Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow domains.
In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which afterwards moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from good.
In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture was backward and there was little commerce outside of the caravan route which passed through the country from Africa to Asia and vice versa. Furthermore, in Palestine politics were entirely dominated by the priests of the temple of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the development of any sort of individual enterprise.
In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The race was strong and trade conditions were good. The country, however, suffered from a badly balanced economic system. A small class of ship owners had been able to get hold of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had at an early date fallen into the hands of the very rich. The poor, deprived of all excuse for the practice of a reasonable amount of industry, grew callous and indifferent and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and went to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her rulers.
In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization, certain of the necessary elements for success were always lacking.
When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur, in Greece in the fifth century before our era, it lasted only a very short time, and strange to say, even then it did not take place in the mother country but in the colonies across the Aegean Sea.
In another book I have given a description of those famous island-bridges which connected the mainland of Asia with Europe and across which the traders from Egypt and Babylonia and Crete since time immemorial had traveled to Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be found on the western coast of Asia Minor in a strip of land known as Ionia.
A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow bit of mountainous territory, ninety miles long and only a few miles wide, had been conquered by Greek tribes from the mainland who there had founded a number of colonial towns of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus were the best known, and it was along those cities that at last the conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion that civilization reached a point which has sometimes been equaled but never has been surpassed.
In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the most active and enterprising elements from among a dozen different nations.
In the second place, there was a great deal of general wealth derived from the carrying trade between the old and the new world, between Europe and Asia.