30 Liberty October 15, 1927 THE LIGHT EYES HAVE IT Continued from Page Twenty-nine Greece became the greatest of the nations. She developed two great fighting tribes-the Spartans (soldiers) and the Attics (sailors) - and these fought each other in a series of merciless civil wars, thus betraying a promi­nent Nordic trait. If they can not fight an alien, they will fight each other. Witness the bloody civil wars that have occurred in every nation the Nordics have leavened-Greece, Rome, Persia, Russia, Ger­many, the British Isles, America. In the world of thought and philosophy there appeared the pioneers, Thales and Heraclitus, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, seers like Pythagoras and Empedocles, thinkers like Soc­rates, Plato, and Aristotle. Homer is said to have written his Iliad fol­lowing the general idea of the Nordic sagas and the form of their logbooks. The Nordic leavened Rome and produced a Caesar, a Pompey, a Cicero, and a Catiline. All of these, says Ferrero, were gray- eyed men, conquerors. And this is a trait of the Nordic. What­ever country he enters, he domi­nates. Since his beginnings, his role has been that of ruler. In Russia a comparatively few of him has dominated an Asiatic general population. This is true also of his invasion of Central Europe and the British Isles, where he found-and ruled-the Iberians, the Asiatic tribe which was sweeping in, either while he was pioneering northward or shortly thereafter. Caesar, leading his legions up northwestward, encountered him in the Goths and the Franks. Piercing through to the British Isles, he found him among the Irish and the Scotch. He describes the English as a mild, badly built race of men, and the mountain Irish of the North of Ireland and the Scotch and the blond Welsh as fierce, warlike people, whom he treated very gently indeed. These blond, at least blue-eyed, people still dominate the British Isles. SEVENTY-FIVE per cent of Britain's great men, all through her history, have been Scotch, the North of Ireland Irish, or the blond Welsh. Recruiting the three outlander tribes and her colonists and the people of her dominions and her commonwealths and her free states, and even mercenaries, to fight for her, is the chief factor which has made for England's greatness. Every time she has fought any of them, she has lost. She attacked Scotland and, in the words of the kilted gentlemen themselves, she had the whey knocked out of her. She invaded Ireland and failed to subdue her after seven centuries of warfare. She tried to coerce America, and lost a large part of the brightest jewel among her colonies. She holds Canada only because it is Cana­da's pleasure to be part of the British Empire. If you are looking for Nordics in England proper, seek among her ruling class, or what is left of them. You won't find them among the masses. Everywhere the trend of the Nordics is upward. In the Dark Ages, Vikings ravaged the seas from Egypt to the British Isles. They swept down in their dragon ships, laying waste the coasts of England and Ireland. They descended each spring and returned north in the fall. Some of them, conquered by the friendlier climate or by love for the willing, soft, brown- eyed women among the conquered, stayed to add the strength of their traits to descendants who, twelve centuries later, were to settle and colonize America. Dr. Hrdlicka describes these settlers in the introduction to Old Americans. From early in the seventeenth century [he says] the temperate zone of the North Amer­ican continent has been receiving successive contingents of the white race, which settled on the available land, multiplied and spread, and receiving ever-growing accessions gradually formed the American nation. These newcomers, while in the main re­cruited from the people of the British Isles, included also larger or smaller contingents of other Europeans, such as the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Swedes, to whom, before the end of the eighteenth century, were added some Ger­mans and individuals of other nationalities. The British colonists were mainly English and later " Scotch-Irish," with the Scotch, Irish, and Welsh in smaller proportions. And the aggregate comprised various physical types, from the predominantly light-haired (blue-eyed), tall, oblong-headed northerners to the round-headed, brown-eyed, and darker- haired Alpines or Gauls, and the still darker elements of the Mediterranean type of white people; for these various types existed not only in geographically different parts of Eu­rope, but, due to older wide-spread infiltra­tions and mixtures, they were all found in differing proportions even as they exist today, in all European countries, including Great Britain, from