snares for the killing of game of which he was in no more need than his vegetarian cousins, the anthropoid apes? Why should there have been progress where the environment provided no stimuli therefore, in other words, why should primitive man have moved forward where indulgent nature allowed him to stand still?
If we believe, with Darwin and other students, that our primitive ancestors emerged from somewhere within the warm zones, we cannot avoid the difficulty of reconciling that supposition with the theory that civilisation is in the first instance the result of a stimulating environment. If on the other hand, we surmise that homo sapiens originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in warmer latitudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation for continued effort in the way of invention and general development.
It would seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man, the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar devil rather than
fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. We see how Egypt hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but never attained thereto. The exponents of the so-called "pulsatory hypothesis" can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish this great feat under very similar climatic conditions. We see how China developed a wonderful civilisation while the Western world lay steeped in barbarism, and then went to sleep till now. The size of that great country made possible always the friction between people coming from widely separated localities, which we believe to be conducive to progress, and the climate and general environment seems to have been no less favourable than in Europe and America. We see how the Arabs made great conquests and enriched the world with many patient and accurate observations and then came to a standstill and remained as they are to-day in serene contentment, strangers to the
very idea of progress. Can it be said that mental capacity and collective will-power were lacking in any of these people? On the contrary, it is admitted that they were possessed of mental powers as great as those of the restless Europeans of to-day who are rushing onward in a ceaseless pursuit of change, a pursuit made possible only by continuous victory over the forces of conservatism, and this victory, as I think, is gained not through the outward circumstances of climate and geographical surroundings, but through a "divine discontent" which is kindled, we know not how, in the leaders of the world, regardless of time and place, as says the poet of one whom he hails as the deliverer of his country:
"A flaming coal
Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The scandal of content."
It is this inward fire rather than any outward pressure that prompts the captive spirit to break loose from the fetters of the unmoving giant, custom, the greatest of all tyrants, who grows stronger as he grows older. The difficulty of reversing the ways and
conditions that have been induced from birth is tremendous, and progress has never been possible without breaking away, always at great risk to the innovators, the stoned prophets of all ages, from the powerful grip of hoary and hallowed custom, which is the essence of conservatism. Initiative implies the breaking of the commandment which enjoins everyone to honour his father and mother that he may live long in the land, a sanction which entails continued adherence to the ancestral ways and ideas, and which, being rooted in instinctive fear of innovation, has power over us all.
Progress, then, has everywhere been the result, in the beginning, of individual initiative in men who were possessed of the power of personality, the "born" leaders of the world who, whether they figured as chiefs or kings, witchdoctors or priests, prophets or lawgivers, were all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders will ever cease.
But although we believe that progress has been started always and everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and circumstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people themselves, and this must surely