It seemed obvious to me that the overwhelming difference between the Canadian and American colonies, and the rest of the Americas was simply that of race. I discussed some of these facts with my geography teacher in high school, Mrs. Weir. She was a dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian who blustered that there were other factors that I failed to consider in my hypothesis. Her first counter argument was that North America was mostly Protestant and thus driven by the work ethic intrinsic to that denomination. My retort was easy: the Renaissance of Western civilization itself began in northern Italy, an exclusively Catholic society. And Quebec, a North American city, was not Protestant but had living standards far more similar to Protestant America than to Mexico or Brazil.

Next she tried to argue that it was simply the democratic traditions of North America compared to the autocratic ones of South America that have made such pronounced differences. I pointed out that history is full of examples of both tyrannies that had become democratic and democracies that had lost their freedoms. The aristocracies of Europe certainly became great and modern nations. Many of the governing constitutions of the Middle- and Southern-Hemisphere nations were modeled directly on our own U.S. Constitution, but those instruments of law did not save them from poverty, massive corruption, tyranny and assassination, continuous revolution, illiteracy, disease, and primitive lifestyles and conditions.

I asked her, "When one considers that there are dozens of nations in the Caribbean and the Americas, and there have been hundreds of revolutions and marked political changes over the centuries, are we supposed to believe that none of them ever got it right?" In response to her silence, I blurted out, "Perhaps the thing that really makes or breaks a nation is not its institutions but the race of its people. "

Race can also be seen in the differences that exist among the many different nations of the Americas. Costa Rica is readily acknowledged as the most advanced nation in Central America. It has a reputation as the least corrupt government and the highest living standard and literacy rate in the region. It also prides itself on being the Whitest nation of Central America. The most advanced nations of South America are Argentina, Uruguay and Chile - the nations with the continent's highest percentages of Europeans. The racial truth can also be seen even within nations themselves. Brazil, for instance, is much like two different nations when one considers the backward Black regions in the north and the more European-like ones in the South. When I visited Brazil in 1991, I readily noticed how the population became Blacker and poorer as one neared the traditional lands of the Black slave plantations and whiter and wealthier in the more mountainous regions. (The same is true for the old plantation "River parishes" of Louisiana as compared to the Whiter ones.)

It became obvious to me that if America's demography changes into one resembling that of South America, we will become like those societies. We will lose our precious heritage and way of life. I became convinced that race is the dominant force of society, influencing every aspect of our lives. Even if a society does not overtly state it or even acknowledge it, race imprints nations - just as it does individuals - with characteristics and traits that egalitarianism cannot explain away.

The lessons of race taught by the history of the Western Hemisphere are pertinent to the history of all nations and all cultures. One can even examine prehistory and find that there have always been tribes that shared a particular gene pool and common characteristics that distinguished them. Nations arose from people who shared a common heritage. They have not always been monoracial, but they were always formed by a dominant people that made the country in their own image, their own culture, values, language and artistic tastes. Nations were not determined strictly by geography, as borders were often poorly defined and amorphous, but by the people who populated them. For instance, whether the people were Assyrians, Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, or the French, nations arose out of the races or subraces that composed them. The term France, for instance, came from the name of the people who rebuilt the country after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Franks. One can trace the history of nations in the racial history and character of its inhabitants.