which emigration to America proceeded. The earlier comers to this country, as well as their successors up to the time when immi­gration assumed large proportions, may be safely assumed to have been individuals on the whole rather above than below the aver­age in sturdiness and energy, for in those times the coming over meant considerable cost as well as hardship, and the weaklings either stayed behind or were rapidly eliminated. AMERICAN institutions are Nordic. Congress is an echo of the Scandinavian Thing, an assembly of the people about the mounds of their dead at which they listened to the advice of the Old Man of the tribe. Our State legisla­tures follow the Heradthing, a local assembly. Democracy was not born in America. It had its birth in Norway when Harald Fairhair destroyed the power of the hersirs (kings) and placed the leadership of the people among the jarls, high-born local chiefs who had won to leadership of the host and certain districts by their warlike qualities. The Nordic yields to no one. If he can not lower heaven to his level, he raises hell. The Kaiser's celebrated partnership of Me und Gott is a striking example of this. The fact that the Kaiser fled to Holland forbids his ever achiev­ing popularity among his breed. But, after all, the Kaiser is a Nordic. You can lead a Nordic to water, but you can not make him drink. Hence democracy in Amer­ica-with the Nordic tinkering with the works from time to time to see that it goes all right. The Ku Klux Klan, the fury of the Funda­mentalists, and prohibition are largely the out­growth of the narrow-minded intolerance and bigotry which distinguish the British Nordics, particularly the Scotch and the Scotch-Irish. These qualities in war are invaluable. In the peace of a machine-softened civilization, they are a nuisance. The American of the general population has tended toward a darkening of the eye under climatic conditions. The United States lies between 25 degrees north latitude in southern Florida and 49 degrees north in Washington in the northwest and Maine in the northeast. The northernmost point is half a degree north of the "blond line," but the heaviest belt of popu­lation lies in 40 degrees, nine degrees below it. The inhabitants here tend to darken in complexion and hair and eye coloring, in response to the actinic rays of the sun and the fact that most city dwellers are darker than those who dwell in the country or in the open spaces. And this makes the prevailing light-eyedness of the eminent Americans as represented in Who's Who all the more mys­terious. Dr. Free offers the following theory, insisting that it was only a theory. The Who's Whoers [he says] are not affected so greatly by the climate as the rest of the popula­tion, possibly because they have more stamina, more physiologic " backbone." Success, I think, de­pends on two things primarily, fixity of purpose and common sense. Fixity of purpose is another word for stubbornness, and stub­bornness has always distin­guished the Nordic. It may be that it affects his physical as well as his mental make-up. THE famous men with dark blue eyes included were Samuel Adams, Matthew Arnold, Charles XII of Sweden, Longfellow, Stephen A. Douglas, Eugene Field, Stonewall Jackson, John Ruskin, Savonarola, William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. And these men had pale blue eyes, often called gray by their biographers: Charles George Gordon, Patrick Henry, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Andrew Jackson, Charles Godfrey Leland, Washington Irving, Washington Alston, James Monroe, Napoleon, General Thomas, and Grieg, the composer. The gray-eyed embrace everything from poet to conqueror, through artists, writers, and ex­plorers. In this list are Michelangelo, Brown­ing, Coleridge, Columbus, Carnegie, Sir Thomas More, William Hazlitt, Ibsen, Thomas Jefferson, Milton, Robespierre, Tolstoy, Tenny­son, Francis Parkman, and S. S. Prentiss. Eyes that were a blend of blue and gray appeared in the heads of great generals and poets. In this list appear George Washington, George William Curtis, Charles Darwin, Fred­erick the Great, General U. S. Grant, Walter Savage Landor, Sidney Lanier, Theodore Parker, Rossetti, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Among the brown-eyed celebrities of history were Captain Cook, Goethe, John Keats. Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bayard Taylor, William the Silent, and Chopin. Hazel-eyed were Rufus Choate, Alexander Hamilton, Fielding, Sir Arthur Sullivan, John G. Whittier, Admiral Farragut, Albert Galla­tin, and Walter Pater. Black eyes gleamed from the brows of Leigh Hunt, John Paul Jones, John Marshall, Peter the Great, George Ripley, and Daniel Webster. THE END