CHAPTER VI

. RACE AND LANGUAGE

69 : 10. See T. Rice Holmes, 2, pp. 185–199. The same thing may have happened in Britain at Cæsar’s conquest, and still more in the Saxon conquest.

70 : 4 _seq._ See p. 206 : 13 and note.

70 : 12–71: 6. These paragraphs elicited a very interesting letter from a British officer in Howrah, Bengal, India, in October, 1919. He says: “May I offer one or two remarks on points of detail? On p. 70 it is stated ‘The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language but there remains not one recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the Northwest,’ and again at p. 261, ‘Of all the wonderful conquests of the Sacæ there remain as evidence of their invasions only these Indian and Afghan languages. Dim traces of their blood, as stated before, have been found in the Pamirs and in Afghanistan, but in the South their blond traits have vanished, even from the Punjab. It may be that the stature of some of the Afghan hill tribes and of the Sikhs, and some of the facial characters of the latter, are derived from this source, but all blondness of skin, hair and eye of the original Sacæ have utterly vanished.’

“This hardly agrees with my own observations during two years’ service in the Punjab and Northwest Frontier Province. I should say that among the Pathans living in British territory about Peshawar, blond traits,—fair skin, the color of old ivory, red or brown hair, grey, green, or blue eyes,—are as common as really black hair is in Scotland; while among Panjabi Mussulmans living about Jhelum these traits are, if not common, at least not extremely rare. Judging from the experience of one squadron of cavalry, I should put the proportion of men with blond traits at not less than one per cent. The women, whom one does not see, must be fairer than the men, as elsewhere. I have seen a small Panjabi Mahommedan girl, from about Dera Ismail Khan with _yellow_ hair. I have also seen a _Sikh_ with _red_ hair, but that was certainly exceptional.

“These remarks are based on what I have seen myself, though no statistics are kept and it is possible that I am generalizing from insufficient data. It would not, however, I think, be too much to say that ‘Blond traits are not uncommon in Afghanistan, and are even to be found among Mussulmans in the Northwestern Panjab.’ (Afghans and Indian Mussulmans of course sometimes dye their beards red, but this artificial blondness has not been confused with the real thing.)”

The following quotation is from _The Outlook_ for March 10, 1920, which contains an article entitled “The Present Situation in India,” by Major-General Thomas D. Pilcher, of the British Army.

“Beside these castes there are tribes, and the Brahmin from the Punjab has very little indeed in common with the Brahmin from Bengal or Madras. Many Pathans and Punjabi Mohammedans have blue eyes and are no darker than a southern European, whereas some of the depressed tribes are as black as Negroes. Many of the northern peoples are at least as tall as men of our own race, whereas other tribes do not average five feet.”

70 : 16. Castes. Deniker, 2, p. 403: “About 2,000 castes may be enumerated at the present day, but year by year new ones are being called into existence as a certain number disappear.” In his footnote Deniker says: “The so-called primitive division into four castes: Brahmans (priests), Kshatriya (soldiers), Vaisyas (husbandmen and merchants), and Sudra (common people, outcasts, subject peoples?), mentioned in the later texts of the Vedas, is rather an indication of the division into three principal classes of the ruling race as opposed, in a homogeneous whole, to the conquered aboriginal race (fourth caste).” He continues: “The essential characteristics of all castes, persisting amid every change of form, are endogamy within themselves and the regulation forbidding them to come into contact one with another and partake of food together.”

See also Zaborowski, _Les peuples aryens_, p. 65. There is, of course, an enormous number of books which deal with the caste system of India.

71 : 7. Sir G. Archdall Reid, 2, p. 186: “If history teaches any lesson with clearness, it is this, that conquest, to be permanent, must be accompanied with extermination; otherwise, in the fulness of time, the natives expel or absorb the conquerors. The Saxon conquest of England was permanent; of the Norman conquest there remains scarcely a trace.”

71 : 24. See pp. 217–222 and notes.

72 : 4. See the notes to p. 141 : 4 _seq._

72 : 19. Ripley, pp. 219–220, says: “The race question in Germany came to the front some years ago under rather peculiar circumstances. Shortly after the Franco-Prussian War, De Quatrefages promulgated the theory ... that the dominant people in Germany were not Teutons at all, but were directly descended from the Finns. Being nothing but Finns, they were to be classed with the Lapps and other peoples of western Russia.... Coming at a time of profound national humiliation in France ... the book created a profound sensation.... A champion of the Germans was not hard to find. Professor Virchow of Berlin set himself to work to disprove the theory which thus damned the dominant people of the empire. The controversy, half political and half scientific, waxed hot at times.... One great benefit flowed indirectly from it all, however. The German government was induced to authorize the official census of the color of hair and eyes of the six million school children of the empire.... It established beyond question the differences in pigmentation between the North and the South of Germany. At the same time it showed the similarity in blondness between all the peoples along the Baltic. The Hohenzollern territory was as Teutonic in this respect as the Hanoverian.”

73 : 6. Deniker is one of these. See his _Races of Man_, p. 334. Collignon is another. See the _Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie_, Paris, 1883, p. 463; and _L’Anthropologie_, no. 2, for 1890.

73 : 11. See Keith, 3, p. 19; Beddoe, 4, p. 39; and Ripley, section on Germany.

73 : 19. Beddoe, 4, pp. 39–40; Deniker, 2, p. 339; Ripley, p. 294.

74 : 12. See the note to p. 198 : 22.

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