Of the Moslem civilisation as a whole, it must be said that on the material side, in Spain and the East, it was such a success as had not been attained under the Romans previously (though it was exceeded in Egypt by the Lagids), and has not been reached in Christian Spain since the fall of Boabdil. Economically, the Moorish regimen was sound and stable in comparison with that of imperial Spain, which, like Rome, merely set up a factitious civilisation on the basis of imported bullion and provincial tribute, and decayed industrially while nominally growing in empire and power. When the history of Spain from the seventeenth century onward is compared with that of the Saracens up to their overthrow, the nullity of explanations in terms of race qualities becomes sufficiently plain—unless, indeed, it is argued that Moorish blood is the secret of Spanish decadence. But that surmise too is folly. Spanish decadence is a perfectly simple sociological sequence;[395] and a Spanish renascence is not only conceivable, but likely, under conditions of free science and free thought. Nor is it on the whole less likely that the Arab stock will in time to come contribute afresh and largely to civilisation. The one element which can finally distinguish one race from another—acquired physiological adaptation to a given climate—marks the Arab races as best fitted for the recovery of great southern and eastern regions which, once enormously productive, have since the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires been reduced to sterility and poverty. The Greeks in their recovered fatherland, and the French in Algeria, have not thus far been much more successful than the Turks in developing material prosperity. If North Africa, Syria, and Mesopotamia are again to be rich and fruitful lands, it must be in the hands of an acclimatised race; and the Arab stocks are in this regard among the most eligible.
But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a renascence.[396] Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race character than the decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the Spaniards: it is the enforced result of the attitude of special enmity taken up towards the Turkish intruders from the first by all their Christian neighbours. By sheer force of outside pressure, co-operating with the sinister sway of the Sacred Book, Turkey has been kept fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly militarist, and therefore financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of the long-oppressed Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was till lately proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military force as against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all endowment of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or prudence should so modify the system of government as to give freer course to industry and ideas; that the military system should be restricted; and that European knowledge should be brought to bear on education, till the fettering force of religion is frustrated, as in the progressive countries of Christendom. For Turkey and Spain, for Moslems and for Christians, the laws of progress and decadence are the same; and if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to help instead of hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course of things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the closest students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict such a transformation.[397]
FOOTNOTES:
[374] Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in Buckle and his Critics, p. 509.
[375] Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is "the highest, it should seem, attainable by the Asiatic type of mind" (Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ii, 222). This in the century which was to witness the renascence of Japan.
[376] Erânische Alterthumskunde, 1871, i, 387.
[377] Id. p. 388.
[378] Erânische Alterthumskunde, p. 389.
[379] Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, "Impressions médicales," in the Journal des Débats, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K. Bikélas, as cited, tr. p. 100. Cp. Renan's language as to "l'esprit sémitique, sans étendue, sans diversité, sans arts plastiques, sans philosophie, sans mythologie, sans vie politique, sans progrès" (Études d'histoire religieuse, 1862, p. 67).
[380] This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, Origin of the Healing Art, 1893, p.72; Withington, Medical History from the Earliest Times, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the Greeks could hardly have resorted to the Egyptians so much as they admittedly did for mathematical and astronomical teaching in the early period without learning something of their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick, Ancient Egypt, 1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The passage in the Odyssey, iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it was stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and Egyptian medicine found "neue Bedeutung" in Greek hands, after the fresh contacts made under Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, 3te Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.