of blood from the other human types from time to time may die of physical degeneration. For myself, I seem to see the prospect of great racial developments in Asia by a mixture of blood. Russian Siberia is going to play a great part in the future development of Asia. The White type which is being developed in that region is of fine physique and of no mean mentality, and is mingling already with the indi- genous Mongols, is intermarrying with Japanese, and even Chinese, and producing offspring of good appearance, physical vigour, and mental alertness. Related to these questions is the problem of how far Dravidian India shall be allowed to colonise South Africa or Northern Australia. For good or for ill, the weary Titan which typifies at times the overworked Metropolitan country of the British Empire, has handed over to the young communities of White men (fortunately, in Australia and New Zealand, to white men and women) the settling of these questions. And these White governments 230 VIEWS AND REVIEWS seem determined that in South Africa there shall be no third racial element, and in Australia no element at all but that of the White race. Seeing the obvious inability of White men to colonise the tropics effectually, it may be said that this is a wise precaution in ear-marking for White development the more or less temperate regions of the Southern Hemisphere.1 Personally, I should feel that a fair compromise had been arrived at if it were laid down clearly that north of the Zambezi the natives of India had as much right to colonise Africa under the British flag as any other British subjects. In any case, Germany is placing no hindrance to the settle- ment of Indians in the sparsely populated territories of German East Africa, and is treating them very well. I should never be surprised to see a tide of Indian immigration setting in to occupy the northern parts of British East Africa and the waste regions of Somaliland and Galaland, and I should have very little sympathy with the obstreperous, idle, noisy Somalis who might complain of being dispossessed thereby. IV. The right appreciation of racial values. A good deal of old-fashioned ethnology has been revived lately in certain English and American periodicals and books. In this an attempt is made — based on no first-hand research, but on quotations from nineteenth-century writers (or writers who quote from nineteenth-century evidence) — to show that the Negro is, and always will be, of inferior mental 1 Though much of Australia is within the tropics, its climatic conditions, except in the extreme north, are quite favourable to the existence of a vigorous White race. RACIAL PROBLEMS 231 calibre to the White man . . . that once left to himself as a free agent he reverts to savagery . . . that he has originated nothing . . . that hybrids between the Negro and the White man are of poor physique and wicked instincts, etc., etc. We are, or used to be, also told that the Amerindians in North America were dying out, that they were unim- provable ; that the Hindus would not do this, the Chinese would never consent to do that ; and many other things tending to lead us back to the stand- point of earlier times — especially of the ’eighties of the last century — this standpoint being the unalter- able superiority of the White man and the eternal position of subservience which the coloured races were to occupy under his world sway. On the other hand, the education spread abroad by White missionaries and White governments has recently rendered articulate, vocal and literary, many a person of a formerly inferior or subject race of yellow, brown, or black skin ; or has pierced through the ignorance of world-affairs on the part of the educated Muhammadan, Buddhist, or Hindu, and brought them into the European or the American arena to defend the present or past con- dition of their fellow coloured men or co-religionists. From such we learn that the civilisation and culture of Ancient Egypt were of African and Negro origin ; that Hindu navigation and colonisation was anciently far more extensive than the conquest of Java ; that the Zulu conquerors of South Africa were not really bloody-minded men, their raids being largely the invention of white historians ; that polygamy is actually a beneficent institution calculated to raise the VIEWS AND REVIEWS 232 standard of womanly purity and happiness ; that caste prejudices have been a benefit to India ; that cruel and devastating sacrifices to Indian, African, Amerindian, Polynesian gods never took place, while Hindu widows enjoyed committing satti,1 and the wives of a Congo or West African chieftain actually desired to be strangled after their husband’s death and buried in his grave ; that the Chinese worship of the dead was not a futile waste of time and sub- stance, and Muhammadans were really tolerant of other religions ; also that the natives of Africa were happy, contented, free from disease, and in possession of the soil of their native land before Europeans came among them. I, personally, am made angry by the repetition of these worn-out theories based on stories that were untrue, or on factors which have