Chapter II: Part 2

Thus when the Carnegie Institution Expedition arrived at the Murray Islands in Torres Straits, the scientific staff were much pleased at the decided evidences of respect shown by the natives until it came out that the Islanders considered their white guests to be semi-idiots, and hence powerful sorcerers to be placated. Fijian religion had developed into the oracular stage, and the priest after receiving prayers and offerings would on occasions be entered into by the god. Tremors would overspread his body, the flesh of which would creep horribly. His veins would swell, his eyeballs protrude with excitement and his voice, becoming quavering and unnatural, would whine out strange words, words spoken by the god himself and unknown to the priest who as his unconscious agent was overcome by violent convulsions. Slowly the contortions grew less and with a start the priest would awaken, dash his club upon the ground and the god would leave him. It may well be imagined that the priests were the most powerful agents of the chiefs in forwarding the interests of their masters, for, as in ancient Greece or Rome, nothing of importance was undertaken without first consulting the oracle.

Surrounded by multitudes of demons, ghosts, and genii who were personified in everything about him, religion was the most powerful factor in controlling Fijian life and politics. In fact, it entered deeply into every act the native performed. The gods were more monstrous in every way than man, but in all attributes only the exaggerated counterparts of Fijian chiefs.

War was constantly occurring among these gods and spirits, and even high gods could die by accident or be killed by those of equal rank so that at least one god, Samu, was thus dropped out of the mythology in 1847.

Ndengei was the oldest and greatest, but not the most universally reverenced god. He lived in a cavern in the northeastern end of Viti Levu, and usually appeared as a snake, or as a snake's head with a body of stone symbolizing eternal life. Among the sons and grandsons of Ndengei were Roko Mbati-ndua, the one-toothed lord; a fiend with a huge tooth projecting from his lower jaw and curving over the top of his head. He had bat's wings armed with claws and was usually regarded as a harbinger of pestilence. The mechanic's god was eight-handed, gluttony had eighty stomachs, wisdom possessed eight eyes. Other gods were the adulterer, the abductor of women of rank and beauty, the rioter, the brain-eater, the killer of men, the slaughter god, the god of leprosy, the giant, the spitter of miracles, the gods of fishermen and of carpenters, etc. One god hated mosquitoes and drove them away from the place where he lived. The names and stations of the gods are described by Thomas Williams, who has given the most detailed account of the old religion.

As with all peoples whose religion is barbarous, there were ways of obtaining sanctuary and many a man has saved his life by taking advantage of the tabus which secured their operation. No matter how desirous your host might be of murdering you, as long as you remained a guest under his roof you were safe, although were you only a few yards away from his door he would eagerly attack you.

But not only did the Fijians live in a world peopled by witches, wizards, prophets, seers and fortune-tellers, but there was a perfect army of fairies which overran the whole land, and the myths concerning which would have filled volumes could they ever have been gathered. The gnome-like spirits of the mountains had peaked heads, and were of a vicious, impish disposition, but were powerless to injure any one who carried a fern leaf in his hand.

Sacred relics such as famous clubs, stones possessing miraculous powers, etc., were sometimes kept in Fijian temples, but there were no idols such as were prayed to by the Polynesians.

The fearful alternatives of heaven and hell were unknown to the Fijians. They believed in an eternal existence for men, animals, and even canoes and other inanimate things, but the future life held forth no prospect either of reward for virtues or punishment for evil acts committed while alive. So certain were they of a future life that they always referred to the dead as "the absent ones," and their land of shades (Mbulu) was not essentially different from the world they lived in. Indeed, their chief idea of death was that of rest, for as William's states, they have an adage: "Death is easy: Of what use is life? To die is rest."

There were, however, certain precautions the Fijian felt it advisable to take before entering the world to come. If he had been so unfortunate as not to have killed a man, woman or child, his duty would be the dismal one of pounding filth throughout eternity, and disgraceful careers awaited those whose ears were not bored or women who were not tatooed upon parts covered by the liku. Moreover, should a wife not accompany him (be strangled at the time of his death) his condition would be the dismal one of a spirit without a cook. Thirdly, as one was at the time of death so would the spirit be in the next world. It was therefore an advantage to die young, and people often preferred to be buried alive, or strangled, than to survive into old age. Lastly and most important, one must not die a bachelor, for such are invariably dashed to pieces by Nangganangga, even if they should succeed in elud- ing the grasp of the Great Woman, Lewa-levu, who flaunts the path of the departed spirits and searches for the ghosts of good-looking men. Let us imagine, however, that our shade departs this life in the best of form, young, married, with the lobes of his ears pierced, not dangerously handsome and a slayer of at least one human being. He starts upon the long journey to the Valhalla of Fiji. Soon he comes to a spiritual Pandanus at which he must throw the ghost of the whale's tooth which was placed in his hand at time of burial. If he succeeds in hitting the Pandanus, he may then wait until the spirit of his strangled wife comes to join him, after which he boards the canoe of the Fijian Charon and proceeds to Nambanggatai, where until 1847 there dwelt the god Samu, and after his death Samuyalo "the killer of souls."

