ognition by all Near and Middle Eastern peoples that they
are fellow "Asiatics," however bitter may be their internecine feuds.
This instinctive "Asiatic" feeling has been noted by historians for
more than two thousand years, and it is true to-day as in the past.

The great racial divisions of mankind are the most fundamental, the most
permanent, the most ineradicable things in human experience. They are
not mere diverse colorations of skin. Matters like complexion, stature,
and hair-formation are merely the outward, visible symbols of
correlative mental and spiritual differences which reveal themselves in
sharply contrasted temperaments and view-points, and which translate
themselves into the infinite phenomena of divergent group-life.

Now it is one of these basic racial lines of cleavage which runs between
"East" and "West." Broadly speaking, the Near and Middle East is the
"brown world," and this differentiates it from the "white world" of the
West in a way which never can be really obliterated. Indeed, to attempt
to obliterate the difference by racial fusion would be the maddest of
follies. East and West can mutually quicken each other by a mutual
exchange of ideas and ideals. They can only harm each other by
transfusions of blood. To unite physically would be the greatest of
disasters. East and West have both given much to the world in the past,
and promise to give more in the future. But whatever of true value they
are to give can be given only on condition that they remain essentially
themselves. Ethnic fusion would destroy both their race-souls and would
result in a dreary mongrelization from which would issue nothing but
degeneration and decay.

Both East and West instinctively recognize the truth of this, and show
it by their common contempt for the "Eurasian"--the mongrel offspring of
unions between the two races. As Meredith Townsend well says: "The chasm
between the brown man and the white is unfathomable, has existed in all
ages, and exists still everywhere. No white man marries a brown wife, no
brown man marries a white wife, without an inner sense of having been
false to some unintelligible but irresistible command."[107]

The above summary of the political, economic, social, and racial
differences between East and West gives us a fair idea of the numerous
cross-currents which complicate the relations of the two worlds and
which hinder Westernization. The Westernizing process is assuredly going
on, a