teach us that it is not incapacity nor yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."
Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not explain why these putative super-men failed
to establish within their own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic" race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie, "about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe. Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the older
stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the underlying races."[19]
Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of their times. The
mind of the early white men of the North never soared higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediæval painters of Germany and Holland.
It is no doubt true that the invaders and the immigrants have often achieved more in their new surroundings than in their homelands, as the Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before they arrived.
Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we
see a people, admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race, white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when, in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued, tends to inhibit
the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic, not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.