by Bart Schultz
Maoris, hitherto a diminishing body, though now just maintaining their numbers,
live apart on their own lands, but seem likely to be ultimately absorbed by the
whites. In western South America the Spanish settlers have, in some regions, very
largely mingled their blood with that of the native Indians, and may ultimately
become as much blent with the latter as has befallen in Mexico. The peculiar
feature of the race problem as it presents itself in the United States is, that the
Negroes are in many districts one-third or even one-half of the population, are
forced to live in the closest local contiguity with the whites, and are for the purposes of industry indispensable to the latter, yet are so sharply cut off from the whites
by colour and all that colour means, that not merely a mingling of blood, but any
social approximation, is regarded with horror, and perpetual severance is deemed
a law of nature.
There are fatal objections to any plans for a “Back to Africa” solution, the
chief of them being that the Negroes would not go and that the whites could
not afford to let them go because it would mean that much of the country
would then “remain untilled and useless.” But intermarriage seems equally
impossible:
Even at the North, where the aversion to Negro blood is now less strong, ‘mis-
cegenation,’ as they call it, is deemed such a disgrace to the white who contracts
it that one seldom hears of its occurrence. Enlightened Southern men, who have
themselves no dislike to the black race, justify this horror of intermarriage by
arguing that no benefit which might thereby accrue to the Negroes could balance
the evil which would befall the rest of the community. The interests of the nation
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and of humanity itself would, in their view, suffer by such a permanent debase-
ment of the Anglo-American race as would follow. Our English blood is suffering
enough already, they say, from the intrusion of inferior stock from continental
Europe; and we should be brought down to the level of San Domingo were we to
have an infusion from Africa added. This is the argument to which reason appeals.
That enormous majority which does not reason is swayed by a feeling so strong
and universal that there seems no chance of its abating within an assignable time.
Revolutions in sentiment are, no doubt conceivable, but they are more rare than
revolutions in politics.
But for all the ghastly prejudice that he both describes and exhibits
himself, Bryce does in the end hope for a revolution in sentiment. The
evils of this situation are to be measured not just in terms of political
stability, but
also by the diminution of happiness which they cause, by the passions hurtful to
moral progress they perpetuate, by the spirit of lawlessness they evoke, by the
contempt for the rights of man as man which they engender. In a world already
so full of strife and sorrow it is grievous to see added to the other fountains of
bitterness a scorn of the strong for the weak, and a dread by the weak of the strong, grounded on no antagonism of interests, for each needs the other, but solely on a
difference in race and colour.
Political progress is possible, and such things as lynching must be sternly
repressed. But for the
social difficulty, rooted deep in the characters of the two races, none but moral
remedies have any promise of potency, and the working of moral remedies, sure as
we believe it to be, is always slow. . . . one must place one’s hopes on what physicians call the healing power of Nature, and trust that the forces which make not only
for equality, but also for peace and goodwill among men, will in due time reduce
these evils, as they have reduced many others.
In some ways, Bryce recognized the harsher realities of British imperial-
ism and his own compromised position: “the Englishman, who knows how
not a few of his own countrymen behave to the ancient and cultivated races
of the East whom they have conquered, feels that he is not entitled to sit in
judgment. That Bryce himself is sitting in judgment is perfectly clear,
however, and he would appear to have made a powerful, if unwitting, ad-
vance case for Said’s thesis that British imperialism involved the construc-
tion of “the lower races” as the chief ideological prop for domination.
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Moreover, his construction of race often incorporated notions of Millian
vitality transformed into Seelyan strength:
In most men the want of individual Will – that is to say, the proneness to comply
with or follow the will of another – is the specially conspicuous phenomenon. It
is for this reason that a single strenuous and unwearying will sometimes becomes
so tremendous a power. There are in the world comparatively few such wills, and
when one appears, united to high intellectual gifts, it prevails whichever way it
turns, because the weaker bow to it and gather round it for shelter, and, in rallying to it, increase its propulsive or destructive power. It becomes almost a hypnotizing
force. One perceives this most strikingly among the weaker races of the world.