This god remains in ambush in some spiritual mangrove bushes and thrusts a reed within the ground upon the path of the ghost as a warning not to pass the spot. Should the ghost be brave he raises his club in defiance, whereupon Samuyalo appears, club in hand, and gives battle. If killed in this combat, the ghost is cooked and eaten by the soul killer, and if wounded he must wander forever among the mountains, but if the ghost be victorious over the god he may pass on to be questioned by Ndengei, who may consign him either to Mburotu, the highest heaven, or drop him over a precipice into a somewhat inferior but still tolerable abode, Murimuria. This Ndengei does in accordance with the caprice of the moment and without reference either to the virtues or the faults of the deceased. Thus of those who die only a few can enter the higher heaven for the Great Woman and the Soul destroyer overcome the greater number of those who dare to face them. As for the victims of cannibal feasts, their souls are devoured by the gods when their bodies are eaten by man.

In temperament and ambitions the spirits of the dead remained as they were upon earth, but of more monstrous growth in all respects, resembling giants greater and more vicious than man. War and cannibalism still prevailed in heaven, and the character of the inhabitants seems to have been fiendish or contemptible as on earth; for the spirits of women who were not tattooed were unceasingly pursued by their more fortunate sisters, who tore their bodies with sharp shells, often making mince-meat of them for the gods to eat. Also the shade of any one whose ears had not been pierced was condemned to carry a masi log over his shoulder and submit to the eternal ridicule of his fellow spirits.

Altogether, this religion seems to have been as sordid, brutal and vicious as was the ancestral negroid stock of the Fijians. Connected with it there was, however, a rude mythology, clumsy but romantic, too much of which has been lost; for the natives of to-day have largely forgotten its stories or are ashamed to repeat it to the whites. In recent times the natives have tended to make their folk-lore conform to Biblical stories, or to adapt them to conditions of the present day. The interesting subject of the lingering influence of old beliefs upon the life of the natives of to-day has engaged the attention of Basil Thomson in "The Fijians, a Study of the Decay of Custom."

As in every British colony, the people are taught to respect the law. Sentences of imprisonment are meted out to natives for personal offences which if committed by white men would be punished by small fines, but the reason for this is that in the old native days such acts were avenged by murder, and it is to prevent crime that a prison term has been ordained. The natives take their imprisonment precisely as boys in boarding school regard a flogging, the victim commonly becoming quite a hero and losing no caste among his fellows. Indeed it is a common sight to see bands of from four to eight stalwart "convicts" a mile or more from the prison marching unguarded through the woods as they sing merrily on their way "home" to the jail. Once I recall seeing two hundred prisoners, all armed with long knives, engaged in cutting weeds along the roadside, chanting happily as they slashed, while a solitary native dressed only in a waist-cloth and armed only with a club stood guard at one end of the line, and this not near the prison, but in a lonely wood fully a mile from the nearest house.

In 1874, the British undertook the unique task of civilizing without exploiting a barbarous and degraded race which was drifting hopelessly into ruin. They began the solution of this complex problem by arresting the entire race and immuring them within the protecting walls of a system which recognized as its cardinal principle that the natives were unfit to think or act for themselves. For a generation the Fijians have been in a prison wherein they have become the happiest and best behaved captives upon earth. During this time they have become reconciled to a life of peace, and have forgotten the taste of human flesh; and while they cherish no love for the white man, they feel the might of his law and know that his decrees are as finalities of fate. All are serving life sentences to the white man's will, and the fire of their old ambition has cooled into the dull embers of resignation and then died into the apathy of contentment with things that are. Worse still, they have grown fond of their prison world, and the most pessimistic feature in the Fijian situation of to-day is the evident fact that there is almost no discontent among the natives. Old things have withered and decayed, but new ambition has not been born.

It is in no spirit of criticism of British policy that I have written the above paragraph for it was absolutely necessary that the race should "calm down" for a generation at least before it could be trusted to arise. Now, however, there are no more old chiefs whose memories hark back to days of savagery, and now for the first and only time has come the critical period in the unique governmental experiment the British have undertaken to perform, for now is the time when the child must learn to walk alone and the support of guardian arms must in kindness be withdrawn, else there must be nurtured but a cripple, not a man.

Among the generation of to-day the light of a new ambition must appear in Fiji or the race shall dwindle to its death. No real progress has been made by the Fijians; they have received much from their teachers, but have given nothing in return. They are in the position of a youth whose schooling has just been finished, life and action lie before him; will he awaken to his responsibility, develop his latent talent, character and power, and recompense his teachers by achievement, or will he sink into the apathy of a vile content?

