FUTURE OF THE RACE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 53, 17 October 1911, Page 6

FUTURE OF THE RACE.

In a recent issue of the “Contemporary Review” Sir Harry. Johnston contributes a thoughtful and suggestive article entitled, “Racial Problems and the Congress of Races.” Taking for his tevt the Universal Congress of Races, Sir Harry discusses at some length the relative qualities, physical and mental, of the white and the coloured races, and concludes that, “so far as we can read pre-history and history, the Caucasian race seems to stand revealed as the redeemer of the world, the creator of Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and early Metal Age civilisation.” Discussing intermarriage between .black and white, Sir Harry Johnston says:— “There is a far greater tendency to intermixture in this direction (white men marrying native wives in tropical countries) than there is between coloured men and white women. We

white men are, or affect to he. shocked at the latter, v.iiilst we shrug our shoulders at the former, and with same justice, for the coloured _ woman, by union with the white man, is raised more or less to his standard el living, which is a superior one; whereas the white w oman mainkig the oured man is in her now surroundings sometimes brought to a lower level of life. But if the white man is to continue to form temporary or permanent , unions with the women of other races, he cannot bo surprised if, as education increases, his women kind should see no harm in marrying coloured men, or coloured men aspire to possess white wives. It may, of course, ho more advantageous to the world at large that there should always remain a stock of while people to represent the highest development as yet known, physically and mentally, of humanity. At the same time, we should hear in mind that nowhere in the world exists, a. pure white race, in whoso ancient ancestry there has been no mixture whatever with the Mongol, the Negro, or the Dravidian, and that, perhaps, a white race which receives no nil of blood from the other human types from time to time may die of physical degeneration. For myself, I seem to see the prospect of great racial developments in Asia by a mixture of blood. Russian Siberia is going to play a great part in the development of Asia. The white type, which is being developed in that region, is of line physique and of no mean mentality, and is mingling already with the indigenous Mongols, is intermarrying will; Japanese, and even Chinese, and producing offspring of gopd appearance, physical vigour, and mental alertness. If some such inter-racial congress could deline a religious basis on which all nations ana civilised races could agree (as they may agree on a universal language, weights and measures, currency, quarantine regulations, scientific nomenclatures, an international code of law); and on this basis regulate their inter-racial international dealings, then in their own homes and local temples they could still continue to cany on other forms of worship of diyino, human, animal, vegetable, or meteoric attributes (one word, “Divine,” covers all these phases of life and energy), such as were not inconsistent with the principles of the basic religion. There could still survive the stately ritual of the Latin Church, the beautiful service of the Anglican Cathedral, even the more reasonable practices of Jam Buddhism and the prayers to Allah as seen through tiie mental vista of pureminded Mahommcdans. Japan would take a tremendous step forward in tho comity of nations it to-morrow she declared her State religion to lie undogmatic Christianity. The only hope for the continued survival ef the Turkish dynasty and Empire is for it to have no State religion at present, so that Christianity and Judaism may he placed on at least an equal footing with Islam, so that Mass may once more he sung at St. Sophia’s, and Jerusalem lie restored to the Jew as a religious centre.