THE FUTURE OF THE ENGLISH RACE

(THE GALTON LECTURE, 1919)


In the year 1890 Sir Charles Dilke ended his survey of 'Greater Britain'
and its problems with the prediction that 'the world's future belongs to
the Anglo-Saxon, the Russian, and the Chinese races.' This was in the
heyday of British imperialism, which was inaugurated by Seeley's
'Expansion of England' and Froude's 'Oceana,' and which inspired Mr.
Chamberlain to proclaim at Toronto in 1887 that the 'Anglo-Saxon stock
is infallibly destined to be the predominant force in the history and
civilisation of the world.' It was an arrogant, but not truculent, mood,
which reached its climax at the 1897 Jubilee, and rapidly declined
during and after the Boer war. These writers and statesmen were utterly
blind to the German peril, though the disciples of Treitschke were
already working out a theory about the future destinies of the world, in
which neither Great Britain nor Russia nor China counted for very much.
There were illusions on both sides of the North Sea, which had to be
paid for in blood. In both countries imperialism was a sentiment
curiously compounded of idealism and bombast, and supported by very
doubtful science. In the case of Germany the distortion of facts was
deliberate and monstrous. Not only was every schoolboy brought up on
cooked population statistics and falsified geography, but the thick-set,
brachycephalous Central European persuaded himself that he belonged to
the pure Nordic race, the great blond beasts of Nietzsche, which, as he
was taught, had already produced nearly all the great men in history,
and was now about to claim its proper place as master of the world.