The desire to enjoy art and luxury is one which feeds itself and grows, when once aroused; and it was these growing desires of the leisured and wealthy classes which created trade, or at any rate first developed it beyond the merest rudiments; and in doing so led to regular and friendly intercourse between nations.
A second very important result of such fusion by conquest must have been the breaking up to some extent of custom and the weakening of the religious sanctions. Under the new régime, both the conquering and the conquered peoples would find their old customs unsuited to their novel social relations, and inadequate to regulate their changed occupations. The old customs of both would inevitably be thrown into the melting pot; at the same time the religious sanctions of both would be weakened by the intimate contact of two systems, neither of which, in the presence of a rival system, would henceforth be able to claim unquestioned authority, until one had suppressed the other or a stable synthesis of the two had been effected. So long as each individual never had intercourse with any but those who accepted the national or tribal religion, it was well-nigh impossible for anyone to question its authority; but as soon as the devotees of two religions lived intermixed, the question—Which religion was true? must inevitably have arisen in some minds. The weight of custom and of religious sanctions, which lies so heavily on a primitive society, restricting all enterprise, forbidding inquiry and repressing the use of the intellectual powers, would thus be lightened and scope be given for experiment in thought and action. And either people, coming into more or less intimate contact for the first time with a system of beliefs and customs and institutions other than their own, must have been led to compare, discuss, and reflect upon these things; the sceptical spirit and the intellect must have been greatly stimulated. There must have been a conflict of ideas and the initiation of an age of discussion. In short such a fusion by conquest must have broken up what Bagehot calls the ‘cake of custom’ as nothing else could, and so have rendered the intellectual and moral traditions once more plastic and capable of progress.
No doubt in many cases such disintegration of the old systems went too far, and the society, before it could evolve anew a sufficiently strong and adequate system of customs and sanctions, went to pieces. In modern times many primitive societies have been broken up and destroyed in just this way—namely, their customs and the religious sanctions of their morality have been undermined and weakened by the contact of the more complex systems of civilised men, and they have not been able to assimilate the new system rapidly enough to enable it effectively to replace their own shaken and decaying code.
A third way in which the fusion by conquest of two peoples must have made for progress was by biological blending, the crossing by intermarriage of the two stocks. We have seen that there is a considerable amount of evidence to show that, when two stocks are very widely different in mental and physical characters, the result of crossing is likely to be bad, the crossed race is likely to be inferior to, and less fit for the battle of life than, both parental stocks; the characters of individuals will be apt to be made up of a number of elements more or less inconsistent with one another; such a composite character made up of inharmonious elements will be apt to be unstable and constantly at war with itself. Character of this kind and the tragic struggles to which it is liable to find itself committed has been well described in fiction by a number of authors, especially in stories of the Mulattoes of America. On the physical side it has been shown that such cross-bred races tend to die out owing to lack of balance of the physical constitution.
On the other hand, we saw that the crossing of two closely allied racial stocks seems to have a tendency to produce a cross-bred race superior to both parent stocks, and especially to produce a variable stock. It is, I think, probable that the frequently repeated blending of allied stocks in Europe has been the fundamental biological condition of the capacity of the European peoples for progressive national life.
In the case of the conquest of one people by another differing very markedly in racial qualities, there seem to be two alternatives equally prejudicial to the continued progress of the nation so formed. On the one hand, free intermarriage may take place, resulting in an inferior cross-bred race incapable of high civilisation, as seems to have occurred in most of the countries of South America, where it is with the greatest difficulty that the outward forms of the high civilisation which they have imitated from Europe are maintained. On the other hand, where especially the outward physical characters are very different, the conquering people may hold itself apart from the conquered, and maintain itself as a ruling class, which prides itself on the purity of its blood and which tends to harden into a caste. Such conquest without subsequent blending gives rise to a civilisation which, being founded upon a rigid caste system, is incapable of continued progress. This is what has happened in India. The fair-skinned Aryan invaders despised the dark-skinned indigenous peoples, whom they spoke of as being scarcely human, and, in spite of a good deal of crossing, they have in theory and in the case of the Brahmans at least to a considerable extent in practice, maintained the purity of their blood, by means of the development of the caste system.
Europe on the other hand was fortunate in that all the different peoples, or most of the peoples, from which its nations have been formed were of allied race; they were all, with few exceptions, of the white race, sufficiently nearly allied not to produce inferior cross-races but rather to produce some superior subraces. The conquered peoples have been so similar to their conquerors in physical type that crossing could take place without the cross-bred offspring bearing the indelible marks of inferior or mixed parentage, such as a dark skin or a woolly head. Hence, although caste systems were formed, they did not prove rigid; free intermarriage took place, and it was not impossible for individuals of the conquered race or of the mixed stock to rise into the superior ruling class. The importance of this may be seen, on reflecting how the merest trace of negro-blood in individuals of mixed origin in North America is apt to show itself in the physical features and how, even in that enlightened and Christian country, a trace so revealed suffices to condemn a man, no matter how great his powers or refined his character, to remain a member of the inferior caste.
But, apart from the possible improvement of the racial qualities of the whole people, or of the average individuals in general, which may well have occurred in Europe, the biological blending of allied races may give important advantages to the resulting people in another way—namely, by increasing its variability, the variability of its mental qualities. If a people is extremely homogeneous in the racial sense, it may be expected to display little variability, its members will be of essentially similar mental qualities and of a uniform level of mental capacity; and this will tend to make them a very stable, but a very conservative unprogressive, nation. This seems to be true of China, and to be in large part the source of its extreme stability and extreme conservatism.
Where, on the other hand, a people is formed by the intimate blending by intermarriage of two or more racial stocks, it is likely to be a variable one; there will be large departures in many directions from the average type of mental ability, and there will be individuals varying by excess of development of various capacities as well as others varying by defect of development.
And a people of variable and therefore widely diversified mental capacities will, even though its average capacity is no greater than that of a more homogeneous people, be more likely to make progress in civilisation, and this for three reasons.