(Madison Grant’s introduction)
All wars thus far discussed have been race wars of Europe against Asia, or of the Nordics against Mediterraneans. The wars against the Mongols were necessary and vital; there was no alternative except to fight to the finish. But the wars of northern Europe against the south, from the racial point of view, were not only useless but destructive. Bad as they were, however, they left untouched to a large extent the broodland of the race in the north and west.
Another class of wars, however, has been absolutely deadly to the Nordic race. There must have been countless early struggles where one Nordic tribe attacked and exterminated its rival, such as the Trojan War, fought between Achæans and Phrygians, both Nordics, while the later Peloponnesian War was a purely civil strife between Greeks and resulted in the racial collapse of Hellas.
Rome, after she emerged triumphant from her struggle with the Carthaginians, of Mediterranean race, plunged into a series of civil wars which ended in the complete elimination of the native Nordic element in Rome. Her conquests also were destructive to the Nordic race; particularly so was that of Cæsar in Gaul, one of the few exceptional cases where the north was permanently conquered by the south. The losses of that ten-year conquest fell far more heavily upon the Nordic Celts in Gaul and Britain than on the servile strata of the population.
In the same way the Saxon conquest of England destroyed the Nordic Brythons to a greater degree than the pre-Nordic Neolithic Mediterranean element. From that time on all the wars of Europe, other than those against the Asiatics and Saracens, were essentially civil wars fought between peoples or leaders of Nordic blood.
Mediæval Europe was one long welter of Nordic immolation until the Wars of the Roses in England, the Hundred Years’ War in the Lowlands, the religious, revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars in France, and the ghastly Thirty Years’ War in Germany dangerously depleted the ruling Nordic race and paved the way for the emergence from obscurity of the servile races which for ages had been dominated by them.
To what extent the present war has fostered this tendency, time alone will show, but Mr. Stoddard has pointed out some of the immediate and visible results. The backbone of western civilization is racially Nordic, the Alpines and Mediterraneans being effective precisely to the extent in which they have been Nordicized and vitalized.
If this great race, with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should ultimately pass, with it would pass that which we call civilization. It would be succeeded by an unstable and bastardized population, where worth and merit would have no inherent right to leadership and among which a new and darker age would blot out our racial inheritance.
Such a catastrophe cannot threaten if the Nordic race will gather itself together in time, shake off the shackles of an inveterate altruism, discard the vain phantom of internationalism, and reassert the pride of race and the right of merit to rule.
The Nordic race has been driven from many of its lands, but still grasps firmly the control of the world, and it is certainly not at a greater numerical disadvantage than often before in contrast to the teeming population of eastern Asia.
It has repeatedly been confronted with crises where the accident of battle, or the genius of a leader, saved a well-nigh hopeless day. It has survived defeat, it has survived the greater danger of victory, and, if it takes warning in time, it may face the future with assurance. Fight it must, but let that fight be not a civil war against its own blood kindred but against the dangerous foreign races, whether they advance sword in hand or in the more insidious guise of beggars at our gates, pleading for admittance to share our prosperity. If we continue to allow them to enter they will in time drive us out of our own land by mere force of breeding.
The great hope of the future here in America lies in the realization of the working class that competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal, whether the latter be the lowly immigrant from southern or eastern Europe or whether he be the more obviously dangerous Oriental against whose standards of living the white man cannot compete. In this country we must look to such of our people—our farmers and artisans—as are still of American blood to recognize and meet this danger.
Our present condition is the result of following the leadership of idealists and philanthropic doctrinaires, aided and abetted by the perfectly understandable demand of our captains of industry for cheap labor.
To-day the need for statesmanship is great, and greater still is the need for thorough knowledge of history. All over the world the first has been lacking, and in the passions of the Great War the lessons of the past have been forgotten both here and in Europe.
The establishment of a chain of Alpine states from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as a sequel to the war, all of them organized at the expense of the Nordic ruling classes, may bring Europe back to the days when Charlemagne, marching from the Rhine to the Elbe, found the valley of that river inhabited by heathen Wends. Beyond lay Asia, and his successors spent a thousand years pushing eastward the frontiers of Europe.
Now that Asia, in the guise of Bolshevism with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners, is organizing an assault upon western Europe, the new states—Slavic-Alpine in race, with little Nordic blood—may prove to be not frontier guards of western Europe but vanguards of Asia in central Europe. None of the earlier Alpine states have held firm against Asia, and it is more than doubtful whether Poland, Bohemia, Rumania, Hungary, and Jugo-Slavia can face the danger successfully, now that they have been deprived of the Nordic ruling classes through democratic institutions.
Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with, or intrust his ideals to, brown, yellow, black, or red men.
This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself.
Madison Grant.
New York, March 1, 1920.