The Basis of Social Relations: A Study in Ethnic Psychology

At the risk of needless repetition I again emphasise the fact that Ethnic Psychology, the group-mind, is a product of social relations, a result of aggregation, and cannot be fully explained by the processes of the individual mind. The resemblances between them are analogies, not homologies. They act and react, one on the other, with the force of independent psychic entities.

The general proposition to this effect I have laid down in the second chapter of Part I. Now I shall go more into detail and examine just what influences the ethnic mind brings to bear upon that of the individual to bring it into rapport with itself, to make it conform to the mass, to expunge, in fact, all that is individual within it.

I have also briefly but sufficiently referred to the psychologic measures by which this is accomplished, such as imitation, opposition, and continuity, by which the anti-social instincts are curbed, but at the same time originality and independence are also often crushed.

It remains to point out the exact instruments which the group-mind employs in this process and to estimate their relative force.

These may be classified under five headings: Language, Law, Religion, Occupation, and Social Relations. This is in the order of the influence which they generally exert on the individual mind, which influence is to be understood as reciprocal, the individual working most potently on the ethnic mind in the same order of instruments. It is true, however, that the relative potency of each of them varies considerably with the condition of culture. Let us briefly examine their several characteristics.

Language.—Of all bonds which unite men, none other is so strong as language. This, indeed, it is which first developed the human in man. I have shown that the one distinguishing trait which divides man from brute is his power of general conceptions under symbols. The word “language” provides the symbol. To form words is the necessary first step in reasoning; to attach to words precise meanings, perfect connotations, is the main effort of all subsequent reasonings. Words are the storehouse of all knowledge; they are the tools of the mind, by which all its constructions are framed.

Language is the involuntary product of the human intellect. The man speaks with like spontaneity as the dog barks or the bird sings; but the brute’s inarticulate cry expresses mere emotion, while the man’s articulate sounds convey thought.

Language is a proof of man’s original social nature. It is impossible to explain it as other than the action of a group. It is due directly to the need of others felt by each. The individual alone could never form a speech, and hence he could never clearly think; for thought, for clearness, needs not only creation but expression. We never fully understand or fully believe, until another understands us and believes with us.

Hence, language is the most perfect example of ethnic psychical action. It is the product of the group, to which each individual of the group contributes his share, and which is the common property of all, reflecting at once the traits of the group and the relations of the individual to it.

Nor is language a merely temporary criterion of group-character. Conspicuously not. Nothing clings so tenaciously to us as our mother tongue. Religions may fade and institutions decay, we may change our clime and culture, but the tongue persists. It is passed from generation to generation, exceeding count. No heirloom is so cherished, no tradition so hoary.

By the Aryan tongues of modern Europe antiquaries have restored the mode of life of that primitive horde who spoke the ancestral speech of all the Indo-European peoples, now stretching in an unbroken line from Farther India to San Francisco. Unnoticed but indelible, the ethnic life of that horde left its impressions on its speech like the footsteps on geologic strata from which the palæontologists reconstruct the strange forms of extinct species.

As the individual can convey his thoughts, his personality to the group, in the language of the group, he is confined and limited by that language. Hence the sovereign necessity in this investigation to study not merely the contents of a tongue, its verbal richness and resources, but that subtler side of it, its form or morphology. Indeed, the highest aim of linguistic science, of the philosophy of language, is to estimate the influences of the various forms of speech not merely on the expression, but on the formation of ideas. We think in words and in grammatical relations, and both should be logical and accurate if our expressed results shall be so also.

Few but specialists are aware how widely the varieties of human speech differ in the power they exert of this formative character. Suppose that in English we could not speak of that “divine tool,” the hand, except as a bodily member belonging to some particular person, “my hand” or “John’s hand”; how it would crush all means of generalisation, shut in our minds to present and local cases! Yet this is the case in hundreds of American and some Asiatic dialects, not only with this but many classes of concepts. How are we to convey the simplest arithmetical relations to tribes who have no words for integers beyond 5? What is more hopeless, how can a member of such a tribe ever become an arithmetician of his own effort?

Thus an individual is a mental slave to the tongue he speaks. Virtually, it fixes the limits of his intellectual life. His most violent efforts cannot transcend them. Here the group, the ethnic mind exercises tyrannical sway over him.

