IV. Race and History
There are some two billion colored people on the earth, and some nine
hundred million whites. However, many palefaces were delighted when
Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau [Gobineau, Comte Joseph-Arthur de
(1816-82)], in an Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-55),
announced that the species man is composed of distinct races inherently
different (like individuals) in physical structure, mental capacity, and
qualities of character; and that one race, the “Aryan,” was by nature
superior to all the rest.
Everything great, noble, or fruitful in the works of man on this planet,
in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting point, is
the development of a single germ; … it belongs to one family alone,
the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized
countries of the universe… History shows that all civilization derives
from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a
society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the
noble group that created it.
Environmental advantages (argued Gobineau) cannot explain the rise of
civilization, for the same kind of environment (e.g., soil-fertilizing rivers)
that watered the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East produced no
civilization among the Indians of North America, though they lived on
fertile soil along magnificent streams. Nor do institutions make a
civilization, for this has risen under a diversity, even a contrariety, of
institutions, as in monarchical Egypt and “democratic” Athens. The rise,
success, decline, and fall of a civilization depend upon the inherent quality
of the race. The degeneration of a civilization is what the word itself
indicates–a falling away from the genus, stock, or race. “Peoples
degenerate only in consequence of the various mixtures of blood which
they undergo.”
Usually this comes through intermarriage of the
vigorous race with those whom it has conquered. Hence the superiority of
the whites in the United States and Canada (who did not intermarry with
