BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

expressed it, was to Darwin, Spencer and Huxley “what Beelzebub is to a trio of bad boys.” 68
Even if “Darwinism was a convenient brush with which to tar racists, and vice versa,” the moral
and scientific controversy surrounding the “survival of the fittest” doctrine involved questions of
attitude and policy that rarely challenged the paradigm of a racial hierarchy. 69 Social imperialists
and social Darwinist reformers employed the same prejudices as the more extreme
polygeneticists and militant imperialists, but toward opposite ends. 70 The fact that both adherents
and critics of social Darwinism could find common ground in vilifying the Germans typifies the
double-edged nature of late nineteenth-century British Germanophobia and its logical absurdity.
Social Darwinism, eugenics and the fixation on racial distinctiveness reflected concerns
over racial degeneration and the belief that evolution somehow entailed a diminution of racial
vigor. Paradoxically, these fears and social imperialist angst stimulated calls for emulating the
German model, particularly in education. It is nevertheless interesting that War Secretary, Lord
Haldane, felt it necessary in 1901 to qualify his pitch for educational reform according to the
German example with praise for the allegedly superior courage and doggedness of Anglo-Saxons
in order to dispel the idea of a “decaying race.” 71 Despite reluctant acknowledgment of superior
training methods, resistance to the German educational model and a refuge for vanity could be
68 H. L. Mencken, Prejudices, 3rd. ser. (New York, 1922), 129, quoted in Bannister, 210.
69 Bannister, Social Darwinism, 184-86. Darwin’s Descent of Man reinforced the notion
of a hierarchical progression from barbarism to civilization, but carefully avoided a racial
interpretation.
70 Polygeneticists believed in separate origins rather than phenotype or genetic variations
for different races, as if different species of humans existed.
71 See Richard B. Haldane, “Great Britain and Germany: A Study in Education,” Monthly
Review 5 (November 1901): 48.
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