So also do the contents of his tongue. I mean by this that incalculable potency broadly called literature, spoken or written,—the oratory, romance, poetry, philosophy, history, and science,—which is his daily mental food all the years of his conscious life. In this maelstrom of the opinions of others, his own individuality is generally submerged; he loses it in the struggle, and his own talk becomes but the echo of that of others of the group.

Law.—Writers who imagine that Law is a product of Culture are singularly off the track. Nowhere are its prescriptions more definite, its violation more abhorred, or its penalties more inflexibly enforced than in the lowest depths of savagery. There the punishment is known and leniency unknown. When the Australian black has broken the unwritten law of his tribe, he has but two alternatives,—disappearance forever or death. After accepting the latter, or when seized in his flight, he quietly digs his own grave and, sitting in it, awaits the spears of his tribesmen.

So the “totemic” bond, the earliest form of permanent grouping in many families of mankind, whether based on religious or consanguine ties, invariably presents a compact and minute system of restrictions on individual liberty. They are, indeed, often carried to such an extent as to destroy all sense of personal responsibility or conscience, and to limit independence of action to the most trivial details of life. In them, through the recognised power of law, the group is everything, the individual nothing. Hence, they preserve but do not progress; for I cannot too often repeat the fundamental distinction between the group-mind and the individual mind: that the former is active and preservative, while the latter alone is creative and progressive.

By the general term “Law” I mean that restraint exercised by the group on the individual which in its last recourse is backed by physical force. It makes no difference whether the sentiment of the group is laid down by the High Chancellor in his ermine or by “Judge Lynch” in his shirt-sleeves; nor whether the group is the House of Lords or a gang of thieves, the underlying principle—that of the forcible constraint of the individual by the community—remains the same. To borrow Blackstone’s definition, it is the “rule of conduct” which the group chooses to establish for its own ends. Law, therefore, is essentially a part of the ethnic mind, not conceivable except as a group-product, and if at times, apparently, the expression of one mouth (autocracy), yet voluntarily accepted by the group.

The body of concrete laws developed in a community, whether under conditions of freedom or restraint, constitute its government. Under either condition, the government is rightly regarded as the most significant product of the ethnic mind as revealing, educating, and moulding ethnic or national character. For any permanently accepted government, though it may have been instituted by force, must be mainly in unison with the ethnic traits.

The law stretches its hand over all the activities of the individual, mental or physical, fostering some and repressing others, marking the limit to all. Personal actions, the acquisition of property, the expression of opinions, all are by common consent of every community absolutely subjected to the ethnic mind, the will of the group, and the physical power of the group stands ready to compel obedience to this will.

Distinctly the ethnic and not the individual will; for in laws we have frequent examples of the contrast between the two, when no individual approves a law which all approve. There is not an American writer who would be willing to have the expression of his thoughts gagged by government; and not one but approves of the law of libel.

In no relation of human life has the influence of law as a moulder of ethnic mental unity been more observable from earliest times than in that of Marriage.

It is my own opinion, based on a long study of the subject, that physical fidelity, la fidélité du corps, as Manon Lescaut expressed it, of either sex to the other never was, and is not now, what is termed a “natural” trait of human character. The native desire for sexual variety is equally strong in both sexes and has been so from the beginning.

Marriage laws, it should be borne in mind, have been everywhere and in all time framed by the males alone, and they all reveal the intention of the framers to preserve a right of property in the female, to limit her sexual freedom, while their own remains unrestricted.

Collateral interests, such as the extent of the food-supply, the rules of transmission of property, the purity of castes or classes, and the like, have frequently entered into the bearing of marriage laws; but the first and continued aim remains the prevention of feminine infidelity and the retention of masculine independence.

For this reason, the woman, even in the most advanced states to-day, is deprived of civic rights and kept in economic dependence; she is allowed no part in either the making or the execution of the laws, and her position is ranked with that of minors or adults of undeveloped minds.

Government, therefore, with few exceptions, differs from language in this, that it is the exclusive production of the male ethnic mind, and must be considered to express the masculine traits only.

The form of marriage intimately affects two questions of prime importance in ethnic psychology: that of purity or intermixture of blood, and that of the permanence of the group.

In an earlier chapter I have emphasised the results of close and of mixed breeding in man as one of the controlling factors of his advancement. It is obvious that the forms of marriage called endogamous, where the only recognised marriages are within the clan; monogamous, where there is but one wife; and “preferential” polygamous, where there are several wives, but the children of one only are recognised as legitimate, greatly favour close breeding.

