Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say that:—
(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to offer constant temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is defensible only by a strong community.)
(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population, readily lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving despotism and subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level territories, which facilitate conquest and administration, and thus also involve military autocracy.
The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large populations in a primary civilisation, generate despotisms, was explicitly put in the eighteenth century by Walckenaer (Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198). Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be fanciful and non-economic (cp. Volney, Leçons d'Histoire, 6ième séance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed. pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides that mountaineers tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to rulers, and coast-dwellers something midway between (Esprit des Lois, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not easy to conquer, doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched on in Gray's unfinished poem on the Alliance between Government and Education, written before the appearance of the Esprit des Lois, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had forestalled some of his best thoughts" (Gray's Works, ed. 1821, p. 274). The point is discussed more fully in Dr. Dunbar's Essays on the History of Mankind, 1780, Essay vi.
(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations, in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly. Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese, and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.
As Dr. Draper has well pointed out (Intellect. Develop. of Europe, ed. 1875, i, 84-88), the peculiar regularity of Egyptian agriculture, depending as it did on the Nile overflow, which made known in advance the quantity of the crops, lent itself especially to a stable system of life and administration. The long-lasting exclusion of foreigners there, as in China and in Sparta, would further secure sameness of culture; and only by such causes can special unprogressiveness anywhere arise. Sir Henry Maine's formula, marking off progressive and unprogressive civilisations as different species, is merely verbal, and is not adhered to by himself. (The point is discussed at some length by the present writer in Buckle and his Critics, pp. 402-8.) Maine's distinction was drawn long ago by Eusèbe Salverte (De la Civilisation depuis les premiers temps, 1813, p. 22, seq.), who philosophically goes on to indicate the conditions which set up the differentiation; though in later references (Essai sur les noms d'hommes, 1824, préf. p. ii; Des Sciences occultes, 1829, préf. p. vi) he recurs to the empirical form of his proposition, which is that adhered to by Maine.
(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race of not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated as to be much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or otherwise easily defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the fresher civilisation that the latter, if not vitiated by a bad political system, will soon surpass it,[135] provided that the latter community in turn is duly crossed as regards its stock, and that the former has due resources.
(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a region not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is the less likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population is not so easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which have stimulated it.[137]
(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races, however, is as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from their union as to a useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares ill with the contact of higher and lower races even in a climate equally favourable to both; and where it is favourable to the latter only, there is likely to be no immediate progress in the lower race, while in the terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or disappear.[139]
(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more civilised, there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to progress, though after a period of independent growth the newer civilisation may be greatly fecundated by intelligent resort to the remains of the older.