The situation in Fiji is one of peculiar delicacy for the desire for better things must arise among the Fijians themselves, and should it once appear, the paternalism of the present government must be wisely withdrawn to permit of more and more freedom in proportion as the natives may become competent to think and act rightly for themselves. A cardinal difficulty is the unfortunate fact that the natives DESIRE no change, and even if individually discontented and ambitious, they know of no profession, arts or trades to which they might turn with hope of fortune. The establishment of manual training schools wherein money-making trades should be taught, if possible BY NATIVE teachers, is sorely needed in Fiji.

At present there is too little freedom of thought in Fiji; fear of the chief and of Samuyalo's club has been replaced by fear of the European and his hell. Free, fearless thought is the father of high action, and while their minds remain steeped in an apathy of dread there can be no soil in which the seed of independence can germinate.

Yet it is still possible that the Fijians may attain civilization. Of all the archipelagoes of Polynesia, Fiji alone may still be called the "Isles of Hope." As one who has known and grown to love these honest, hospitable, simple people, I can only hope that the day is not far distant when a leader may arise among them who will turn their faces toward the light of a brighter sky, and their hands to a worthier task than has ever yet been performed in Polynesia.

Yet why civilize them? Often does one ask oneself this question, but the answer comes as the voice of fate, "they must attain civilization or they must die." Should the population continue to decline at its present rate, the time is imminent when the dark-skinned men of Fiji will be not the natives, but the swarming progeny of the coolies of Calcutta.

Nowhere over all the wide Pacific have the natives been more wisely or unselfishly ruled than in Fiji, yet even here native life seems to be growing less and less purposeful year by year. In time it is hoped a reaction may set in and that with the decline of communism new ambitions may replace the old, but then will come the problem of the rich and the poor--a thing unknown in Fijian life to-day.

Hardly the first lessons in civilization have been taught in Polynesia, yet who can predict the noon day, should even the faintest glow appear in native hope. In former ages the Japanese were a barbarous insular people, and as in our own civilization the traditions and habits of rude Aryan ancestors still color our fundamental thoughts so in Japan we find evidences of a culture essentially similar to that of the Pacific Islands of to-day. The ancient ancestor worship of Japan is strangely like that of the tropical Pacific with its gods, the ghosts of long departed chiefs, and its high chief a living god to-day. Moreover in the Pacific Islands the house consists of but a single room, and such to-day is essentially the case in Japan, save only that delicate paper screens divide its originally unitary floor-space into temporary compartments. As in the South Seas, matting still covers the floor of the Japanese house, its roof is thatched, and is constructed before the sides are made, there is no chimney, the fire-place is an earthen space upon the floor or is sustained within an artistically molded bronze brazier, the refined descendant of the cruder hearth. In Polynesia as in Japan one seats oneself anywhere in tailor-fashion upon the floor, and upon this floor the meals are served, and here one sleeps at night, nor will the women partake of food in the presence of the men. In essential fundamental things of life the Japanese show their kinship in custom and tradition to the insular peoples of Asiatic origin now occupying the Pacific, and if Japan has attained to so great a height in culture and civilization, why may we not hope for better days for the South Sea Islanders?

WAR SELECTION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

BY CHANCELLOR DAVID STARR JORDAN

LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY

"The human harvest was bad!" Thus the historian sums up the conditions in Rome in the days of the good emperor, Marcus Aurelius. By this he meant that while population and wealth were increasing, manhood had failed. There were men enough in the streets, men enough in the camps, menial laborers enough and idlers enough, but of good soldiers there were too few. For the business of the state, which in those days was mainly war, its men were inadequate.

In recognition of this condition we touch again the overshadowing fact in the history of Europe, the effect of "military selection" on the human breed.

In rapid survey of the evidence brought from history one must paint the picture, such as it is, with a broad brush, not attempting to treat exceptions and qualifications, for which this article has no space and concerning which records yield no data. Such exceptions, if fully understood, would only prove the rule. The evil effects of military selection and its associated influences have long been recognized in theory by certain students of social evolution. But the ideas derived from the sane application of our knowledge of Darwinism to history are even now just beginning to penetrate the current literature of war and peace. In public affairs most nations have followed the principle of opportunism, "striking while the iron is hot," without regard to future results, whether of financial exhaustion or of race impoverishment.

The recorded history of Rome begins with small and vigorous tribes inhabiting the flanks of the Apennines and the valleys down to the sea, and blending together to form the Roman republic. They were men of courage and men of action, virile, austere, severe and dominant.[1] They were men who "looked on none as their superior and none as their inferior." For this reason, Rome was long a republic. Free-born men control their own destinies. "The fault," says Cassius, "is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings." Thus in freedom, when Rome was small without glory, without riches, without colonies and without slaves, she laid the foundations of greatness.

[1] Virilis, austerus, severus, dominous, good old words applied by Romans to themselves.

But little by little the spirit of freedom gave way to that of domination. Conscious of power, men sought to exercise it, not on themselves but on one another. Little by little this meant aggression, suppression, plunder, struggle, glory and all that goes with the pomp and circumstance of war. So the individuality in the mass was lost in the aggrandizement of the few. Independence was swallowed up in ambition and patriotism came to have a new meaning, being transferred from hearth and home to the camp and the army.

