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. _PART I_ THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR CHAPTER I THE WORLD OF COLOR The man who, on a quiet spring evening of the year 1914, opened his atlas to a political map of the world and pored over its many-tinted patterns probably got one fundamental impression: the overwhelming preponderance of the white race in the ordering of the world's affairs. Judged by accepted canons of statecraft, the white man towered the indisputable master of the planet. Forth from Europe's teeming mother-hive the imperious Sons of Japhet had swarmed for centuries to plant their laws, their customs, and their battle-flags at the uttermost ends of the earth. Two whole continents, North America and Australia, had been made virtually as white in blood as the European motherland; two other continents, South America and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while even huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the white man's abode. Even where white populations had not locked themselves to the soil few regions of the earth had escaped the white man's imperial sway, and vast areas inhabited by uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed the white man's will.