The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. The first is to
assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best
race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.
This has a fine, modern, biological air ("Survival of the Fittest").
If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity
about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the "Teutonic";
Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the
"Anglo-Saxon race"; my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to
be said for the Jew. On its premises, this is a perfectly sound and
reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for the
scientific inventor for what one might call Welt-Apparat in the
future, for national harrowing and reaping machines, and
race-destroying fumigations. The great plain of China ("Yellow
Peril") lends itself particularly to some striking wholesale
undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and
then disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all the
inferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would not
proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social
harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business
over again at a higher level, is an interesting residual question
into which we need not now penetrate.
That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not,
however, very widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of
confidence in the public imagination. We have, however, a very
audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which
distinguishes its own race--there is a German, a British, and an
Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which
embraces the whole "white race" in one remarkable tolerance--as the
superior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves,
collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of this
doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct
eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in
subjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forth
pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd's Control of the Tropics. The whole world
is to be administered by the "white" Powers--Mr. Kidd did not
anticipate Japan--who will see to it that their subjects do not
"prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which they
have in charge." Those other races are to be regarded as children,
recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender
emotions of paternity. It is a little doubtful whether the races
lacking "in the elementary qualities of social efficiency" are
expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races
which, through "strength and energy of character, humanity, probity,
and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty,"
are developing "the resources of the richest regions of the earth"
over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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