In the subsequent history of Rome, we have now to consider only a single factor, the reversal of selection." In Rome's conquests, Vir, the real man, went forth to battle and foreign invasion; Homo, the human being, remained on the farm and in the workshop and begat the new generations. "Vir gave place to Homo," says the Latin author. Men of good stock were replaced by the sons of slaves and camp-followers, the riff-raff of those the army sucked in but could not use.

The Fall of Rome was due not to luxury, effeminacy or corruption, not to Nero's or Caligula's wickedness, nor to the futility of Constantine's descendants. It began at Philippi, where the spirit of domination overcame the spirit of freedom. It was forecast still earlier in the rise of consuls and triumvirs incident to the thinning out of the sturdy and self-sufficient strains who brooked no arbitrary rule. While the best men were falling in war, civil or foreign, or remained behind in faraway colonies, the stock at home went on repeating its weakling parentage. A condition significant in Roman history is marked by the gradual swelling of the mob, with the rise in authority of the Emperor who was the mob's exponent. Increase of arbitrary power went with the growing weakness of the Romans themselves. Always the "Emperor" serves as a sort of historical barometer by which to measure the abasement of the people. The concentrated power of Julius Caesar, resting on his own tremendous personality, showed that the days of Cincinnatus and of Junius Brutus were past. The strength of Augustus rested likewise in personality. The rising authority of later emperors had its roots in the ineffectiveness of the mob, until it came to pass that "the little finger of Constantine was thicker than the loins of Augustus." This was due not to Constantine's force, but to the continued reversal of selection among the people over whom he ruled. The emperor, no longer the strong man holding in check all lesser men and organizations, became the creature of the mob; and "the mob, intoxicated with its own work, worshipped him as divine." Doubtless the last emperor, Augustulus Romulus, before the Goths threw him into the scrap-heap of history, was regarded by the mob and himself as the most god-like of the whole succession.

The Romans of the Republic might perhaps have made a history very different. Had they held aloof from world-conquering schemes Rome might have remained a republic, enduring even down to our day. The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be fathers of coming generations.

"The Roman Empire," says Professor Seely, "perished for want of men." Even Julius Caesar notes the dire scarcity of men, while at the same time there were people enough. The population steadily grew; Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, but self-reliant farmers, "the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines," men of the early Roman days, these were fast going, and with the change in type of population came the turn in Roman history.

The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries has been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the Apennines.

"The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers were decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army multiplied," says Professor Bury. Thus "Vir gave place to Homo," thus the mob filled Rome and the mob-hero rose to the imperial throne. No wonder that Constantine seemed greater than Augustus. No wonder that "if Tiberius chastised his subjects with whips, Valentinian chastised them with scorpions."[2]

[2] The point of this is that the cruel Tiberius was less severe on the Romans of his day than was the relatively benevolent Valentinian on his decadent people.

With Marcus Aurelius and the Antonines came a "period of sterility and barrenness in human beings." Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge." Wars were conducted in the face of a declining birth-rate, and the decline in quality and quantity in the human breed engaged very early the attention of Roman statesmen. Deficiencies of numbers were made up by immigration, willing or enforced. Failure in quality was beyond remedy.

Says Professor Zumpt:

'Government having assumed godhead, took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty.... The worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine. . . . The emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because it had no country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic ties. . . . There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and barbarian's contempt for honest industry. . . . Roman civilization was not a creative kind, it was military, that is, destructive.'

What was the end of it all? The nation bred Romans no more. To cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were borrowed." The man with quick eye and strong arm gave place to the slave, the scullion, the pariah, whose lot is fixed because in him there lies no power to alter it. So at last the Roman world, devoid of power to resist, was overwhelmed by the swarming Ostrogoths.

The barbarian settled and peopled the empire rather than conquered it. It was the weakness of war-worn Rome that gave the Germanic races their first opportunity.

"The nation is like a bee," wisely observes Bernard Shaw, "as it stings it dies."

In his monumental history of the "Downfall of the Ancient World" (Der Untergang der Antikenwelt) Dr. Otto Seeck of the University of Munster in Westphalia, treats in detail the causes of such decline. He first calls attention to the intellectual stagnation which came over the Roman Empire about the beginning of the Christian Era. This manifested itself in all fields of intellectual activity. No new idea of any importance was advanced in science nor in technical and political studies. In the realm of literature and art also one finds a complete lack of originality and a tendency to imitate older models. All this Seeck asserts, was brought about by the continuous "rooting out (Ausrottung) of the best"[3] through war.

[3] "Die Ausrottung der Besten, die jenen schwacheren Volken die Vernichtung brachte, hat die starken Germanen erst befahigt, auf den Trummern der antiken Welt neue dauerende Gemeinschaften zu errichten." Seeck.

