1. The stability and malleability of the national
mind.
THE knowledge of a people at any given moment of its history
involves an understanding of its environment and above all of its
past. Theoretically one may deny that past, as did the men of
the Revolution, as many men of the present day have done, but its
influence remains indestructible.
In the past, built up by slow accumulations of centuries,
was formed the aggregation of thoughts, sentiments, traditions,
and prejudices constituting the national mind which makes the
strength of a race. Without it no progress is possible. Each
generation would necessitate a fresh beginning.
The aggregate composing the soul of a people is solidly
established only if it possesses a certain rigidity, but this
rigidity must not pass a certain limit, or there would be no such
thing as malleability.
Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity,
and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes
of environment resulting from the progress of civilization.
Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a
people to incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity
leads it to decadence. Living species, like the races of
humanity, disappear when, too fixedly established by a long past,
they become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of
existence.
Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium
between these two contrary qualities of stability and
malleability. The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern
times may be cited among those who have best attained it.
The peoples whose mind is most fixed and established often
effect the most violent revolutions. Not having succeeded in
evolving progressively, in adapting themselves to changes of
environment, they are forced to adapt themselves violently when
such adaptation becomes indispensable.
Stability is only acquired very slowly. The history of a
race is above all the story of its long efforts to establish its
mind. So long as it has not succeeded it forms a horde of
barbarians without cohesion and strength. After the invasions of
the end of the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form
a national soul.
She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries
this soul finally became too rigid. With a little more
malleability, the ancient monarchy would have been slowly
transformed as it was elsewhere, and we should have avoided,
together with the Revolution and its consequences, the heavy task
of remaking a national soul.
The preceding considerations show us the part of race in
the genesis of revolutions, and explain why the same revolutions
will produce such different effects in different countries; why,
for example, the ideas of the
French Revolution, welcomed with such enthusiasm by some peoples,
were rejected by others.
Certainly England, although a very stable country, has
suffered two revolutions and slain a king; but the mould of her
mental armour was at once stable enough to retain the
acquisitions of the past and malleable enough to modify them only
within the necessary limits. Never did England dream, as did the
men of the French Revolution, of destroying the ancestral
heritage in order to erect a new society in the name of reason.
“While the Frenchman,” writes M. A. Sorel,
“despised his government, detested his clergy, hated the
nobility, and revolted against the laws, the Englishman was proud
of his religion, his constitution, his aristocracy, his House of
Lords. These were like so many towers of the formidable Bastille
in which he entrenched himself, under the British standard, to
judge Europe and cover her with contempt. He admitted that the
command was disputed inside the fort, but no stranger must
approach.”
The influence of race in the destiny of the peoples
appears plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of
the Spanish republics of South America. Composed of half-castes,
that is to say, of individuals whose diverse heredities have
dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations
have no national soul and therefore no stability. A people of
half-castes is always ungovernable.
If we would learn more of the differences of political
capacity which the racial factor creates we must examine the same
nation as governed by two races successively.
The event is not rare in history. It has been manifested
in a striking manner of late in Cuba and the Phillipines, which
passed suddenly from the rule of Spain to that of the United
States.
We know in what anarchy and poverty Cuba existed under
Spanish rule; we know, too, to what a degree of prosperity the
island was brought in a few years when it fell into the hands of
the United States.
The same experience was repeated in the Phillipines, which
for centuries had been governed by Spain. Finally the country
was no more than a vast jungle, the home of epidemics of every
kind, where a miserable population vegetated without commerce or
industry. After a few years of American rule the country was
entirely transformed: malaria, yellow fever, plague and cholera
had entirely disappeared. The swamps were drained; the country
was covered with railways, factories and schools. In thirteen
years the mortality was reduced by two-thirds.
It is to such examples that we must refer the theorist who
has not yet grasped the profound significance of the word race,
and how far the ancestral soul of a people rules over its
destiny.
