The savants have, moreover, endeavored to justify their opinion by propping it upon the three following supports:
First, the antiquity of the inferior races is explicitly recognized by the scientific world as equal to that of the white race; consequently the stationary condition of the former, whereas the latter have progressed, proves absolute inferiority;—
Second, undeveloped peoples generally inhabit the most favored climates which ought to have helped to hasten their development;—
Third, savage children whom it has been sought to bring up in European fashion have in nowise fulfilled the hopes of their educators.
Further examples are given in the cases of those agglomerations of savages penned up in villages, which have remained unchanged for hundreds of years, as well as the negro republic of Haiti with its endless revolutions.
One need not go very far into history to discover that the “universal concensus” is not always proof. Up to the time that Galileo proved that the earth revolved around the sun it had been almost universally believed that it was the sun which revolved around the earth. Universal consent, therefore, proves nothing if it be not supported by facts; and again, in the case cited above the apparent facts seemed to support the erroneous opinion. Do the facts corroborate the opinion that all races are of equal antiquity? This is what we want to know.
Upon the Egyptian monuments there have been found representations of certain African types still existing in our days, which would, indeed, prove a relative antiquity; it is also averred that these tribes, formerly subject to the Egyptians, do not appear to have progressed. At first glance this would seem to be in favor of the partisans of the inferiority of races, but a deeper examination would show this conclusion to be too hasty. As a matter of fact the admitted antiquity of the Egyptian monuments is about eight thousand years; let us put it in round numbers at ten thousand. Thus in ten thousand years these tribes do not appear to have progressed, while the white race has made that progress with which we are familiar. But at the epoch when these monuments were raised Egypt already represented a very advanced civilization; the difference between these backward tribes and the builders of the temples of Philae, Karnak, and Memphis was already enormous; the Egyptians had already passed through the prehistoric period which is estimated at hundreds of thousands of years.17 Slow indeed must have been the progress of man during the quarternary epoch, and the period of development is still longer if the existence of man during the tertiary epoch be admitted. The ten thousand years of stagnation of the tribes in question represent, then, but an insignificant amount in the history of the unfoldment of humanity, and it is probable that ten thousand years after he had cut the first stone the primitive Egyptian would have presented hardly any sensible improvement to the observer, and would also have appeared to be of a fundamentally inferior race. On the other hand these Egyptians, who made the great progress attested by their science and their monuments, are not whites; and this same people, which is classed among the “superior” races of antiquity, is now classed among the “inferior” races. Its English overlords have thoroughly demonstrated that. What a mass of contradictions! For the necessities of the argument the Egyptians are alternately both “superior” and “inferior.”
The skulls and jawbones of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Naulette, which date back to a remote epoch, present characteristics so simian that while studying them the anthropologists were in doubt whether to class their possessors among the ancestors of man or among the large anthropoid apes. In the presence of such humble beginnings are we happy in designating ourselves “the phoenix of humanity”? And by what right do we speak of the inferiority of other races when their present condition proceeds from our barbarous persecutions? Thus the present inferiority of the red-skinned race proves nothing; for let it not be forgotten that the aboriginal civilizations which were developing at the time of the European conquests were destroyed by their invaders; and the descendents of the aborigines, hunted, despoiled, massacred, were compelled little by little to retreat and be annihilated before the conqueror. Highly flourishing civilizations thus disappeared, no one knowing what they might have brought forth; we cannot judge of them by the brutalized and degenerate natives which the United States is in the course of wiping out. I will not instance in example the Empire of Mexico nor that of the Incas; upon the arrival of the Spaniards these empires were already on the highway to decay. For that very reason they were unable to resist. The Hurons, the Iroquois defended themselves with much greater energy than the Aztecs and Peruvians.
One might suppose that in order to prove the equal antiquity of races there remained one last resource—that of making researches in as yet unexplored strata and comparing the age of the skeletons which would certainly be found therein. But this resource is illusive; no possible means of establishing the exact concordance of the formation of earthy strata in the divers parts of the world exists. How then can we discover a perfect concordance between the remains found in these strata? To sum up, this question of the equal antiquity of races is an insoluble one and quite without value in the solution of the problem of virtual equality. Has it the least importance to those who consider all progress derived from the incessantly changing influence of environments?
“Undeveloped peoples generally inhabit the most favored countries,” declared Prof. G. Herve, one of the partisans of the theory of inferiority of races, in one of his courses on zoological anthropology at the Anthropological College. This declaration remains to be proven. Can it be applied to the Eskimo or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego; to the