Such extermination which took place in Greece as well as in Rome, was due to persistent internal conflicts, the constant murderous struggle going on between political parties, in which, in rapid succession, first one and then the other was victorious. The custom of the victors being to kill and banish the leaders and all prominent men in the defeated party, often destroying their children as well, it is evident that in time every strain distinguished for moral courage, initiative or intellectual strength was exterminated. By such a systematic killing off of men of initiative and brains, the intellectual level of a nation must necessarily be lowered more and more. In Rome as in Greece observes Seeck:

'A wealth of force of spirit went down in the suicidal wars. . . . In Rome, Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds and thousands. Sulla destroyed the democrats, and not less thoroughly. Whatever of strong blood survived, fell as an offering to the proscription of the Triumvirate. . . . The Romans had less of spontaneous force to lose than the Greeks. Thus desolation came sooner to them. Whoever was bold enough to rise politically in Rome was almost without exception thrown to the ground. ONLY COWARDS REMAINED, AND FROM THEIR BLOOD CAME FORWARD THE NEW GENERATIONS.[4] Cowardice showed itself in lack of originality and in slavish following of masters and traditions.'

[4] Author's italics.

Certain authors, following Varro, have maintained that Rome died a "natural death," the normal result of old age. It is mere fancy to suppose that nations have their birth, their maturity and their decline under an inexorable law like that which determines the life history of the individual. A nation is a body of living men. It may be broken up if wrongly led or attacked by a superior force. When its proportion of men of initiative or character is reduced, its future will necessarily be a resultant of the forces that are left.

Dr. Seeck speaks with especial scorn of the idea that Rome died of "old age." He also repudiates the theory that her fall was due to the corruption of luxury, neglect of military tactics or over-diffusion of culture.

'It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans suffered from over-culture.[5] In condemning the sinful luxury of wealthy Romans we forget that the trade-lords of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were scarcely inferior in this regard to Lucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting the slightest check to the advance of the nations to which these men belonged. The people who lived in luxury in Rome were scattered more thinly than in any modern state of Europe. The masses lived at all times more poorly and frugally because they could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war force of untold millions of people is rendered effeminate by the luxury of a few hundreds? . . . Too long have historians looked on the rich and noble as marking the fate of the world. Half the Roman Empire was made up of rough barbarians untouched by Greek or Roman culture.

Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical, not a moral decay. In valor, discipline and science the Roman armies remained what they had always been, and the peasant emperors of Illyricum were worthy successors of Cincinnatus and Calus Marius. But the problem was, how to replenish those armies. Men were wanting. The empire perished for want of men.'

[5] "Damitsprechend hat man das Wort `Ueberkultur' uberhaupt erfunden, als wenn ein zu grosses Maass von Kultur uberhaupt denkbar ware."

In a volume entitled "Race or Mongrel" published as I write these pages, Dr. Alfred P. Schultz of New York, author of "The End of Darwinism," takes essentially the same series of facts as to the fall of Rome and draws from them a somewhat different conclusion. In his judgment the cause was due to "bastardy," to the mixing of Roman blood with that of neighboring and subjective races. To my mind, bastardy was the result and not the cause of Rome's decline, inferior and subject races having been sucked into Rome to fill the vacuum left as the Romans themselves perished in war. The continuous killing of the best left room for the "post-Roman herd," who once sold the imperial throne at auction to the highest bidder. As the Romans vanished through warfare at home and abroad, came an inrush of foreign blood from all regions roundabout. As Schultz graphically states:

'The degeneration and depravity of the mongrels was so great that they deified the emperors. And many of the emperors were of a character so vile that their deification proves that the post-Roman soul must have been more depraved than that of the Egyptian mongrel, who deified nothing lower than dogs, cats, crocodiles, bugs and vegetables.'

It must not be overlooked, however, that the Roman race was never a pure race. It was a union of strong elements of frontier democratic peoples, Sabines, Umbrians, Sicilians, Etruscans, Greeks, being blended in republican Rome. Whatever the origins, the worst outlived the best, mingling at last with the odds and ends of Imperial slavery, the "Sewage of Races" ("cloaca gentium") left at the Fall.

Gibbon says:

'This diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the old standard and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies when the fierce giants of the north broke in and mended the puny breed. They restored the manly spirit of freedom and after the revolutions of ten centuries, freedom became the parent of taste and science.'

But again, the redeemed Italian was of no purer blood than the post-Roman-Ostrogoth ancestry from which he sprang. The "puny Roman" of the days of Theodoric owed his inheritance to the cross of Roman weaklings with Roman slaves. He was not weak because he was "mongrel" but because he sprang from bad stock on both sides. The Ostrogoth and the Lombard who tyrannized over him brought in a great strain of sterner stuff, followed by crosses with captive and slave such as always accompany conquest. To understand the fall of Rome one must consider the disastrous effects of crossings of this sort. Neither can one overlook the waste of war which made them inevitable through the wholesale influx of inferior tribes. Neither can one speak of the Roman, the Italian, the Spaniard, the French, the Roumanian, nor of any of the so-called "Latin" peoples as representing a simple pure stock, or as being, except in language, direct descendants of those ancient Latins who constituted the Roman Republic. The failure of Rome arose not from hybridization, but from the wretched quality on both sides of its mongrel stock, descendants of Romans unfit for war and of base immigrants that had filled the vacancies.

