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Unpopular Government
Maine built a stronger case in each successive book, Early History of Institutions (1875) and
Early Law and Custom (1883). His magnificent tour de force, Popular Government (1885),
smashed the very basis for popular democracy. After Maine, only a fool could believe
non-Anglo-Saxon groups should participate as equals in important decision-making. At the same
time, Maine’s forceful dismissal of the fundamental equality of ordinary or different peoples was
confirmed by the academic science of evolution and by commercial and manufacturing interests
eager to collapse smaller enterprises into large ones. Maine’s regal pronouncements were
supported by mainstream urban Protestant churches and by established middle classes.
Democratic America had been given its death sentence.
Sir Henry’s work became a favorite text for sermons, lectures, Chautauqua magazine journalism
and for the conversation of the best people. His effect is reflected symbolically in a resolution
from the Scranton Board of Trade of all places, which characterized immigrants as:
The most ignorant and vicious of European populations, including necessarily a
vast number of the criminal class; people who come here not to become good
citizens, but to prey upon our people and our industries; a class utterly without
character and incapable of understanding or appreciating our institutions, and
therefore a menace to our commonwealth.
Popular Government was deliberately unpopular in tone. There was no connection between
democracy and progress; the reverse was true. Maine’s account of racial history was accepted
widely by the prosperous. It admirably complemented the torrent of scientifically mathematicized
racism pouring out of M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and virtually every bastion of high
academia right through the WWI period and even beyond. Scientific racism determined the shape
of government schooling in large measure, and still does.
Kinship Is Mythical
Aryans, said Maine, were not overly sentimental about children. They maintained the right to kill
or sell their children and carried this custom with them as they spread over the earth, almost up to
the outskirts of modern Beijing. These Great Ones had an intensely practical streak, tending to
extract from every association its maximum payoff.
This pragmatism led them to extend privileges of kinship to every association in which a good
chance of profit might lurk. This casual disregard of blood ties led to powerful alliances much
more adaptable to local circumstance than any pure blood-allegiance system could be, such as the
one the Japanese practice. In other words, Anglo-Saxons were prepared to call anyone "family"
for a price. Similarly, Anglo-Saxon ties to priests and gods were mostly ceremonial. All rules,
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