They are not necessarily the less intelligent races. In India, for instance, an average European finds many Hindus fully his equals in intelligence, in subtlety, and in
power of speech; but he feels his own volitions and his whole personality to be so
much stronger than that of the great bulk of the native population (excluding a very
few races) that men seem to him no more than stalks of corn whom he can break
through and tread down in his onward march. This is how India was conquered and
is now held by the English. Superior arms, superior discipline, stronger physique,
are all secondary causes. There are other races far less cultivated, far less subtle
and ingenious, than the Hindus, with whom Europeans have found it harder to
deal, because the tenacity of purpose and the pride of the individual were greater.
This is the case with the North-American Indians, who fought so fiercely for their
lands that it has been estimated that in the long conflict they maintained they have
probably killed more white men than they have lost at the hands of the whites. Yet
they were far inferior in weapons and in military skill; and they had no religious
motives to stimulate their valour.
Is this “fire and strength” or the “triumph of the will”?
Bryce’s work could helpfully be taken as providing something of a
key for interpreting Sidgwick’s more abstract account. Nor is this at all
surprising, given how closely they collaborated in their political work.
It is here that one finds the issues of national character, manual labor,
and “debasement of the race” versus fusion raised,
and the problem of
the color line in the United States used as a unique way of categoriz-
ing the various forms of interaction between different populations. The
“coolie” and the “ryot” were industrious compared to the “Negro,” and
the “ancient and cultivated races” of India and China did not pose quite the
same problems as the “savage” aboriginal populations of the Congo, the
Australian wilderness, and the American West. These were the con-
crete examples behind Sidgwick’s colorless arguments about race and
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colonization. He had supplied Bryce with extensive commentary on his
proofs, and the points that he did not query are as important as the ones
he did.
Quite possibly, Sidgwick actually played a role in stimulating Bryce’s
extended meditations on the subject of race. The extensive correspondence
that they maintained during the eighties has Sidgwick complaining, of
Bryce’s claims about the future of the United States, that “Only people of
European origin appear to be contemplated in this forecast. Is the nigger
no longer a problem, and is the Mongolian played out?” And a letter from
October of explains, “I enclose an extract from the Times of today
about the nigger: it represents a view I have heard more than once expressed
with much confidence: but I am glad to hear that the best authorities do not
share it.” This continues with the suggestion: “For ‘antecedent theory’ I
should be inclined to suggest ‘prevalent views of heredity’: as I do not think
that there [has] ever been any theory deserving the name of scientific which
has professed to determine the relative influences of physical heredity and
social environment.” (CWC)
The peculiar dissonance that comes from Sidgwick’s casually lapsing
into offensive slang – slang that he, like Bryce, scrupulously avoids in all his
published works, and that even Maine found offensive – while at the same
time denying the very ground of the racism that Bryce had described, is
hard to absorb. One can convict Sidgwick of many failings – Eurocentrism,
certainly, and also falling in with any number of ridiculous stereotypes that
were legitimated under the rubric of “national character” – but it should
have seemed – on the face of it, at least – difficult to convict him of
harboring racist convictions appealing to hereditary inferiority, and for
much the same reason that it is difficult to convict Mill of harboring any
such convictions. And yet the jarring usage and easy acceptance of it are
still apt to leave doubts about just where to locate him and his colleagues.
After all, as noted, his friend Cowell had softened him to the Southern
cause during the American Civil War, which he tended to treat in legalistic
terms as a matter of the right of secession and noninterference.
It is possible that Sidgwick increasingly adopted this (long-familiar) us-
age during the eighties, as a result of his readings in American literature.
The year finds him reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the
title character of which he describes as “a kind of boyish, semi-savage
Gil Blas, of the low – the lowest – Transatlantic life, living by his wits
on the Mississippi. The novelty of the scene heightens the romantic
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imprévue of his adventures: and the comic imprévu of his reflections on them is – about once every three times – irresistibly laughable.” (M )
But the “n word” was a fixture of many of his literary sources, most of
whom were more racist than Twain. Tennyson, for example. When in
, the young Symonds got to accompany his father to a dinner party
featuring Tennyson and Gladstone, among others, and the talk of the
evening turned to race and Governor Eyre of Jamaica: “Tennyson did
not argue. He kept asserting various prejudices and convictions. ‘We are
too tender to savages; we are more tender to a black than to ourselves.’