Greece.--Once Greece led the world in intellectual pursuits, in art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187 years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the Christian bombs of the Venetian Republic.

But the glory of Greece had passed away long before the fall of the Parthenon. Its cause was the one cause of all such downfalls--the extinction of strong men by war. At the best, the civilization of Greece was built on slavery, one freeman to ten slaves. And when the freemen were destroyed, the slaves, an original Mediterranean stock, overspread the territory of Hellas along with the Bulgarians, Albanians and Vlachs, barbarians crowding down from the north.

The Grecian language still lives, the tongue of a spirited and rising modern people. But the Greeks of the classic period--the Hellenes of literature, art and philosophy--will never be known again. Says Mr. W. H. Ireland:

'Most of the old Greek race has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed, there is a strong ground for the statement that there was more of the old heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George.'

The modern Greek has been called a "Byzantinized Slav." King George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of outer powers, being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks were merely barbarians.

It is maintained that the modern Greeks are in the main the descendants of the population that inhabited Greece in the earlier centuries of Byzantine rule. Owing to the operation of various causes, historical, social and economic, that population was composed of many heterogeneous elements and represented in very limited degree the race which repulsed the Persians and built the Parthenon. The internecine conflicts of the Greek communities, wars with foreign powers, and the deadly struggles of factions in the various cities had to a large extent obliterated the old race of free citizens by the beginning of Roman period. The extermination of the Plataeans by the Spartans and of the Melians by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war, the proscription of the Athenian citizens after the war, the massacre of the Coreyrean oligarchs by the democratic party, the slaughter of the Thebans by Alexander and of the Corinthians by Mummius are among the more familiar instances of the catastrophes which overtook the civic element in the Greek cities. The void can only have been filled from the ranks of the metics or resident aliens and of the descendants of the far more numerous slave population. In the classic period four fifths of the population of Attica were slaves; of the remainder, half were meties In A.D. 100 only three thousand free arm-bearing men were in Greece. (James D. Bourchier.)

The constant little struggles of the Greeks among themselves made no great showing as to numbers compared to other wars, but they wiped out the most valuable people, the best blood, the most promising heredity on earth. This cost the world more than the killing of millions of barbarians. In two centuries there were born under the shadow of the Parthenon more men of genius than the Roman Empire had in its whole existence. Yet this empire included all the civilized world, even Greece herself. (La Pouge.)

The downfall of Greece,[6] like that of Rome, has been ascribed by Schultz to the crossing of the Greeks with the barbaric races which flocked into Hellas from every side. These resident aliens, or metics, steadily increased in number as the free Greeks disappeared. Selected slaves or helots were then made free in order to furnish fighting men, and again as these fell their places were taken by immigrants.

[6] Certain recent writers who find in environment the causes of the rise and fall of nations, ascribe the failure of Greece to the introduction in Athens and Sparta of the malaria-bearing mosquito. As to the facts in question, we have little evidence. But while the prevalence of malaria may have affected the general activity of the people, it could in no way have obliterated the mental leadership which made the strength of classic Hellas, nor could it have injected its poison into the stream of Greek heredity.

It is doubtless true at this day that "no race inhabits Greece," and the main difference between Greeks and other Balkan peoples is that, inhabiting the mountains and valleys of Hellas, they speak in dialects of the ancient tongue. Environment, except through selection and segregation, can not alter race inheritance and the modern "Greeks" have not been changed by it. Schultz observes:

'We are told that the Hellenes owed their greatness largely to the country it was their fortune to dwell in. To that same country, with the same wonderful coast line and harbors, mountains and brooks, and the same sun of Homer, the modern Greeks owe their nothingness.'

In other words, it is quite true that the Greece of Pericles owed its strength to Greek blood, not to Hellenic scenery. When all the good Greek blood was spent in suicidal wars, only slaves and foreign-born were left. " 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more."[7]

[7] In contrasting a new race with the old--as the modern Greeks with the incomparable Hellenes--we must not be unjust to the men of to-day whose limitations are evident, contrasted with a race we know mainly by its finest examples. In spite of poverty, touchiness and vanity characteristic of the modern Greek, there is good stuff in him. He is frank, hopeful, enthusiastic. The mountain Greek, at least, knows the value of freedom, and has more than once put up a brave fight for it. The valleys breed subserviency, and the Greeks of Thessaly are said to be less independent than the mountain-born.

Furthermore, we do not know that even the first Hellenes of Mycenae were an unmixed race, or that any unmixed races ever rose to such prominence as to command the world's attention. We do know that when war depletes a nation slaves and foreigners come in to fill the vacuum, and that the decline of a great race in history has always been accompanied by a debasing of its blood.

Yet out of this decadence natural selection may in time bring forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security and peace nature may begin again her work of recuperation.