ceased to operate. We should indeed be living in a fool’s paradise if we continued to assume that a Negro could never attain to the high mentality of a White man, or equal him as an inventor, an artist, a strategist, a writer. I have read books by pure- blood Negro authors, recently written and published in Haiti, which gave one the keen delight of the best French literature. I mean, for example, the works of Mons. Fernan Hibbert.2 3 I have seen paintings and black-and-white drawings by Negro artists in Paris, in the British West Indies, or produced in Brazil, which any honest connoisseur would have singled out as being genuinely good, original, and clever. The Negro 1 Being burnt to death on the funeral pyres of their husbands ; a practice only put a stop to by European intervention. 3 “ Sena 55 or Scenes de la Vie Haitienne , and other studies. RACIAL PROBLEMS 233 gift for music and genius for acting do not need any expatiation on my part to affirm their existence. There are Negro composers,1 musicians, actors, and vocalists of no mean order to-day in Brazil, the United States, and the West Indies, and will be, before long, in South Africa and West Africa. I could also cite many a skilled Negro surgeon, physician, and even dentist whom I have encountered in America or West Africa. There have been great Negro Generals in the history of Haiti, of Venezuela, of Colombia, and of India and North Africa. Indeed, successful Negro soldiers actually created sovereign States in Western India, one or two of which have lasted to this day. I should not be surprised, within the remainder of my lifetime, to see emerging from the Negro ranks in America, West or South Africa (Islam stunts the mental growth in the Egyptian or French Sudan) a “ first-class ” botanist, philologist, electrician, engineer, statesman, or novelist. The North American Indian — Amerindian, as I prefer to call him — is going to be heard , of before long in several of these great careers and professions. So is the Brazilian “ Mameluco ” — half Amerindian, half Portuguese. So is the Hindu, if he can slough the silly and the foul accretions of his once pure and transcendental religion ; and so are Syrians, Berbers, Arabs, and Turks, if they can detach themselves from the profitless doggerel dictated by Muhammad of Mekka to Jewish and Arab scribes and Abyssinian 1 Such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a mulatto of Sierra Leone origin — half English, half Negro ; and Will Marion Cook, an American Negro, whose works, such as In Dahojne , display marked originality in their melodies and harmonies. 234 VIEWS AND REVIEWS slaves. The men and women of China may yet astonish the civilised world even more than Japan has done if they can clear their minds of cant, and exchange that slavish worship of a semi-mythical past for a vivid realisation of the present ; in short, if they will put themselves to school with the West, and apply the best and most modern of our teaching to the ordering of their own immense domain. At present a rational essay on geology, palaeontology, dynamics, germ-diseases, photography, or chemistry from a Chinese pen in the Chinese language, is almost unthinkable. But the same thing, barely twenty years ago, might have been said about Japan, still more in regard to Amerindians or Filipinos, or West African Negroes ; yet these people are entering — have entered — the pale of the abstrusest science of the White man, and are feeling quite at home there. The arrogant, imperfectly educated, unobservant White man of England, the United States, Belgium, or South Africa, who would continue to assert that the coloured races have made no progress towards the White standard and point of view during the last fifty years, that they can never vie in any direction with the White race, that it is justifiable or necessary to treat them with injustice and contumely, is a serious enemy to the peace of the world. His words — far more than he imagines — are read by many a yellow, black, or brown man, who has been given perhaps a better education than his traducer, and who resents most . bitterly these ex cathedrd pronouncements as to his perpetually inferior position in the world, and conceives such RACIAL PROBLEMS 235 a hatred of the overbearing White race that in his turn he is unjust, and prone to forget that the very education he has received, opening to him the knowledge of good and evil, and an understanding of the White man’s speech and philosophy, is itself a gift from the White man, of whom some repre- sentatives are the constant friends, if others are the cruellest enemies of the coloured races. On the other hand, just as pernicious is the conceited recruit from the backward or one-time helot nations, who decries the White man’s power and past achievements, who fails to realise that he cannot as yet develop his own neglected country without an appeal to the White man’s capital ; and that such capital is dearly lent where there is not complete security for life and property. Such — only released a few years ago by the White man’s valour, money, or science from some intolerable thraldom, some violent and bloody