General polygamous marriages, on the other hand, lead infallibly to intermixture of stocks and the enfeeblement of the higher in its mental capacity.

Not less do these laws affect the permanence of the group. This depends directly on the amount of property it has, and its ability to keep it.

In any form of communal marriage the property descends in common and belongs to the clan or consanguine group. There is no stimulus to the individual to augment it, as he gains nothing for himself. Hence, such marriages early fell into disuse.

General polygamous marriages are scarcely less fatal. Equal rights of inheritance between the offspring of several mothers lead to dissipation of the inheritance and to family feuds in the division. This is conspicuously true of inherited dignities and power. In history no polygamous nation has long survived the internecine feuds between the many heirs to the throne. The Sultan is safe only when all his brothers are murdered.

The marriage laws powerfully influence the ethnic mind in another direction, heavily fraught with weal or woe for its destiny; that is, in the respect for woman as a sex, in the honour shown her, in the sentiment of chivalry.

This is a true ethnic sentiment, quite apart from personal affection or romantic love. It reflects the position of woman in the group, not in the family, and reflects the feelings of the individual mind toward woman as a sex, as a part of the general group.

If we regard culture as the full development of the sentiment and emotions, as well as the intellectual faculties of a community, then I know no one criterion which will measure its degrees more accurately than the prevailing opinion about woman, her place and her dues.

Where the laws make her distinctly dependent and inferior, where, in marriage, she becomes more or less the property of her husband or the mere instrument of his passion, it is impossible that the general sense of the community can regard her with high esteem. This is the case in all polygamous nations.

The chivalry of the Middle Ages was the direct consequence of the inflexible monogamy commanded by the Church.

Closely related to these influences are those of celibacy and divorce as sanctioned by law.

By “Occupation” in ethnology is meant that aim to which the individual devotes most of his time, thoughts, and energies.

It does not necessarily mean to “work” or to gain a livelihood. In many cases it is mere amusement or a routine of social customs, or, like the beggar, sitting still and asking alms.

Whatever aim it acknowledges, the occupation is one of the most direct and potent agencies in the formation of character, individual and national; in Shakespeare’s phrase, “almost the nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”

Some ethnographers have selected the prevailing occupations as the best of all tests to distinguish the grades of man’s cultural advance. They have divided his progress into a hunting, a pastoral, an agricultural, and a commercial stage. Much may be said in favour of such a division. At any rate, it indicates the close connection between human life in the aggregate and individual avocation.

It is certain that the man or the group who have to devote their whole energies to obtain the necessities of existence must advance very slowly or not at all in the intellectual life. This partly explains the stationary culture of the Australian black and the native of our arid western plains.

But it does not follow, as some theorists would have us believe, that leisure, the non-necessity of work, in itself favours progress. The reverse is the case. The Polynesians, for whom nature’s harvests were ample, were as low as, often lower than, the Australian. Nothing favours progress but ordered industry directed toward a distant purpose.

The manner in which occupations, therefore, modify the ethnic mind varies with the character and aims of the occupations. The first distinction may be drawn in the degree in which they favour social intercourse, and thus promote the unity of the group. In this respect agriculture holds a low place. The unprogressive character of farming communities is notorious. The contrast of the adjectives rustic and urbane shows it to be an observation of ancient date. The cause lies chiefly in the isolation of the farmer, and the suspicion and jealousy with which he usually regards his nearest neighbours.

Another cause lies deeper and is of general value. Where there is but one prevailing occupation, where all men’s thoughts and energies are directed along the same lines to the same ends, there can be little social advance. For the best results to the group the movements of individual activities should be in intersecting, not in parallel lines. This is the main secret of the superiority of city life, in spite of its many drawbacks.

The respect, or lack of it, with which a community regards occupations is a marked trait of ethnic psychology, and reacts powerfully on the position and destiny of the nation.

In England, commerce, “trade,” is widely regarded as somewhat degrading. Yet were she to lose her trade she would promptly sink to a fourth-class power—an illustration of what I have before remarked, that a sentiment of the group-mind may not be that of the individuals of the group.

The vocation of arms is regarded in modern Europe with admiration, but in China with disrespect; the results of which have proved that the Chinese, if correct, are far ahead of their time.

The veneration of the priestly office has coloured the thoughts and written the fate of many a nation; and there is no lack of examples to-day where their oracles close the ethnic mind to the admission of verifiable knowledge and the results of science.