In the fall of Greece we have another count against war, scarcely realized until the facts of Louvain and Malines, of Rheims and Ypres, have brought it again so vividly before us. War respects nothing, while the human soul increasingly demands veneration for its own noble and beautiful achievements. As I write this, there rise before me the paintings in the "Neue Pinakothek" at Munich, representing the twenty-one Cities of Ancient Greece, from Sparta to Salamis, from Eleusis to Corinth, not as they were, "in the glory which was Greece," not as they are now, largely fishing hamlets by the blue Aegean Sea, but as ruined arches and broken columns half hid in the ashes of war, wars which blotted out Greece from world history.

ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS AND WAR

BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS

NEW YORK CITY

ONE of the most curious of those misstatements of fact and confusions of thought the conservative seems even more prone to make than the radical has to do with a certain suppositiously historical relation between women and war. It is assumed[1] that early society is ever militant and that because of its militarism it excludes women, women not being fighters, not only from its government, but from all its privileges, even making of them its drudges and its beasts of burden. And so, argues the conservative, women are for the same reasons disfranchised, and properly disfranchised, to-day. Whether more or less militant than it was, society is still founded on force, and because women are not as strong as men, men will not give them the vote. Besides it is only right, since they can not fight, they should not vote. It has always been so, and so it should continue to be, at any rate until war becomes a thing of the past, and that will never be, you can't change human nature, etc., etc.

[1] And, let us admit, not merely by the conservative anti-feminist. As radical and discerning a feminist as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, after asserting that physical strength was once "sole ruler," cites in agreement Walter Bagehot's reference to "the contempt for physical weakness and for women which marks early society." ("Women and the Alphabet," p. 49. Boston and New York, 1900.)

There are of course various answers to this militarist anti-suffrage argument, answers which in spite of the logic of current events are still likely to be satisfactory or not according to previous convictions, but the only point I wish to challenge is the appeal in this connection to the past. Let the militarist anti-suffragist assert his belief in government by force if he likes, but let him not try to justify it by the precedents of primitive life. Nor may he--or she--explain the exclusion of women to-day as a survival of their subjection in primitive society to brute force. The government of primitive society is not based on physical prowess, and although modern woman is excluded from men's activities for the same reason as primitive woman was excluded, the reason is not muscular inferiority.

It is a pity in the feminist controversies of the last hundred years or so that the "exclusion of women" did not become a more popular phrase than the "subjection of women." That term gave a fallacious twist both to observation and analysis. Primitive and modern men alike commonly EXCLUDE women, they seldom subject them. Similarly, in some societies, children and young people, all in fact but the elderly, are treated to methods of exclusion rather than of subjection.

Early society is dominated by the elders; its practices and customs have been determined by them and, in the most primitive society, government is nothing but a gerontocracy, a government of old men. Even with chieftaincy the council of the elders is weighty and the heads of households have considerable influence. Are the elders the fighters or raiders of the tribe? No, they are its judges, its legislators and, most important of all, its magicians. Nor is the chief or king the fighter par excellence of the tribe. But he too may be and often is the tribal magician. Through their powers of magic elders and chiefs are responsible for the weather, for the reproduction of plants and animals, for the success of the crops, of hunts and catches, for the health and general welfare of the people. And in war? In war they are the most important personages too. Because they fight? No, because in war too they make magic; they charm the approaches to the village, they "doctor" the trails or the weapons or the canoes, they make war medicine, they invoke and propitiate the war gods. The warriors are the younger men, men whose efforts would be vain without the backing of their magic-working seniors or chiefs. The elders make peace and declare war. And it is at their dictate that the young men take to head-hunting or to raiding or even to stealing women.

As to the subjection of women, what exists of it the elders are responsible for. It is they who scare a girl or shame her into being docile. It is they who marry her off against her will, it is they who set her unending tasks or shut her up in idleness. It is they who make her undergo the discomforts or miseries of what we call conventional life or bully her into exile or death.

With this control of girls or women the warriors, the "standing army," have little or nothing to do, even less in primitive life than in modern. It is the old people, the old women at times as well as the old men. Again it is the old men who are leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they threaten--sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy--are too dire to pass unheeded. This "avoidance" has been explained as due to the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible explanation, I think, takes the avoidance as a concentration rite, so to speak, a symbol, if you like, of the life ahead, the life in which the boys, "made" men, are going to have little to do in public with women. For even after the special avoidance of the initiation period ends, the segregation of the sexes continues. Men keep together and away from women in their club-houses, and in all the places of assembly which are differentiated from the primitive club-house--the church, the council, the workshop, the gymnasium, the university, the play-house. And from all the interests which center in these places men have from time to time excluded women, they have excluded them from magic and religion, from arts and letters, from games, from politics and, let me add, from war.

