Meredith Townsend

Meredith White Townsend (1831–1911) was an English journalist and editor of The Spectator. With Richard Holt Hutton, he was joint-editor of the Spectator until 1887, and he was largely instrumental in making it an established success, writing most of the political articles and the opening paragraphs every week. His two chief publications were The Great Governing Families of England (1865), written in conjunction with Langton Sanford, and Asia and Europe (1901).

Quotes

• As the Englishman Meredith Townsend says: “None of the black races, whether negro or Australian, have shown within the historic time the capacity to develop civilization. They have never passed the boundaries of their own habitats as conquerors, and never exercised the smallest influence over peoples not black. They have never founded a stone city, have never built a ship, have never produced a literature, have never suggested a creed. ... There seems to be no reason for this except race. It is said that the negro has been buried in the most ‘massive’ of the four continents, and has been, so to speak, lost to humanity; but he was always on the Nile, the immediate road to the Mediterranean, and in West and East Africa he was on the sea. Africa is probably more fertile, and almost certainly richer than Asia, and is pierced by rivers as mighty, and some of them at least as navigable. What could a singularly healthy race, armed with a constitution which resists the sun and defies malaria, wish for better than to be seated on the Nile, or the Congo, or the Niger, in numbers amply sufficient to execute any needed work, from the cutting of forests and the making of roads up to the building of cities? How was the negro more secluded than the Peruvian; or why was he ‘shut up’ worse than the Tartar of Samarcand, who one day shook himself, gave up all tribal feuds, and, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Baltic and southward to the Nerbudda, mastered the world? ... The negro went by himself far beyond the Australian savage. He learned the use of fire, the fact that sown grain will grow, the value of shelter, the use of the bow and the canoe, and the good of clothes; but there to all appearances he stopped, unable, until stimulated by another race like the Arab, to advance another step.”
  • Asia and Europe (1901), pp. 92, 356-8. Quoted in Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (1920), Ch. IV