The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy

by T. Lothrop Stoddard

Ill will it fare if ever our race should close its ears to this most elemental call of the blood. Then, indeed, would be manifest the writing on the wall.

Especially has it evoked in bellicose and fanatical minds the vision of a “Pan-Colored” alliance for the universal overthrow of white hegemony at a single stroke—a dream which would turn into a nightmare of race-war beside which the late struggle in Europe would seem the veriest child’s play.

Men worthy of independence will sooner or later get independence. This is as certain as is the converse truth that men unworthy of independence, though they cry for it never so loudly, will either remain subject or will quickly relapse into subjection should they by some lucky circumstance obtain what they could only misuse.

White men cannot, under peril of their very

race-existence, allow wholesale Asiatic immigration into white race-areas.

Neither black Africa nor mongrel-ruled tropical America can stand alone. If the white man goes, the Asiatic comes—browns to Africa, yellows to Latin America. And there is no reason under heaven why we whites should deliberately present Asia with the richest regions of the tropics, to our own impoverishment and probable undoing.

A new Mohammed is quite as likely to make his appearance as a new Buddha, a reborn Confucius, or a modern Christ.... Asia raided and scourged Europe for more than a thousand years.

The black race offers no real danger except as the tool of Pan-Islamism.

Thirty years ago, Professor Pearson forecast China’s imminent industrial transformation. “Does any one doubt,” he asks, “that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.” [143]

Here again we see why the white man, however conciliatory in Asia, must stand like flint in Africa and Latin America. To allow the whole tropic belt clear round the world to pass into Asiatic hands would practically spell white race-suicide.

The question of Asiatic immigration is incomparably the greatest external problem which faces the white world. Supreme phase of the colored peril, it already presses, and is destined to press harder in the near future. It infinitely transcends the peril of arms or markets, since it threatens not merely our supremacy or prosperity but our very race-existence, the wellsprings of being, the sacred heritage of our children.

Religions, rules, laws, and customs are only the national character in the form of standards of conduct.

The dangerous fallacy in that short-sighted idealism which seeks to make America the haven of refuge for the poor and oppressed of all lands, and its evil effects not only on America but on the rest of the world as well, has been convincingly exposed by Professor Ross. He has scant patience with those social “uplifters” whose sympathy with the visible alien at the gate is so keen that they have no feeling for the invisible children of our poor who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of the to-be, who might have been born, but will not be.

One fact should be clearly understood: If America is not true to her own race-soul, she will inevitably lose it, and the brightest star that has appeared since Hellas will fall like a meteor from the human sky, its brilliant radiance fading into the night. “We Americans,” says Madison Grant, “must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the melting-pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to ‘all distinctions of race, creed, or color,’ the type of native American of colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”

The simple truth of the matter is this: A mighty problem—a planet-wide problem—confronts us to-day and will increasingly confront us in the days to come. Says Putnam Weale: “A struggle has begun between the white man and all the other men of the world to decide whether non-white men—that is, yellow men, or brown men, or black men—may or may not invade the white man’s countries in order there to gain their livelihood. The standard of living being low in the lands of colored men and high in the lands of the white man, it has naturally followed that it has been in the highest degree attractive for men of color during the past few decades to proceed to regions where their labor is rewarded on a scale far above their actual requirements—that is, on the white man’s scale. This simple economic truth creates the inevitable contest which has for years filled all the countries bordering on the Pacific with great dread; and which, in spite of the temporary truce which the so-called ‘Exclusion Policy’ has now enforced, will go much farther than it has yet gone.” [159]

“Assuredly, every small-family nation will try to raise such a dam, and every big-family nation will try to break it down. The outlook for peace and disarmament is, therefore, far from bright. One needs but compare the population-pressures in France, Germany, Russia, and Japan to realize that, even to-day, the real enemy of the dove of peace is not the eagle of pride or the vulture of greed, but the stork!

Thus, white men, of whatever country and however far removed from personal contact with colored competitors, must realize that the question of colored immigration vitally concerns every white man, woman, and child; because nowhere—absolutely nowhere—can white labor compete on equal terms with colored immigrant labor. The grim truth is that there are enough hard-working colored men to swamp the whole white world.

All this is no disparagement of the Asiatic. He is perfectly justified in trying to win broader opportunities in white lands. But we whites are equally justified in keeping these opportunities for ourselves and our children. The hard facts are that there is not enough for both; that when the enormous outward thrust of colored population-pressure bursts into a white land it cannot let live, but automatically crushes the white man out—first the white laborer, then the white merchant, lastly the white aristocrat; until every vestige of white has gone from that land forever.

We shall not be destroyed, perhaps, by the sudden onrush of invaders, as Rome was overwhelmed by the northern hordes; we shall be gradually subdued and absorbed by the ‘peaceful penetration’ of more virile races.” [183]

So ends our survey. It has girdled the globe. And the lesson is always the same: Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world. Nowhere can the white man endure colored competition; everywhere “the East can underlive the West.” The grim truth of the matter is this: The whole white race is exposed, immediately or ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races.

Civilization is the body; the race is the soul. Let the soul vanish, and the body moulders into the inanimate dust from which it came.

Fortunately, we now know the truth. At last we have been vouchsafed clear insight into the laws of life. We now know that men are not, and never will be, equal. We know that environment and education can develop

Well, what of it? Does not the new idealism teach us that we are links in a vital chain, charged with high duties both to the dead and the unborn? In very truth we are at once sons of sires who sleep in calm assurance that we will not betray the trust they confided to our hands, and sires of sons who in the Beyond wait confident that we shall not cheat them of their birthright.

lines: “Our Fathers in a wondrous age, Ere yet the Earth was small, Ensured to us an heritage, And doubted not at all That we, the children of their heart, Which then did beat so high, In later time should play like part For our posterity. * * * * * Then, fretful, murmur not they gave So great a charge to keep, Nor dream that awestruck Time shall save Their labor while we sleep. Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year Our fathers’ title runs. Make we likewise their sacrifice, Defrauding not our sons.” [191]