De la supériorité des peuples d’espèce caucasienne sur les peuples des autres espèces. — Des causes

CHAP. 48: > Of the superiority of the peoples of the Caucasian species over the peoples of other species. — Of the causes to which this superiority has been attributed. — Continuation of the preceding chapter.

But there is a second order of facts by which some seek to prove that, by their nature, the peoples of the colored species are less susceptible to improvement than the peoples of the Caucasian species: these are, on the one hand, the progress that the latter have really made; and, on the other, the vices and barbarism believed to be particular to the former. If it had not been in the nature of the peoples of the Caucasian species to be more perfectible than the others, how, it is said, would they have constantly shown themselves to be superior to them? How, amidst the revolutions that have shaken the world, would it never have happened that one of the colored species showed itself superior to the others? How is it that all works of genius are to be found on the side of a single species, while nothing is to be found on the side of the four others? Has there ever existed among any other species than our own anything comparable to the republics of Greece, of Rome, or even to the monarchical governments of most of the peoples of Europe? In our colonies, is not a very small number of whites sufficient to hold an immense multitude of blacks in servitude? And would a small number of blacks be sufficient to likewise hold multitudes of whites in servitude? Was not a handful of European adventurers enough to overthrow the empires founded by peoples of the American species, and to subjugate entire nations? Have not the peoples of Europe established in America alongside the natives made immense progress, while the latter, far from imitating them, have not only failed to take a single step, but have fallen into a more profound degradation? Are not the Chinese, who are the most advanced peoples of the Mongol species, stationary for more than four thousand years? Finally, have peoples of the Caucasian species ever been seen, even in their most barbarous state, in a degradation as profound, in a brutishness as complete as the most degraded peoples of the other species [524]?

If, instead of treating the question at hand as a partisan question, it had been treated in a scientific manner; if one had researched in what ways the species differ and in what ways they resemble each other, instead of exclusively endeavoring to prove the superiority of a single one over all the others, I have no doubt that most of the errors into which one has fallen would have been avoided. One would at least have understood that most of the facts considered decisive not only proved nothing in favor of the thesis being defended, but could, if necessary, serve to prove the opposite thesis; one would have felt, above all, that when one wishes to establish a truth, one must not use arguments that naturally destroy each other.

To prove that a certain effect is the consequence of a certain cause, it is not enough to prove the existence of both; one must also demonstrate the connection that exists between the two, or establish that no other causes existed. Thus, to establish that the peoples of the Caucasian species are, by their nature, more susceptible to improvement than the others, it is not enough to prove that certain peoples belong to a certain species and that they have made certain progress; one must prove, furthermore, that they have made such progress because they belong to that species, or else that the sole cause of their progress was in their own nature, and that they were not subject to any other kind of influence. But neither of these two propositions has ever been established.

The progress of some European peoples and the stationary state or retrograde march of some peoples of the other species are assuredly very surprising phenomena; but they are no more so than the manner in which the diverse species of men have been distributed over the surface of the globe, and so many other phenomena that the difference of species cannot explain. If one were to ask why the peoples of the Negro species occupy Africa and New Holland, and not Europe; why the peoples of the copper-colored species were found in America rather than in Asia; why the peoples of the Caucasian species were placed in Europe rather than in Africa or New Holland; why it was copper-colored peoples who were found on Tierra del Fuego, rather than white or black peoples; finally, why peoples of all species were not found equally spread across all continents, one would be at a great loss to answer, and the difference of species would probably not resolve the question. It is to be remarked, moreover, that the same line of reasoning used to prove that Europeans are of a more perfectible nature than the peoples of other species would prove that within the same species there are peoples more perfectible than others. If one were to compare what the genius of the peoples of Italy has produced to what the genius of the peoples of Hungary, Poland, Courland, or Russia has produced, one would find a difference as great as that which exists between Europeans and Asiatics. If one were to compare the progress that the small city of Geneva has brought to the sciences and arts to the progress we owe to the capital of the Austrian empire, the difference would be greater still. Must one conclude from this difference that, by its own nature, one of the two peoples is more susceptible to improvement than the other?

