Contemporary Grantist

How did the slave, the blind mole of Culture, originate? The Greeks in their instinct relating to the law of nations have betrayed it to us, in an instinct, which even in the ripest fulness of their civilization and humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen mouth such words as: "to the victor belongs the vanquished, with wife and child, life and property. Power gives the first right and there is no right, which at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence."

The anthropologists, who gave their field the grandiose name of "anthropo-sociology," measured thousands of human heads to calculate a cephalic index, the ratio of head width to head length. In this fashion, they believed they could scientifically demonstrate a permanent race hierarchy. The superior races had longer heads (and thus a lower cephalic index). […] Head, hue, and height distinguished Teutons, Alpines, and Mediterraneans. The northern Teutonic race was long-headed ("dolichocephalic"), tall in stature, and pale in eyes and skin. The southern Mediterranean race was also long-headed but shorter in stature and dark in eyes and skin. The people of the central Alpine race were round-headed ("brachycephalic"), stocky, and intermediate in eye and skin color.

Leading the campaign for minimum wages for women, Florence Kelley cited the success of the Victoria, Australia, minimum wage law. The Victoria minimum wage law, enacted in 1894, was one of the first of its kind. Labor reformers worldwide made the long journey to the antipodes to study its workings. The Australians succeeded, said Kelley, because the minimum wage eliminated the "unbridled competition" of women, children, and Chinese, who had been "reducing all the employees to starvation." Kelley's formulation excluded women workers from the category of "employee," grouping them with children as exploited victims in need of state protection. Women and children were, she said, "the weakest and most defenseless breadwinners in the state." At the same time, Kelley also placed women with the Chinese, whom she represented as low-wage threats to white Australian men.

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness, readiness to challenge misfortune and love his Fate.

Darwin, in the Descent of Man, attributed the progress and character of the American people to the results of natural selection. Ten or twelve generations of Europe's most energetic and restless people, Darwin said, emigrated to "that great country and have there succeeded best. Enterprising people of good stock left the Old World, and the rigors of American frontier life selected the fittest among them.

The Romans were the strong and aristocratic; a nation stronger and more aristocratic has never existed, never even been dreamed of. Every relic of them, every inscription, enraptures, provided one can divine what it is that writes the inscription.

[…] In other words, eugenics proposed to replace random natural selection with purposeful social selection. As Galton encapsulated it, "what nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly." Galton was an elderly man when England began to take him seriously, living just long enough to see a worldwide eugenics movement catch fire.

“Eugenics" derives from the Greek for "well born" and describes the movement to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding. The concept was ancient. Plato's Republic asked why we breed cattle but not humans. The term was minted in 1883 by Francis Galton, a celebrated Victorian Era polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton advanced the three governing premises of any eugenic program. First, differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament were due to differences in heredity. Second, human heredity could be improved, and with reasonable dispatch. Human heredity, Galton said, was "almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder's will." And third, the improvement of humankind, like any kind of breeding, could not be left to happenstance. It required scientific investigation and regulation of marriage, reproduction, immigration, and labor. […]

In defending immigration restriction, Edward T. Devine invoked a "sacred duty" to protect the American national heritage, which, Devine said, "its creators gave it to us with their blood." The crossing of races, Devine wrote, was beneficial within limits, but America had reached the dangerous point beyond which the biologists confirmed, interbreeding led only to a "mongrel and degenerate breed." Devine denied any "shred of bigotry or prejudice." It was not the immigrants' fault they were less skillfull, less intelligent, less efficient, and less in- herently desirable than native Anglo-Saxon workers. The blame lay with American employers exploiting the immigrants' inferiority, which was manifest in their willingness to accept low wages, work long hours, and remain unorganised. Admitting more immigrants, Devine wrote, amounted to treason.

Ross blamed the Jews, whom he vilified as clannish, shrewd, pushy, ill-mannered, underhanded, and possessed of a “monstrous love of gain." Hebrew money, Ross wrote indignantly, was financing the anti-restriction campaign, which pretended to benefit all immigrants, but was, in fact, "waged by and for one race." According to Ross, the Jews had repaid the gift of American asylum by undermining America's capacity to control its own racial destiny.