Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

pure-bred specimens of the other main European races.

      The variation in race characters is very appreciable within each of these national populations; in the German case being quite pronounced between north and south. Whereas the differences which go to make the distinction between these nationalities taken as aggregates are of an institutional kind - differences in acquired traits not transmissible by inheritance, substantially differences of habituation. On this side, however, the divergences between one nationality and another may be large, and they are commonly of a systematic character; so that while no divergence of racial type may be alleged, the divergence in the cultural type may yet be serious enough.

      The hybrid composition of these peoples affects their character in yet another bearing, which is of grave consequence in the growth of culture, at the same time that it affects the fortunes of all the peoples of Europe in much the same fashion, though perhaps not in the same degree. By consequence of their hybrid composition the individual members of these nationalities vary more widely in respect of their native capacities and aptitudes than would be the case in any pure-bred people.² So that these peoples each present a much larger diversity of personalities than would be found among them if they were not crossbred. On the physical side, in respect of such traits as can be measured and compared by mechanical methods, this great range and complexity of variations within each nationality is obvious enough, - in stature, color, mass and anatomical proportions. But it no less indubitably comprises also those (spiritual and intellectual) traits that are less amenable to anthropometrical statistics, at the same time that they are of greater consequence to the fortunes of the people among whom they are found. It is these psychological traits - spiritual and intellectual proclivities, capacities, aptitudes, sensibilities - that afford the raw material out of which any given scheme of civilisation is built up and on which its life-history and the sequence of its permutations run their course. It is, of course, a trite matter-of-course that no people can work out a scheme of culture that lies beyond or outside the range of its capacities; and it is likewise a matter-of-course that a nation whose population is gifted with many and various capacities is thereby better fitted to meet the exigencies that arise in the course of its life-history, and so will be in a position more promptly to respond to any call. A larger, fuller, more varied and more broadly balanced scheme of culture will, under tolerable circumstances, be found among such a people than in a community made up of individuals that breed true with close approximation to a single specific type.

      Such a hybrid population will, of course, also have the faults of its qualities.

      The divergence of temperament and proclivities will be as wide as that of its capacities and aptitudes; and the unrest that works out in a multiform ramification of achievements on the one side is likely to work out also in a profuse output of irritation and dissentient opinions, ideals and aspirations on the other side. For good or ill, such has been the congenital make-up of the Western peoples, and such, it may be called to mind, has also been the history of Western civilisation.

      All the while it may as well be kept in mind that in this respect, as regards the range and multifarious character of their native endowment, these Western peoples are today what they once were in neolithic time. The range of variations in each and all is very appreciably wider than would be had within any pure-bred stock; but it is no wider, nor is it in any sensible degree different, among the hybrid gen-erations that inhabit these countries today than it once was among the similarly hybrid generations that carried this Western culture in that earlier time. This wide-ranging heritage is after all a neolithic heritage; and however multiform and picturesquely varied the cultural scheme of the Western peoples in later times may seem, the stream does not, after all, rise higher than its neolithic source. The population that makes up and carries forward this civilisation is, after all, endowed with the faults of its qualities, and they are the neolithic qualities.

      Chapter II.

       The Old Order

       Table of Contents

I

       Table of Contents

      The state of civilisation and of the industrial arts into which the remote ancestry of the north-Europeans may be said to have been born was the earlier neolithic, - the earliest phase of the stone age of which there is certain evidence in northern Europe. The European palaeolithic does not come into the case, since it closed before the formation of that hybrid population out of which these later European peoples have sprung; besides which its traces are virtually wanting throughout the habitat in which this population of mixed race lived and moved and made good their survival. Even for Europe at large, it is held, there is no cultural continuity, and little if any racial continuity, between the palaeolithic and the neolithic. The neolithic is believed to have begun independently, so far as concerns its course in Europe, having come in as an intrusive culture, presumptively at the intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe, probably late in quaternary time; the earlier stages of the advance that led up to the European neolithic having been worked out outside the European area and before the bearers of the neolithic penetrated that quarter of the world.

      It may therefore be said that this early neolithic state of the arts of life is in a way congenital to the north-European peoples. Whether such a statement will apply in the case of the Mediterranean race, which is held to have brought this culture into Europe, may be left an open question. It is of no immediate interest here. The like is true for the Alpine stock, which is held to have come in from the east, presumably from Asia, during the early neolithic, and which is likewise believed to have reached the neolithic stage before breaking into the European situation. Neither of these races, nor the two together, as they stood at the time of their intrusion into Europe, are to be reckoned the ancestors of the north-Europeans, in the sense of affording the ancestral type, whether physical or spiritual, of that north-European population that presently multiplies and continues to find a livelihood by help of the neolithic technology on the north-European seaboard.

      Doubtless each of these races contributes its share to this ancestry; they are both present from the outset, or nearly so, in the mixed north-European population, and they have apparently always continued to account for at least one-half of the racial constitution of these peoples. But the ancestry of the north-Europeans can not be said properly to have come into effectual bearing until the dolicho-blond stock is mixed with the other two, so as to give rise to the particular hybrid strain that has continuously occupied this region since neolithic times and has peopled north Europe with the nations now living. The racial history of these peoples is the history of a population of hybrids made up of the three stocks in conjunction, not of one and another of these racial types in severalty; it can therefore not fairly be said to take its beginning until the three racial factors requisite for its constitution came into conjunction.

      The selective test of fitness to survive in the climatic region of the Baltic and North Sea under neolithic conditions, and to hold that habitat against all comers, was not applied to the three constituent stocks in severalty, and so was not a conclusive test of superior fitness in either one of the three taken by itself. The test, and the conclusion to be drawn from the experiment, applies solely to the composite population into which the three enter as essential constituents. Such is obviously the case, since in the course of selective breeding through several thousands of years no one of the three constituent types has displaced both or either of the other two in any part of the region in question, nor has any one of the racial types at any point displaced the hybrid offspring of the three. The most that can be said is that while the population has continued through this long interval of time to be a hybrid mixture, the character of the mixture has come to vary from one place to another in such a way that this composite population is more blond toward the north and more brunet toward the south, at the same time that, even with an equal initial chance, the dolicho-brunet (Mediterranean) counts for less both north and south, within this special climatic region, than either of the other two constituent stocks.

      For a contrast that will enforce this line of argument illustrative instances