One seeks to prove, by two orders of facts, that the peoples of the Caucasian species are more susceptible to improvement than the others: one seeks to prove it first by their organization, or, to be more precise, by the development of the brain; one seeks to prove it next by the progress that the peoples of this species have really made. But, if these facts are proofs for the Caucasian species, they must equally serve as proof for all the others. Let us therefore set aside, for a moment, the Europeans and the colonies they have formed; let us compare among themselves the peoples of the other species, and see if the two orders of facts by which we prove the superiority of our nature could also serve as proof among peoples who are different from ourselves.

According to the reports of all travelers, the peoples of the Malay species are those who have the most developed cerebral organ; they are also those who are the tallest, the strongest, the best-built—in a word, the most beautiful. The peoples of the Mongol species are, on the contrary, among those who, it is asserted, have the least developed brain; they are stout, short, ugly, and ill-proportioned. The organs of intelligence are those that dominate in the head of the Malays; those of animality dominate, it is said, in the head of the Mongol. Thus, here is a first order of facts that evidently proves that the Malay peoples are, by their own nature, more susceptible to physical, moral, and intellectual improvement than the peoples of the Mongol species.

But, in the most remote centuries, the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Persians, and other peoples of the Mongol species had already made immense progress in civilization; they cultivated most of the arts we know; they possessed the elements of the sciences; they had gentle morals and wise laws, compared to what we have seen later, even among peoples of the Caucasian species. The Malay peoples, on the contrary, seem never to have emerged from barbarism; agriculture, the only art they know, is reduced, among them, to the cultivation of three or four plants; they are in perpetual wars among themselves, and most still devour their prisoners. Here is a second order of facts that proves, no less clearly than the first, that the peoples of the Malay species are less susceptible to moral and intellectual improvement than the peoples of the Mongol species.

In this parallel, it is not one tribe that is opposed to another; it is an entire species that is opposed to another species; for, if one compares the corresponding classes in the two, that is, the most civilized of one to the most civilized of the other, and the most barbarous of the latter to the most barbarous of the former, one will find that the intellectual and moral superiority is almost always on the side of the Mongol species. Of these two orders of facts, which one, then, will serve as proof? For, here one cannot invoke them both at the same time.

If, instead of comparing the Malays to the Mongols, we compare them to the Ethiopians or to the natives of America, we will arrive at similar results: we will often find the development of the organs of intelligence on one side, and intellectual and moral improvement on the other. The peoples of the copper-colored species have, according to the testimony of travelers, a less developed brain than the Malays and even than most Negroes. However, at the time of the invasion of America, the most civilized peoples of this species were at least as advanced as any Malay or Ethiopian tribe. No tribes as civilized as the Mexicans and Peruvians were at the time they were enslaved by the Spanish have been found in any of the islands of the great Ocean. Finally, the Negroes, whom some writers seem to place at the lowest rank with respect to intellectual organs, seem never to have had morals as barbarous as most of the Malay peoples, who are placed immediately after the peoples of the Caucasian species.

It is difficult to trust the validity of an argument that, to prove the opposite of what one seeks to establish, lacks only having been made at a different time; such, however, is the one made when seeking to prove the superiority of the species to which we belong. It is said, in effect, that the white peoples are more susceptible to improvement than the peoples of other species; and the reason given is that they have really made more progress, and that they count a greater number of men of genius. But have they always been the most advanced? At all epochs, have they counted the greatest number of distinguished men in the arts or in the sciences? Were not all the peoples who belong to this species, on the contrary, plunged in the most profound barbarism when the Chinese, the Hindus, and probably also the Persians, had already made immense progress [525]? The stationary state of the Chinese is considered proof of the inferiority of their species: for four thousand years, it is said, they have not advanced a single step. But what can be concluded from this, if not that they were already very far along in civilization before the first step had been taken by the peoples of the Caucasian species, and that they had been civilized for more than a thousand years before the peoples of Europe had produced a single man of genius? If, some time before the appearance of Homer, the Chinese had created systems on the differences of species, with what ease they would have proven the superiority of theirs over ours! On their side, what antiquity of civilization! And on ours, what antiquity of barbarism! What a poverty of men of genius! They have stopped, it is said. That may be: but is it quite certain that it would require more genius for them to get from the point they have reached to the point where some peoples of Europe now find themselves, than it once required of their ancestors to get from the state in which we see the inhabitants of the Fox Islands to the point where we suppose the Chinese have stopped? Is it, moreover, without example to see peoples of our species stationary or even regressive? The peoples who inhabit the soil of ancient Greece, of Asia Minor, of the northern coasts of Africa, and of Egypt, since the epoch when they were enslaved by the Romans, have they marched in the career of civilization at a more rapid pace than the Chinese, since the day one of their emperors decreed them perfect and immutable? The Kalmouks, with their broad faces and crushed foreheads, have not risen, it is said, above the nomadic life. So be it: but have the Bedouins, with their oval faces and high foreheads, risen much higher? If the former exist in greater proportion in the Mongol species than the latter in the Caucasian species, must this be attributed to the difference of species or to the difference that exists between the extent of the steppes of central Asia and the extent of the deserts of Arabia? If the soil of Europe had been in all ways similar to the soil of the Gobi desert, and if the Kalmouks had been placed on a soil similar to ours, is it quite certain that they would not today be making the same arguments about us that we make about them [526]?

