World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the
question. National types are not divided into homogeneous units "by the
course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains,"
but are intermingled from village to village. Do the Balkan mountains
represent the purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which nationality,
Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as Wallas sees it, for recurring war
between nations is an international science of eugenics which might
"indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each
other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial
type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly
made possible between individuals of consciously different national
types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be
created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based,
"not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but
upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to
deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We
have sought to escape our problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite
dissimilarity of the individuals in our population. The only direction
for hope to travel is that the improvement of the whole species will
come rather from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition
of the value of racial as well as individual variety than from mere
fighting." This is the true internationalism, and it differs as widely
from a cosmopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from the bitter
enforced nationality of blood and iron, or spiritual imperial arrogance.
I have found a perfectly clear statement of what lies loosely in the
mind of modern Americans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with
the game of getting on. I have found it in the editorial columns of a
Middle Western paper. The Cedar Rapids _Gazette_ says:
EXTINCT AMERICANS
"The authorities who fear that the American race will 'die out' may
not have noticed that all the ingredients of that race are still being
born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if one
American race dies out there will be another race as good or better in
America to take its place.
"Several American races have already died to the extent that
the members are no longer to be separately identified and their
distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the county. Among the
vanished races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the
Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania
and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and
southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern Cracker,
the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom in his time and place
was the representative of a small and distinct nationality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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