B OOKS.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NATIONS.*
The Psychology of Peoples. By Guitars Le Bon. Londoa : T. Fisher tinwia.. THE moral of M. Le Bon's fascinating book is that we Anglo- Saxons have a great deal to be thankful for. Study of the history of civilisations, to which he has devoted his life, con- vinces him that the most important thing for any individual is to belong to a good race ; and it is a fair deduction from many passages in this book that the Anglo-Saxon stock is the best available at present. "If it be wished," he says, "to' state in precise language the influences which govern the individual and direct his conduct, they may be said to be of three kinds. The first, and certainly the most important, is the influence of ancestors ; the second, the influence of the immediate parents ; the third, commonly supposed to be the most powerful, but nevertheless the weakest, is the influence of environment." We are physically and literally the children of our race as well as the children of our parents, for each one of us who belongs to a modern nation, where close inter- marriage is the exception, has millions of ancestors belonging to that race. Blood tells ; and that is why thirty or forty men picked at random out of an English regiment, and sent any- where you like to fight or govern, would have a better chance to succeed than an equal number chosen from the very flower of India. The genius of the race shows itself most in government. And this exceptional success in governing has arisen from a ready recognition of the cardinal fact which M. Le Bon is concerned to emphasise,—that every race has a soul, and that the soul of a race finds expression in its institu- tions. When Englishmen have governed subject peoples, they have done so upon institutions in harmony with the temper of their subjects ; they have, it is true, introduced their owls justice, but injustice is no integral part of any institutions, rather a flaw in the machine. Where they do not govern but colonise, they supplant and supersede, as they have done in America, New Zealand, and Australia; the weaker type has disappeared before them, and they have practically demon- strated M. Le Bon's point that environment is a very slight force as compared with heredity. The race remains the same wherever it can live; peaceful if self-governed, turbulent if subject, as in the Transvaal; and everywhere one finds Britons of the worst parentage displaying the most valuable qualities that a race can possess. Everywhere, also, where the Anglo-Saxon stock spreads you find substantially the same institutions, and working, in accordance with M. La
Bon's theory, well or ill just in proportion as the race is homogeneous. In America there is danger enough to these institutions from the crude and unassimilated masses of various foreign strains, and M. Le Bon goes so far as to pre- dict a great internecine war of the true American against this invasion of the comparatively barbarous. That is remote. But already both branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are at grapple with the negro question. There exists this one markedly inferior stock which will not die out before the march of its white competitors, and the problem of its position in the State is scarcely less difficult at the Cape than in America.
What is to be done with negro citizens ? one would ask M. Le Bon ; and he would be in no doubt as to the answer. Practically, you must not have negro citizens. You may educate your negro, as you already educate your Hindoo, till he can pass every examination that a European passes ; but in educating his intellect you have not perceptibly educated his character. Acquisitions of the intellect are won by the individual; acquisitions of character, the slow outcome of heredity, are the gradual gain of a race. And consequently your negro will never be fit for institutions that are not in some way a direct outcome of the negro character. Such would emihatically be M. Le Bon's answer. By admitting the negro to full civic rights and a share in government you imperil your existence as a nation just in proportion to the bulk of the new element admitted ; or you drive the national existence to assert itself against laws which do not sanc- tion, but contravene, a state of feeling existent in the race. To give this answer unreservedly would be to overlook one main factor in the problem,—the presence of that strong religions element which M. Le Bon himself recognises as permanent in the Anglo-Saxon character, and which persists in regarding the negro as a person with rights equal to the white man's, at least before God. Yet the principle under- lying the contention is sound in policy, though perhaps the highest destinies of a nation are not served by following always the obviously sound policy ; and the question is urgent, at least for America. How to assimilate the continual influx of new European elements is already a problem ; how to make English and Dutch blend at the Cape is a hard enough task ; but the real and baffling crux is how to make theory and fact square over the position of negroes in a white commonwealth. In a State of the Latin type the difficulty is less. Latin races feel, as M. Le Bon says, "the incurable need of being governed ; " what they crave is equality rather than freedom. And consequently, if you set up over the heads of everybody either a rigid autocratic system or the personality of an autocrat, you have a type of rule which is excellent for all who can submit to it. In that case, the negro has to identify himself not with the law, but with the submission ; it is when he is called on to exercise freedom and play his part in a society, whose object is to allow the greatest possible range of individual inequality, that he endangers the whole fabric. There is no way to eradicate the racial inferiority, for heredity is the only force strong enough to combat heredity, and cross-breeding is impossible or undesirable between races of different colour. Either one race disappears into the other, as race after race has sunk into the original Egyptian type, or there results a hybrid where the qualities of each race neutralise each other and leave a being destitute of any basis of character, any traditional morality. Brazil, according to M. Le Bon, is the type of a State composed mainly of mulattoes ; indeed, pure blood is lacking through- out the whole of South America ; and the expression of that type is found in a bastard republicanism with intervals of tyranny, the least stable and least admirable form of govern- ment known on earth.