The ease with which the other species submit to masters is considered proof of their natural inferiority: servitude appears to be, it is said, their natural state; a few Spanish adventurers have subjugated millions of Americans; a small number of colonists hold multitudes of Negroes in servitude; the Asiatics cannot conceive that they could exist without masters; none of these species has ever had anything comparable to the Roman republic, the republics of Greece, or the most civilized monarchies of Europe; a small number of Negroes would never succeed in maintaining, under their domination, multitudes of whites to make them cultivate their lands.These facts, which are considered decisive, in fact prove very little. In the time of the Roman republic, the nature of the peoples of Europe was no different from what it is today; the men who lived on the banks of the Tiber were not of a superior species to the men who lived on the banks of the Rhone, the Loire, the Rhine, and all the rivers that water the entire then-known part of Europe; and yet this whole multitude of peoples was vanquished, destroyed, or enslaved by a population that occupied only one point of Italy. The Romans enslaved not only all the peoples of the Caucasian species who existed from the banks of the Danube to the banks of the Tagus, but also those who existed on the northern coasts of Africa, and even those of Asia whom they could reach. The Roman soldiers, to enslave almost without exception all the nations of this species, did not arrive among them, like the Spanish in America, carried by winged and floating houses, mounted on unknown and terrible animals, armed with an iron that they alone possessed, and hurling a fire more fearsome than that of the heavens; they did not appear as gods whose arrival and successes oracles had predicted; they arrived among them as men of the same species, clad in the same arms, provided with the same means, and yet nothing resisted them. How, then, is it possible to present the existence and aggrandizement of the Roman republic as proof of the superiority of the Caucasian species over the others? To what species did those multitudes of nations belong, vanquished, chained, sold like vile herds by the Roman legions? Among the other species, which one has seen the numerous nations of which it was composed enslaved and almost destroyed by a small people from its own midst [527]?

A small number of colonists of the Caucasian species is sufficient, it is said, to hold in servitude a considerable number of individuals of the Ethiopian species; and if the current order were reversed, if a small number of blacks were masters of a number twenty times more considerable of whites, they would be incapable of ensuring the duration of their empire. It is not by comparing the number of black slaves to the number of colonists that one can know the proportion that exists between the enslaved men and their dominators. The colonists are not reduced to their own forces; they are supported by the very power of the States of which they are a part, and they draw from them as much force as they need to ensure their domination. For the comparison to be just, therefore, one must put on one side the slaves, and on the other the colonists and the inhabitants of the mother country, who support them with their power. Now, proceeding thus, one finds that the number and resources of the masters exceed, in an immense proportion, the number and resources of the enslaved men. Here, the difference of species is without influence; for, if men of the Caucasian species were possessed by blacks, and if the latter had over the former the superiority of number and forces, slavery would be no less solid than it is in the current state.

But if one wishes to make a more just comparison than the one that was made when the number of white colonists was placed in parallel with the number of enslaved blacks, one must compare, in antiquity, the number of citizens to the number of their slaves; and, among the moderns, the number of lords to the number of serfs attached to the glebe. In the republic of Athens, there were, it is assured, twenty thousand citizens and four hundred thousand slaves: that was twenty slaves for one free man, approximately the same proportion observed in the colonies between whites and blacks [528]. We do not know what the proportion was in the Roman empire between free men and enslaved men; but, if one considers that all labors were done by slaves; that the great had up to five hundred, and sometimes even up to a thousand, in the interior of the capital, and that they had a multitude in their domains, one will conceive that the proportion of enslaved men to free men was at least as great in the Roman empire as it was in Greece. A twentieth of the men of the Caucasian species was therefore sufficient to maintain the other nineteen-twentieths in a servitude harsher than that to which blacks are subjected; and this servitude was maintained, not by the help of an external force like that of the blacks in the colonies, but by the sole power of the masters. This enslavement of men of the Caucasian species to a small number of their fellows is a phenomenon that has no analogue in any other species; and this phenomenon existed from the moment the Romans reached their highest degree of power until the epoch when their empire was overthrown by the barbarian peoples.

