Chapter XXII
"Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean," Terrence McFane
said in fatherly tones.
The sages of the madrono grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick
and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.
"Mere naming of one's position does not settle it, Terrence," Dick
replied. "I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate
it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere
scholastic, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of
Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace."
"And I am to conclude," Hancock broke in, "that a Hottentot is as good
as a white man?"
"Now the South speaks, Aaron," Dick retorted with a smile. "Prejudice, not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer's handicap of the early influence of the Manchester School."
"And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?" Dar Hyal challenged.
Dick shook his head.
"Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average
Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a
par with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are
proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely
average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are
not average, who are above average. These are what I called the pace-
makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note
that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the
average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities, enable them to travel a faster collective pace.
"Give an Indian a modern rifle in place of his bow and arrows and he
will become a vastly more efficient game-getter. The Indian hunter
himself has not changed in the slightest. But his entire Indian race
sported so few of the above-average men, that all of them, in ten
thousand generations, were unable to equip him with a rifle."
"Go on, Dick, develop the idea," Terrence encouraged. "I begin to
glimpse your drive, and you'll soon have Aaron on the run with his
race prejudices and silly vanities of superiority."
"These above-average men," Dick continued, "these pace-makers, are the
inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting
dominants. A race that sports few such dominants is classified as a
lower race, as an inferior race. It still hunts with bows and arrows. It is not equipped. Now the average white man, per se, is just as bestial, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just as retrogressive, as the average savage. But the average white man has a faster pace. The large number of sporting dominants in his society give him the equipment, the organization, and impose the law.
"What great man, what hero--and by that I mean what sporting dominant--
has the Hottentot race produced? The Hawaiian race produced only one--
Kamehameha. The negro race in America, at the outside only two, Booker
T. Washington and Du Bois--and both with white blood in them...."
Paula feigned a cheerful interest while the exposition went on. She
did not appear bored, but to Graham's sympathetic eyes she seemed
inwardly to droop. And in an interval of tilt between Terrence and
Hancock, she said in a low voice to Graham:
"Words, words, words, so much and so many of them! I suppose Dick is
right--he so nearly always is; but I confess to my old weakness of
inability to apply all these floods of words to life--to my life, I
mean, to my living, to what I should do, to what I must do." Her eyes
were unfalteringly fixed on his while she spoke, leaving no doubt in
his mind to what she referred. "I don't know what bearing sporting
dominants and race-paces have on my life. They show me no right or
wrong or way for my particular feet. And now that they've started they
are liable to talk the rest of the evening....
"Oh, I do understand what they say," she hastily assured him; "but it
doesn't mean anything to me. Words, words, words--and I want to know
what to do, what to do with myself, what to do with you, what to do
with Dick."