The Golden Age, “The Sons of Japheth”
“We use the term Aryan with diffidence, since that scholarly myth has now generally been repudiated, the modern European being considered the descendant of indigenous ethnic stocks—Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, which have been mingled in varying proportions to form the existing nations.”
A signed contributor’s article, and a sustained attack on European colonialism: it describes Spanish and British conduct in the Americas, Africa, India and the Pacific, calls the slave trade’s cargoes "wailing cargoes of ‘black ivory’", and says the prosperity of English-speaking colonists "was established at the expense of the slower, weaker races". The article’s much harsher-sounding line about John Bull having "benefited posterity by weeding out inferior races through the agency of fire-water and other domestic products" is the second of three items in a list of his "beneficent activities", introduced "In the first place … In the second place … In the third place": the first is that he "benefited himself by annexing large areas of the earth’s surface" whose settlers "crowded out the original owners", and the third that he "set an example of sound business principles to the world by encouraging missionary activities which softened the intractability of savage tribes, rendering them amenable to peaceful penetration by the trader, and the introduction of such civilizing agencies as rum, opium, syphilis, and tuberculosis". The article’s last sentences read: "Certainly the Sons of Japheth, by their quite unexampled career of rapacity, greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy, have incurred such a justly merited recompense. It would be poetic justice."
Escaneo del original (se abre en una pestaña nueva)
Nota de procedencia y verificación for The Golden Age, The Sons of Japheth
Nota de confianza. Read page by page from the item’s djvu.xml on 19 September 2026 and read again independently on the same date. The article opens on the leaf mapped to printed page 259 under the masthead "Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, Jan. 31, 1923 Number 88" with the by-line "The Sons of Japheth By O. L. Rosenkrans, Jr."; the passage about "weeding out inferior races" stands on the leaf mapped to page 264. The article ends on the leaf mapped to page 270, where the next signed article, "The Standard of Value By T. D. Jones", begins on the same page; the range is therefore 259-270. Two earlier versions of this record gave the range as 259-264 and then as 259-269, the second asserting that the next signed article began on page 270 — it begins on page 270, but so does the end of this article. The surrounding pages were read in full; the three-part list quoted in quoteContext, and the closing sentences, are the evidence that the passage is ironic.
Procedencia del escaneo. Internet Archive item “Magazines: The golden age, 1923”; printed page numbers from the item's page_numbers.json checked against the masthead “Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, Jan. 31, 1923 Number 88”.
Notes. The "weeding out inferior races" sentence would read, taken alone, as an endorsement of colonial extermination. The three-part list it belongs to, the article around it, and its closing sentences are an indictment of European colonialism by the same contributor.
Consultado. 19 de septiembre de 2026 · Identificador de la fuente. src-race-ga-1923-0131-sons-of-japheth