‘Niggers are tigers; niggers are tigers,’ in obligato, sotto voce, to Gladstone’s declamation.”
In any event, the potential affinities between Sidgwick and Bryce, on
this as on other issues, are certainly worrisome. Even if they were not
completely at one on all matters, it is very hard to say just where (if at
all) they would have parted company. It is also worth emphasizing in this
connection that, of the two, Sidgwick was in some ways more sympathetic
to, albeit worried about, the socialist future. It was Sidgwick who had
taxed Bryce, in correspondence, for insisting too strongly that there was
“[n]o sign of class hatred” in the forces shaping America’s future: “But the
formidable class hatred of the present and future is that between labour
and capital: and is not the development of boycotting in U.S. and the action
of the Knights of Labour, something of a sign of this?” Sidgwick explains
that he would
lay more stress on the general movement towards Socialism in the modern civilised
community, and which is marked in the recent economics of America – the
‘Katheder Sozialisten’ . . . seem to predominate. Are they likely to lead the movement when the time of pressure comes? And to what will they lead it? Perhaps
however you are prudent in leaving out here any specific reference to the movement
of ideas. (CWC)
Bryce’s “prudence” extended a good deal further than this last remark
suggests, since his account of the labor struggles in the United States,
including even the Pullman case, was uniformly hostile to labor.
But still, having socialist or collectivist sympathies and a background in
academic liberalism was no guarantee at all, during the late Victorian
era, that one would be immune to racist beliefs and eugenic policy
prescriptions (or to imperialistic tendencies). A very wide range of
figures – Balfour, the Fabian socialists, Havelock Ellis, even Bertrand
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Russell and Edward Carpenter – would soon make it patently obvious
that no party was unreceptive to the views of Frances Galton, and
worse. Indeed, Sidgwick’s connections to such figures as Seeley and Bryce
are not even the most alarming ones in this respect. Another noteworthy
concern is how over the course of some decades, he would warmly support
the career and work of Charles Henry Pearson. Born in , Pearson,
who had studied at King’s C
ollege, London, under F. D. Maurice, and
at Oriel College, Oxford, where he became friends with John Conington
and eventually a Fellow, would go on to become education minister in
Victoria, Australia, and a stalwart of the Liberal Party in general. He was
brought to Cambridge by Sidgwick just at the time of the latter’s resig-
nation, when the changes in the curriculum meant that Sidgwick would
no longer have to teach history as part of the Moral Sciences. They would
work together closely for two years and correspond for many years after-
ward, and Sidgwick even came to think and hope that in the mid-s
Pearson would receive a professorship in history. At any rate, Sidgwick
thought very highly of Pearson, and in a telling review, which appeared in
the National Review in , he warmly praised Pearson’s book National
Life and Character:
I will begin by remarking that prophecies are not always put forward, even by
the most highly educated prophets, as based on a scientific grasp of the laws of
social evolution. Indeed, in the most impressive book of a prophetic nature which
has appeared in England for many years – I mean Pearson’s National Life and
Character – the prophecies are not announced with any such pretensions; they
always rest on a simply empirical basis, and only distinguish themselves from
the common run of such forecasts by the remarkably wide and full knowledge of
relevant historical facts which the writer shows, and the masterly skill with which
the facts are selected and grouped. His predictions are almost always interesting
and sometimes, I think, reach a degree of probability sufficient to give them a real
practical value. (MEA )
The distressing thing about this encomium is that Pearson’s book was
concerned to make such arguments as the following, in which Mill’s wor-
ries about the loss of cultural vitality get transmuted into a Nietzschean
mode, not that one would ever guess it from Sidgwick’s review:
Summing up, then, we seem to find that we are slowly but demonstrably ap-
proaching what we may regard as the age of reason or of a sublimated humanity;
and that this will give us a great deal that we are expecting from it – well-ordered
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