The disrespect for occupations beneficial to the group is an invariable proof of low intelligence in the ethnic mind. The result of such a sentiment is anti-social and weakens the power of the group as a unit, by promoting divisions and opposition among its members.

The extreme of this is seen in the system of castes, rigidly carried out, as in India, and resulting everywhere in national impotence and ethnic dissociation. The former system of feudal aristocracy in Europe was little better, and led to civil wars, the fruits of national disunity.

National unity, to be of the highest type, must be based on equal respect for every man’s employment, if that employment is of advantage to the community.

By confining the exercise of certain highly honoured occupations to so-called “privileged” classes, a heavy blow is dealt at the unity of the ethnic mind. Class jealousy and party antagonism are developed, followed by a corresponding weakening of the national force. Modern democracy fully recognises this danger, but has been unable to remove it under the guise of nepotism and succession in office.

It need hardly be added that where there exists a recognised distinction between owners and slaves, or between a “ruling” and a “subject” class, unity of group sentiment or thought is out of the question.

Yet, in modern life strenuous exertions are frequent to insist on a distinction of the occupations of men and women, based, not on capacity or opportunity, but on the fact of sex alone, the general effort being to confine women to “menial” or mechanical occupations only.

The philosophical ethnologist can see in this nothing but the near-sighted effort of the strong to oppress the weak, unaware of its sure recoil on themselves. In reducing the influence of woman, exerted through beneficial activities, the ethnos directly diminishes the elements of its own advancement. Goethe never wrote a deeper truth than in his famous lines:

And the ethnic psychologist has no sounder maxim than that uttered by Steinthal: “The position of woman is the cardinal point of all social relations.”

The ethnic psychologist has a wide field in the study of the influence of particular occupations on the minds of those engaged in them, and thereafter on the mind of the group. He will have to examine the assertion that some, though necessary, are in themselves deteriorating to the better elements of humanity. Can the slaughter of men in war be carried on without brutalising the sentiments? Can commerce be successfully conducted without deception? Can the advocate do his best for the guilty client without impairing his sentiment of truthfulness?

Further subjects of study must be the influence of occupations on home and family life. Many involve travel, enforced absences, or a migratory career, weakening such ties.

A marked tendency of modern occupations is toward increased specialisation. A man will spend his life, it has been said, in making the ninth part of a pin; and it has been asked, with accents of despair, what hope for the mental growth of such a case? Yet, in fact, the lawyer confined to his local code, or the medical specialist to the diseases of one organ, has the horizon of his daily labour as narrowly circumscribed.

The truth is that the individual is in the position of the primitive tribe. If he is forced to give all his waking hours to “getting a living,” it matters little what his employment is. One is as bad as another. And if by his work he wins leisure, all depends on the use of that leisure. Spinoza gained his bread by grinding optical glasses,—surely an uninspiring mechanical drudgery! But in odd times he wrote his Ethics, than which no nobler contribution to the highest realms of thought has ever been composed.

The extent to which the geographic environment decides the character and history of a people has been and still is a question on which competent writers differ widely.

On the one side we have such writers as Draper, Menschikoff, von Ihering, Ratzel, and generally the Russian and English schools, who seek in climate, soil, and waterways the explanation of the whole of history. Their views may be summed up in the maxim of von Ihering, “The soil is the Nation.”

In contrast to them stand the pure psychologists, notably the French school, who refuse to admit any great or lasting power of the material surroundings on the psychical traits. These, they claim, are to be looked for in race and in permanent anatomical differences, persisting in all climes and spots. They would say with the philosopher Hegel: “Tell me not of the inspiration of Ionian skies! Have they not for a thousand years spread their beauties in vain before degenerate eyes?”

The latter party, however, by no means insist that the environment is indifferent. They would entirely agree with Professor Wundt, that purely psychological laws are inadequate to explain the events of history, and that we must constantly take into account the associated physical conditions in order correctly to tell the story of human development. They would not deny that in some remote and invisible past the racial mind, like the racial anatomy, must have absorbed its permanent characteristics from local impressions; but this once accomplished, they would argue, both orders of characteristics became ineffaceable.

Even the most determined of the “anthropo-geographers” will not deny that the power over the mind which they attribute to geographical features diminishes in proportion as culture increases, to the extent that it is no longer coercive in civilised life. Nor can anyone who reflects be blind to the fact that the sameness brought about by subjection to given geographical conditions is something very different from the unity produced by mental association.