After the fall of the Roman empire, a new kind of slavery succeeded the one to which the invasion of the Barbarians had put an end: this was the servitude of the glebe. The number of slaves was greater here, in comparison to the number of masters, than it had been in the republics of antiquity. This slavery extended over most of the peoples of Europe, and consequently affected almost all men of the Caucasian species. It was maintained, as among the ancients, by the sole effect of the force and organization of the masters. The epoch at which the destruction of this kind of servitude began, in some States, is not very far from us, and a system of slavery no less harsh still exists in all its force in Russia, in Poland, in Courland, in Bohemia, and in almost all of northern Europe; it maintains itself, so to speak, on its own, and by the sole effect of the brutishness and stupidity of the slaves. If, in some places in this part of Europe, one encounters freedmen, these are not men who have broken their chains out of hatred for slavery, like the blacks of Saint-Domingue; they are slaves to whom their masters have made a gift of freedom. A regime analogous to the feudal regime that existed among us has been found on various points of the globe, among peoples of various species; but one has seen in no other species neither that multitude of slaves that existed in Europe, from the beginning of the Roman republic until the invasion of the barbarians, nor that multitude of serfs of the glebe who succeeded them.

But it is not necessary to go back to the Middle Ages or to the epoch of Roman domination to be convinced that, if the penchant for tyranny or servitude is proof of inferiority, the peoples of our species have nothing, in this regard, over the others. In considering, even in their current state, the diverse species into which the human genus has been divided, one finds none in which domestic or civil slavery is as widespread and practiced in a more systematic and cruel manner than among the peoples of the Caucasian species. In Europe, nearly half the population is still composed of serfs of the glebe; the Turks do not admit this kind of servitude, but they admit domestic slavery with regard to those who do not share their beliefs. In Africa, the peoples among whom slavery is the harshest and most generally established are the colonists of the Cape of Good Hope, the peoples of Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and those of the mountains of Abyssinia, all of the Caucasian species. In Asia, the peoples who are slaves, or who subject others to slavery, belong to the same species. The Japanese not only do not admit it, but they abhor it; the Chinese tolerate it in so few cases that the exceptions are hardly worth counting; among the Persians, the peasants, workers, and servants are all free men: civil or domestic slavery is therefore almost unknown among the nations of the Mongol species. In the islands of the great Ocean, peoples of the Malay species have established the servitude of the glebe; but none has admitted purely personal slavery. Finally, in America, domestic slavery exists and is maintained only by the force of the peoples of our species. Before the arrival of the Europeans on this continent, this kind of slavery, the most cruel and immoral of all, was not known there. If the number of slaves still multiplies there, it is only through the vices and the force of the peoples of Europe. And what is strangest in these phenomena is that at the same time that we cite the slaves we have made of other races as proofs of the superiority of our mind, we say that we do not admit slavery, to prove the superiority of our morals.

Men of the Caucasian species have produced, it is added, remarkable works, even in slavery: the Roman slaves counted among them Epictetus, Phaedrus, Terence; and what are the men of genius that the Negro slaves of Jamaica or Saint Lucia have seen born among them? Is this absence of great philosophers or great poets among the Negro slaves not an infallible proof of the inferiority of their species and the superiority of ours [529]? There was an epoch at which it was thought that the climate of America caused men to degenerate; and this phenomenon was proven by saying that this part of the world had never produced any remarkable scholar or artist. These two ways of reasoning are very analogous: to prove that Negroes form an inferior species, for the reason that the black slaves employed in the cultivation of sugar have produced nothing comparable to the comedies of Terence; or to prove that the citizens of the United States are a degenerate race, for the reason that they have produced no orator like Cicero, or no poet like Virgil, is this not, in effect, exactly the same thing? I doubt, moreover, that the genius of the Russian, Polish, or Courlandian slaves has ever been much more productive of poets or philosophers than the genius of the black slaves, although the former are infinitely more numerous than the latter, and their lot is less miserable.