As the Anglo-Saxon Clubs become better known, their progress will be watched with much interest, especially by people who have read with sympathetic understanding Madison Grant’s “Passing of a Great Race.” The aim of the organization founded in Richmond and described in the news columns this afternoon is the maintenance of racial purity, racial integrity and lofty racial ideals. The practical question is whether that aim is attainable and if so, by what methods. To judge from the carefully-prepared statement of the purpose of the clubs, there is no disposition to dogmatize or to assume there is a single sure remedy for those pollutions of blood against which every intelligent race has struggled, some of them in vain. The clubs insist on proper laws against miscegenation and seek to insure the registration by race of all persons now living. This registration is intended to supplement the recordation of births under the existing vital statistics law.
Presumably the clubs will not rely solely upon laws which, however proper and desirable in them, can be evaded sometimes or defied. The maintenance of the purity of any race depends on social standards and on its morality not less than on its laws. The great tragedy of the Anglo-Saxon race is that politically it dominates, but biologically it is not a dominant. There is no “tribe” of modern times that more completely has spread itself throughout the world, but there is none that has paid a more dismal price for exogamy.