The decision of this debated question presents itself to me in a light which I have not seen stated by previous writers.

Both parties are right. We must agree with Hegel that the most lovely and advantageous spots on earth fail to develop their inhabitants; and yet, where such development takes place, we can always point to the geographic conditions which have alone rendered it possible.

In reality, the question is one only indirectly of geography. It belongs, directly, in quite another department of research, that of Economics, the science of the production and distribution of material wealth.

No matter how fertile the soil, how inviting the waterways, how smiling the skies, man will remain amid it all the savage of the prime unless he have within him the psychical stimulus to make use of these for the increase of his wealth; and that stimulus comes not from without.

Material wealth is as much a condition of mental growth as is bodily nutrition, but is just as far as is the latter from being either a synonym or a measure of such growth. It is a prerequisite, not a correlate.

The application of this principle explains the discrepant facts which have led to the conflict of opinions in anthropo-geography. Without geographic facilities, a nation cannot become wealthy; and without wealth it is even more at a disadvantage than the individual.

Poverty and riches are what most influence the fate of men and nations.

Life itself is a question not merely of means, but of ample means. In central England the rich have an average longevity of forty-nine years, the poor but twenty-five years; in Berlin the rich live fifty years, and the poor thirty-two years (Farr, Kolb).

The higher culture, anything above the mere fight for life, can find a place only when it is possible, through accumulated wealth, to call a truce in that fight. The leisure so obtained may not be, generally is not, employed to that higher end; but without it the effort remains impossible.

Anthropo-geography, therefore, is primarily a branch of economics, not of ethnology. It affects the ethnic mind only indirectly, and not at all through the action of any laws of its own. It is a vital factor in the production of tribal or national wealth, but in no way influences the use which the tribe or nation may make of that wealth; while this is the only question with which the ethnologist or the historian of human culture is primarily concerned.

With this perfectly clear understanding on the real bearings of the much-talked-of “geographic environment,” I shall proceed to review its leading divisions.

Such a conclusion will not be favoured by those writers who teach that the surroundings exert in some manner an inspiring or a depressing effect on the mind, and that this reflects itself in the ethnic character. What! they will exclaim; are we to count for nothing the sweet meads, the sparkling waters, the glory of the landscape, and the hues of the flowers? The grandeur of the forest, the sublimity of beetling crags, the solemn expanse of the ocean,—are these of no avail in impressing the souls that see them with exalted aspirations and fervently stimulating the imagination?—

Alas! “The hand of little use has the daintier touch,” and lifelong familiarity with the most beautiful scenes of nature reduces to zero the stimulus which they are capable of yielding to others.

Wordsworth held the other view and could sing:

But it is obvious, on reading the note in which he explains the source of his observation, that it was their social culture, not their local habitation, which imparted this seeming indifference to the peasantry. Precisely the same indifference to death among their congeners in France was noted long before by Montaigne.

There are three chief economic factors, derived from geographic surroundings, which decide the material welfare of a human group on any part of the earth’s surface. They are:

1.—The distribution of the surface land and water.

2.—The character of the soil with reference to productiveness, in the mineral, floral, and faunal realms.

3.—Its salubrity for man.

These favour or oppose the three essential desiderata for human progress, to wit:

1.—Intercommunication.

2.—Abundant nutrition and materials for the arts.

3.—Bodily health.

The Distribution of Land and Water.—The Iroquois Indians call the peace-belt of wampum which is exchanged between friendly tribes a “river,” because it unites, as does some smooth watercourse, those living apart. This is a sweet native tribute to the influence of navigable streams in bringing man into relation to man. Bays, fiords, and harbours permitted man with frail early craft to keep along the seashore for thousands of miles. Thus the Tupis migrated from the river La Plata to beyond the mouth of the Amazon and far up that stream; while, antedating history, the Mediterranean peoples dared the stormy Iberian coast to visit the remote Cassiterides and the boreal isles of Thule.

The Delaware Indians expressed their relationship among themselves by saying, “We drink the same water,” meaning that they all dwelt on the Delaware River and its tributaries. Thus watersheds, through the facility of intercourse they offered, became natural national areas, and developed unity of thought and feeling.

Lake-districts exerted a like influence and became not only strongholds by their pile dwellings, but centres of tribal unity. When Cortes reached the valley of Mexico he found the shores of the lake occupied by three nations, independent but closely federated for offence and defence.

