The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-05-14
LOWER AND HIGHER RACES.
OUR DUTY TOWARD THE MORE
 BACKWARD OF MANKIND.
From a Paper by President G. Stanley Hall, Printed by the Massachusetts u

H storical Society.
 The one hundred and thirty-six col onies and dependencies of the world now include about two fifths of the globe and one-third of the human race. Nearly all habitabIe lands are now discovered, their peoples known and partitioned among the great powers; and this process has gone on with amazing rapidity since the scramble of 1897. Everything is now taking on osmic dimensions, mission enterprise, business and trade, coinage, weights and measures, fashions, postal systems, education, etc, and back of politics and even of history are now looming up great ethnological problems which give vastly deepened background and en- larged horizon to history, all of which is but news of the day, compared with the past ages through which heredity has been doing it's silent work and seems to invite larger ken as well as to mark the present and near future as the greatest of all historic periods, and to offer the most magnificent opportu- mites ever opened to constructive statesmanship. Never, perhaps, were lower races being extirpated as weeds in the human garden, both by conscious and organic processes, so rapidly as to- day. In many minds this is inevitable and not without justification. Pity and sympathy, says Nietzsche, are now a disease, and we are summoned to rise above morals and clear the worlds stage for the survival of those who are fittest because strongest. The supreme good, says Guyau, is diffusum sui. The world will soon be overcrowded, and we must begin to take selective agencies into our own hands. Primi- tive races are either hopelessly deca- dent and moribund or at best have de- monstrated their inability to domesti- cate or civilize themselves. History shows, too, that each of the great races has developed upon a basis of a lower one, and our own progress has been so amazing that in it we read our title clear to dominion. If they finger, they must take up our burden of cul- ture and work. This sentiment has found several remarkable expressions in Europe within the last few years, both by soldiers and thinkers.
 But, on the other hand, what we call low races are not weeds in the human garden, but are essentially children and adolescents in soul, with the same good and bad qualities and needing the same kind of study and adjustment. The best of them need no less our lay ish care. They have the same right to finger in the paradise of childhood. To war upon them is to war upon chil- dren, and without them our earthly home would be left desolate indeed. To commercialize and overwork them is child labor on large scale. If un- spoiled by contact with the advanced wave of civilization, which is too often it's refuse and in which their best is too often unequally matched against our worst, they are mostly virtuous, sim pie, confiding, affectionate and peace ful among themselves, curious, maaz- ingly healthful, with bodies in enarly every function superior to ours and frequently models for the artist. Even the sixty troglodyte skulls that Hors- ley measured showed great develop ment, and demonstrated that the art of trephining was well understood and practiced. The best of the lower races represent that most precious thing in EI,,o T of of new type, full of new promise and potency for our race, because an ounce of heredity is worth a hundredweight of civilization and schooling. Such were the Germans who in the days of Tacitus just escaped Roman imperial
 ism; the inhabitants of England in the days of Roman occupation, and even in that of Alfred the Great; the Japanese in 1S40, when the powers would have divided their land among themselves could they have agreed on terms and shares, and thus robbed the world of modern Japan. Not only has progress been almost glacierly slow, but it is not yet adequately defined. If too rapid, it is sure to be bad for virtue, health, and the most valuable knowledge. Re- clus thinks civilization on the whole no whit in advance of savagery, so much lower than it are slum denizens; and Ranke doubts all real progress in history, believing it to involve extreme differentiation of classes which is itself moribific.
 It is not pessimistic to realize that our civilization is not a doom and dis ease when forced precociously upon lower races, but that it has created scores of diseases, made cities biologi- cal furnaces where life is consumed, and in general has q dark as well as a bright side. What if Pabydonostseff S reflections of Russian statesman inn peaching western ideas have even g. scintilla of truth! There are those who hold that any type of civilization is only a dim candle in one corner of the vast museum of man-soul, leaving most of it obscure and some of it pitchy dark. Perhaps he has mean idea of our race who does not believe in the possibility of very different types of culture and civilization than ours, but just as good; and may not he be the real barbarian who deems his own age, race or faith the best and last, to which all must be brought, and insists, with a fanatisicm worthy of the Mahdi on holiness after our type or else Death? Perhaps our very reli- .xs- 1a a4o1