It may be urged, however, that M. Le Bon is unduly scep- tical of the extent to which character may be modified by education. Mr. Frederick Boyle, who writes an interesting article on "The Capacity of Savages" in this month's Mac- millan's Magazine, observes that the Tagals, nearly all of whom can read and write, seem to have arrived at a degree of real civilisation. At least they formed a coherent organisa- tion, and they did not maltreat their prisoners. It is true that Mr. Boyle notes that the negro child is extraordinarily quick witted, but that a relapse into dullness comes with puberty. Whether that defect is eradicable, or whether if eradicable we should be wise to eradicate it, he does not
decide. There is, of course, also the case of the Japanese, which M. Le Bon dismisses with contempt. "The varnish of European civilisation boasted at present by Japan in nowise corresponds to the mental condition of the race. It is a trumpery borrowed garment, which will soon be rent by violent revolutions." We shall see; but it is worth noting that when the British took over Wei-hai-wei, they found that the Japanese had established their camp in a separate quarter ; that they had policed the town and issued sanitary regulations, and failing the power to enforce them, used to send down detachments to clean up the Chinese filth weekly ; and that wherever the troops man cenvred they paid compensation to the astonished owners of the ground. These are symptoms of more than a varnish.
We gladly abstain from cavilling at some rash generalisa- tions, but we wish there were space to quote freely from M.
Le Bon's brilliant pages, or to discuss his views in detail- Roughly, we may say that, in his opinion, all progress is towards inequality ; what distinguishes a superior race is not the general level of the people, but the greater number of exceptional individuals. In Socialism he sees the antithesis of progress, the revolt of the masses against an intellectual aristocracy, against a disparity which widens with advancing civilisation as the artisan sinks more and more into the
machine and the employer is more and more specialised as the brain and contriver. Another revolt, of which M. Le B011 takes no account, but which he would class in the same category, is that of woman against what he would call the
superior sex. This, at least, we must quote :—
"The differentiation of individuals brought about by the development of civilisation is also apparent in the case of the sexes. Among inferior peoples or the inferior classes of superior peoples the man and the woman are intellectually on much the same level. On the other hand, in proportion as peoples grow civilised the difference between the sexes is accentuated. The volume of the male and female skull, even when the subjects compared are strictly of the same age, height, and weight, pre- sents differences that increase rapidly with the degree of civilisa- tion. Very slight in the case of the inferior races, these differ- ences become immense in the case of the superior races. In them the feminine skulls are often scarcely more developed than those of the women of very inferior races. Whereas the average volume of the skulls of male Parisians is such as to range them among the largest known skulls, the average of the skulls of female Parisians classes them among the smallest skulls with which we are acquainted, almost on a level with the skulls of Chinese women, and scarcely above the feminine skulls of New Caledonia."
We hasten to disown all responsibility for these statements; indeed, we should be ready to argue that if ethnological facts point to an equality between Chinese and Parisian women, there is little confidence to be placed in ethnology. Still, the most remarkable woman before the world at this moment is Chinese.
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