Those who argue for a distinct species in the case of the blacks, and do not believe in the slow changes produced by geographical position and the elements, will point to the fact, that Negroes taken into temperate latitudes, and propagating purely for a few generations, have appeared to be Negroes still—not much the whiter for the experiment. But it has not been a full and a fair one. Nature produces her permanent results very slowly. She took hundreds of years to bake, and blacken and flatten, and lanify the nigger, and hundreds more to harden his osteology—to burn, as it were, his traits into his clay; and if the man is to be unbaked, unblackened, and so forth, she must have something of the same time, in which to reverse her operations. It would take four or five hundred years, at least, to bleach Pompey or Lucretia. Perhaps at Spitzbergen, or some of those hyperborean places—
Where the wild hare and the crow
Whiten in surrounding snow—
the process may be accelerated by a century or so. But, till some philosopher gets his pair of blacks, and sits fairly down to see the experiment out, we shall be of opinion that, centuries would be necessary to counteract the slow workmanship of nature in this business; but certainly, that at the end of that time, the whole human type would have suffered a perfect change, conformable to the latitude and longitude—the locus in quo. We repeat—those early effects of climate, tropical or boreal, were such as no elemental influence noted in modern times can give us any correct idea of. Ages and continents were the first premises and means, by and from which Nature stamped her human varieties in the first ages.
Coming from the physical and ethnical considerations, we see the influence of the material elements very perceptible, in the social, moral, and historical manifestations of the various races of the world. A consideration of the Asiatics, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and other nations of ancient or modern name, would make this evident. The Easterns inhabiting, in Central Asia, vast extents of level country, for the most part at a distance from the sea, were chiefly pastoral and nomadic. They had room to wander and grow, and be numbered by millions. Under such circumstances, they were naturally liable to be dominated by great commanders, to whom—seeing that their unsettled polity also included the principles of war and plunder—they would delegate the leadership; and who, on the broad plateaux, could make use of cavalry and chariots—those ready means of conquest and despotism in the old times. Hence the people fell numerously under the sway of a few kings, who used their power with the fierceness and irresponsibility of gods, and kept the soldiery and the masses in a state of slavery—whether following plunder, cultivating the soil, or making bricks from mud, and rearing with these, through sweating generations, those walls and towers of Central Asia—Nineveh, Babylon, and so forth—of which we have transmitted to us such vague and magnificent traditions, and of which Layard and others have been discovering some traces for us latterly.
It was the same way, nearly, in Egypt—that prominent historic feature of antiquity. The valley of the Nile was one level, isolated extent of unrivaled fertility—capable of supporting millions at the expense of no very heavy amount of agricultural toil. People necessarily multiplied there, and being of peaceful agrarian disposition, came, in time, to be subservient to the priests and Pharaohs of the land. The civilization of Egypt was a monstrous sort of thing, born of the sun and the sediment of the Nile, like the other monsters of that “Great river.” Relaxed and enervated by the heat of the climate, kept in ignorance, and employed in masses by the despotism of the country, the people became slavish laborers, husbandmen and manufacturers, living content, in a hot inland condition, unfreshened by any breeze of the civilizing sea, worshiping animals first used as hieroglyphical helps to language, and hating the idea of foreign invasion, ever associated in their minds and traditions with the revolution of the nomade shepherd kings. The stupendous architecture of Egypt, like that of Assyria, proved the numerical force, physical slavishness, and mental superstition of that people. Fattened by the lætas segetes—the exuberant harvests of the Nile—brute force and beaverism divided the nation between them—excepting what amount of esoteric knowledge the priests and kings made use of to keep the many-headed monster in order.
Let us now look at the aspects of Greece—a country, undoubtedly, peopled from the places and races of Central Asia. Greece is an irregular land of hills and valleys, broken by a thousand bays, and clasped, beneficently, in the serpent arms of the Midland Sea. In Greece are no broad levels on which a despot may deploy his horsemen and war-chariots. Marathon, to be sure, is a plateau, looked on by the mountains, and looking on the sea—
The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea—
but history tells us that the Persian cavalry found it far too rugged a place to charge upon. Neither had Hellas any fat, broad extent of soil on which maize, rice, and corn may grow, to feed millions in a supine content, and predispose them to be the instruments of some powerful despotism, kingly or priestly. The climate of Greece was varied by the inequalities of its surface and the nearness of the sea; and the inhabitants became a pastoral, agricultural, and commercial people. The soil brought forth, in reward of care and labor, corn, and wine, and oil, and vegetation of great beauty and grandeur. The climate was marked by those vicissitudes which the experience of the world proves to be most favorable to the condition of man, and the highest development of his powers. It had none of the inland and enervating characteristics of Middle Asia or Egypt. The Greek was obliged to wrestle with Nature for her blessings. Thence rose, in time, the illustrious polities, the immortal mythologies, and white theories of her fields and streams—all that memorable splendor of intellect and war which has had nothing comparable to it in antiquity.