Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

from the context just what distinctive meaning is attached to one or another of these terms. They are used loosely and suggestively, and for many purposes they may doubtless be so used without compromise or confusion to the argument; so that it might seem the part of reason to take them as they come, with allowance for such margin of error as necessarily attaches to their colloquial use, and without taking thought of a closer definition or a more discriminate use than what contents those who so find these terms convenient for use in all their colloquial ambiguity.

      But through all the current ambiguity in the use of these terms, and of others that serve as their virtual equivalents, there runs a certain consistent difference of connotation, such as to work confusion in much of the argument in which they are employed. Whatever else it may be taken to con-vey, “race” always implies a solidarity of inheritance within the group so designated; it always implies that the complement of hereditary traits is substantially the same for all the individuals comprised in the group. “Race” is a biological concept, and wherever it is applied it signifies common descent of the group from an ancestry possessed of a given specific type and transmitting the traits that mark this type, intact to all members of the group so designated. The other terms, that are currently used as interchangeable with “race,” as, e.g., “nation” or “people,” do not necessarily imply such a biological solidarity of the group to which they are applied; although the notion of a common descent is doubtless frequently present in a loose way in the mind of those who so use them.

      In this colloquial use of terms, when the distinction between these several peoples or alleged races is not allowed to rest quite uncritically on a demarkation of national frontiers, the distinguishing mark to which recourse is usually had is the community of language. So it comes about that habituation to a given type of speech has come to do duty as a conventional mark of racial derivation. A certain (virtual) uniformity of habit is taken to mean a uniformity of hereditary endowment. And many historians and publicists who discuss these matters have been led into far-reaching generalisations touching hereditary characteristics of temperament, intelligence and physique, in cases where there is in fact ground for nothing more substantial than a discriminating comparison between divergent schemes of use and wont. Such differences of use and wont as mark off one people from another may be a sufficiently consequential matter, of course; but their reach and effect are after all of quite another character, and have quite another place and bearing in the cultural growth, than differences of racial type.

      The scheme of institutions in force in any given community - as exemplified, e.g., by the language - being of the nature of habit, is necessarily unstable and will necessarily vary incontinently with the passage of time, though it may be in a consistent manner; whereas the type of any given racial stock is stable, and the hereditary traits of spiritual and physical endowment that mark the type are a matter of indefeasible biological heritage, invariable throughout the life-history of the race. A meticulous discrimination between the two concepts - of habit and heredity - is the beginning of wisdom in all inquiry into human behavior; and confusion of the two is accountable for much of the polemical animus, and not a little recrimination, in recent and current writing on historical, political and economic matters. And, of course, the larger the burden of chauvinism carried by the discussion the more spectacular and sweeping has been its output of systematic blunders.

      If an inquiry into the case of Germany is to profit the ends of theoretical generalisation bearing on the study of human institutions, their nature and causes, it is necessary to discriminate between those factors in the case that are of a stable and enduring character and those that are variable, and at the same time it is necessary to take thought of what factors are peculiar to the case of the German people and what others are common to them and to their neighbors with whom their case will necessarily be compared. It hap-pens that these two lines of discrimination in great part coincide. In respect of the stable characteristics of race heredity the German people do not differ in any sensible or consistent manner from the neighboring peoples; whereas in the character of their past habituation - in their cultural scheme - as well as in respect of the circumstances to which they have latterly been exposed, their case is at least in some degree peculiar. It is in the matter of received habits of thought - use and wont - and in the conditions that have further shaped their scheme of use and wont in the recent past, that the population of this country differs from the population of Europe at large.

       In view of the prevalent confusion or ignorance on this head among the historians and publicists who have been dealing with these matters, it seems necessary, even at the cost of some tedium, to recite certain notorious facts bearing on the racial complexion of the German people. In so far as may bear on the question of race for the German people taken as a whole, these facts are no longer in controversy. Students of European race questions still are, and no doubt long will be, engaged on many difficult problems of local displacement, migration and infiltration of racial elements, even within the frontiers of the Fatherland; but for the purpose in hand recourse need scarcely be had to any of these matters of recondite detail. Even if more might be convenient, nothing is required for present use beyond those general features of the case on which a secure consensus has already been reached.

      It is only in so far as we can make shift to conceive that the linguistic frontiers coincide in some passable way with the political frontiers of German dominion that we can make use of the name as it is currently employed in historical, polemical and patriotic writing, without phrase or abatement. Taking the name, then, as loosely designating the Empire with its German-speaking population - das deutsche Volk - and overlooking any discrepancies in so doing, the aggregate so designated is in no defensible sense to be spoken of as a distinct race, even after all allowance has been made for intrusive elements in the population, such as the Jews or the Germanised Poles and Danes. The German people is not a distinct race either as against the non-German population of Europe or within itself. In both of these respects the case of this population is not materially different from that of any other national population in Europe. These facts are notorious.

      Like the populations of the neighboring countries, the German population, too, is thoroughly and universally hybrid; and the hybrid mixture that goes to make up the German people is compounded out of the same racial elements that enter into the composition of the European population at large. Its hybrid character is perhaps more pronounced than is the case in the countries lying farther south, but the difference in degree of hybridisation as between the Germans and their southern neighbors is not a serious one. On the other hand the case of the Germans is in this respect virtually identical with that of the peoples lying immediately to the east and west.¹

      In point of race the population of south Germany is substantially identical with that of northern France or the neighboring parts of Belgium; while in the same respect the population of north Germany has substantially the same composition as that of Holland and Denmark on the west and of western Russia on the east; and, taking the Fatherland as a whole, its population is in point of race substantially identical with that of the British Isles. The variations in local detail within this broad belt of mixed populations are appreciable, no doubt, but they are after all of much the same character in one country as in another, and taken one with another they run to much the same effect both east, west and middle. When taken in the large there is, in other words, no sensible difference of race between the English, Dutch, Germans and the Slavs of Great Russia.

      In the current expositions of national merit and notability, when a pure-bred German, Germanic or Anglo-Saxon race is spoken for, the context presently brings into view that what is present in the eulogist’s conception, if anything in the way of a definite biological category, is the dolicho-blond. Now it happens, unfortunately for the invidious insistence on purity of race, that this particular racial stock is less frequently to be found unmixed than either of the other two with which it is associated. It is, indeed, quite safe to affirm that there is no community extant, great or small, that is made up even approximately of pure-bred blonds to the exclusion of other racial elements.

      One may even safely go further and assert that there is not by any chance an individual to be found in the population of Europe who, in point of pedigree, is of unmixed blond extraction. Nor is there any reasonable chance, nor any evidence available, that a community of pure-bred blonds ever has existed in any part of Europe. And the like assertion may be made, with but a slightly less degree of assurance, as regards