Why are men so exclusive? Because--the reason will seem almost too simple, I fear, for acceptance--because now and always men do not want to be bothered by women. Women get in our way, they say, women are a nuisance. Almost anywhere away from home women are a nuisance--in church organization, in the university, in business, etc. Of course if women can be kept apart from us in these activities and will stay in their place, if they join an order of nuns or deaconesses, if they go to a separate college in the university, if they will become good stenographers, we don't mind having their cooperation, we welcome it. Women may even go to war--as an absolutely separate division of the army, said the men of Dahomi, as non-combatant pahia women or workers of magic, said the Roro-speaking tribesmen of New Guinea, or as Red (dross nurses, say the men of Europe and America. If we men can be sure women will not interfere with us, we really do not mind. Women have only to give us that assurance of non-interference to make us doubt the assertion we sometimes make that in going to war they are interfering with the order of nature.

AN INTERPRETATION OF SLAVOPHILISM

BY ARTHUR D. REES

PHILADELPHIA, PA.

THERE are good reasons for believing that the Russians are practically the greatest peace people in Christendom. They are the least commercial in the competitive sense, the least capitalistic also, and as a people, the least combative in Europe, despite the wrecks of warring dynasties that ten centuries have left upon their plains and the miscellaneous strifes and calamities of all kinds that have beset them.

Always expanding along lines of least resistance; absorbing by comparatively petty conquests, decaying or scanty peoples; reaching Kamchatka in the Far East with more ease than she reached the shores of the Baltic; never flinging her legions far and wide victoriously as did Rome, Spain, France or Great Britain--Russia remains to-day, for the most part, humble, and, in reality, a conquered people, living, dreaming and preaching a morality born both of this humility and of the physical environment that has helped to foster it. All Muscovy can not be judged by those few who live in the saddle--the Cossack population, men and women, numbers only about two million--nor by the pitiable pageant of despotism the observer beholds in their land: pogroms, poverty, disease, distress, militarism, orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism. Russia has a soul in spite of these; a gentle and beautiful soul, only half revealed, and too much concealed by her dilapidation and her dilemma; a peaceful soul, abnormally humble and devout, and in respect to these qualities unequalled in Christendom.

Since the age of Vladimir the Holy, "The Beautiful Sun of Kief," in the tenth century, Russia has had the tradition of international peace. Vladimir wandered over the country, sword and battle ax in hand, like a reincarnation of Thor, armed with his mighty and wondrous hammer. Then came his yearning for a new religion--something to inspire his life better than Perun--Russia's old god of thunder--and the other idols, and a little later, the picturesque investigation of his peripatetic commissioners having been completed, he became a Christian of the Greek church, was baptized with many fine and grand ceremonies, compelled his docile people to do likewise, and, like a true Northman that he was--the great grandson of Rurik of the Baltic wilds--he so impressed his frowsy hordes, half Scythian and half Slav, that now in the hearts of their descendants, in their popular songs and legends, in those concerning Kief especially--a beautiful and pathetic strain of music eight centuries old--he, Vladimir, is still the central heroic figure; once a man, but now a kind of god, sent from Heaven to rule, enlighten and bring peace to his people and be known in story and song as "Vladimir the Holy, the Beautiful Sun of Kief."

An old chronicle describes for us how his hordes drank their cup of trembling at his hands. There, around about the low hills of the southern Dnieper River, probably on the crumbling sandstone cliffs of Kief--the city, studded with jewel-like legends and famed for its "golden palaces," stood his candidates for baptism; near by were priests from Constantinople, gorgeously arrayed, chanting, in strains unknown to the populace, the Greek church baptismal service. Then the democratic immersion!--rich man, poor man and all, at Vladimir's command, wade into the baptismal waters, some up to their knees, some to their waists, some to their necks, and, thus finding a new faith from Heaven, they crossed themselves for the first time as the thunder rolled on high! Here is Russia remembering her Creator in the days of her youth--and forgetting Him ever since; from then on, Holy Russia! Possibly Holy Vladimir, at any rate, for becoming, with that ceremony, peaceable, except for self-defence, he gave up all of his idols and his aggressive sword. The former he scourged and cast into the river, the latter he sheathed in its scabbard. And all this about 988--the first peace movement of Holy Russia. The faith of it, and its vision and dream came early in her history and have not yet gone out or been extinguished.

Before the next such movement, time enough passed by to give the seasons and the winds and rains full opportunity to whittle down old Kief's storied sandstone hills. In 1815, the much-expanded realm of Muscovy, then a partner in the holy alliance, proclaimed under Alexander the First, the ideal of peace. This Czar declared he would rule as a father over his children and in the interest of "justice, charity and peace," and, in so doing, created the leading precedent for the peace program of Nicolas the Second.

Alexander, who in the first half of his reign ruled liberally for the days of Napoleonic supremacy, no doubt was sincere in his desire to govern in the "spirit of brotherhood," but in the latter years of his power, he fell sadly short of this standard.

Alexander the Second, the emancipator of forty-six million serfs, may have had some world peace ideal in mind when he in 1874 promoted a conference in Brussels to codify the usages of war, but the reaction from his earlier liberalism was setting in about this time and, growing worse, led to his assassination in 1881.