These are examples of the unifying powers of the watery elements; but in its might as a torrential stream or as “the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,” it severs the families of men with a no less stringent potency. No more striking example can be offered than that of the American race, the so-called “Indians” of our continent. They extended over the whole area from the austral to the boreal oceans, a race-unit, identical in anatomical traits, but absolutely isolated from the rest of mankind, not a trace of European, Asiatic, or Polynesian influence in their languages or cultures.

The land areas offer obstacles more frequently than facilities to tribal intercommunication. Mountain chains, deserts, steppes, vast swamps, dense forests, and tangled jungles isolated by formidable barriers the early hordes, leaving them to battle singly with the difficulties of existence. The Roman writers say that interpreters for seventy different languages were needed in the Caucasus, and de Leon pretends that in the mountains of Ecuador there were as many tongues as there were villages. That Egyptian and Babylonian civilisation flourished contemporaneously for five thousand years without either colouring the other is explained by the trackless and arid desert which lay between them.

Differences in mere area, a matter of square miles, materially modify the ethnic mind. Great men are not born in small islands. The less the area of a state, the less the variety of its life, the fewer the stimuli to thought and emotion, the narrower the range of observation. The ethnographer Gerland attributes the mental degeneracy of the Polynesians, compared to their cognates, the Malays, directly to the much smaller islands which they were obliged to inhabit.

Mere number acts in a similar manner on the psyche. A nation of many millions has greater self-confidence; each citizen feels its power strengthening his own courage, his faith is firmer in what so many believe, and he is the readier to labour for aims which so many admire.

The relation of the area to the number yields the density of the population, which, with its collateral condition of distribution, is a ruling factor in ethnic life.

I have placed the geographic features which favour or impede intercommunication first on the list of those which modify the ethnic mind; and designedly so.

In the philosophic study of human development the social and anti-social factors demand our first attention. A man becomes man only as one of many. Nothing so lames progress as isolation; nothing so hastens it as good company; and I am fain to endorse the proverb that bad company is better than none. Rapid transportation is the key to the phenomenal growth of the nineteenth century: transportation of weight by steam, of thought by electricity. The Romans knew the value of good roads and made the best which have ever been constructed; the Phœnicians and Greeks won their pre-eminence, not by the resources of their home provinces, but by their skill as sailors.

The Soil.—Next and second in deciding the history and character of a people comes the nature of the soil, the earth, on which they live.

Its value is to them in what it yields, either spontaneously or by labour. The primitive man contented himself with the former; but culture came along when toil entered. For culture ever demands an effort greater than that immediately necessary for existence, because its aim, from first to last, is directed to the future; and the higher the culture, the more distant is that future.

Even the earliest men levied tribute on all the realms of nature. The cave-dwellers of the Gironde caught fishes and trapped beasts; they gathered nuts and edible roots; and they sought diligently for the stones best adapted to lance-points and scrapers. All this we know from the remains left in their rock-shelters. They utilised the soil to the full extent of their knowledge and wants.

The wealth they thus amassed was scanty and transitory; but when their successors, the neolithic peoples, appeared with domesticated animals, an agriculture, a beginning of sedentary life and city building, and, ere long, devised the excavation of ores wherewith to fashion weapons of bronze, the land areas suitable for these occupations soon became the centres of ethnic life and property.

I need not pursue the story of the growth of these prime industries: the cultivation of the soil, the domestication of animals, the exploitation of mines, the transformation from a wandering to a sedentary life, from vagabondage to the hallowed associations of a home, and the effects which these changes wrought on the sentiments and intellects of tribes.

What I wish particularly to point out is that what man asks from the soil is primarily nutrition,—only nutrition, a living. It is the “food-quest” which has been so vividly portrayed in American primitive life by Mindeleff and so fully set forth by Mason: the tribe enslaved by the soil; its laws, religion, customs, hopes, and fears wrapped up and submerged in the desperate strife for food. Only where there is a surplus, where wealth rises above want, is it possible for the group to free itself from this bondage to the clod,—to become more than an “adscript of the glebe.”

The relations between man and the fauna and flora of the region he inhabits are constant and intimate. The progress of civilisation has been traced by Pickering and others in the distribution of plants cultivated by man for his food, use, or pleasure. They have been rightly named by Gerland “the levers of his elevation.” Especially the cereals supplied him a regular, appropriate, and sufficient nutrition. Their product was not perishable, like fruit, but could be stored against the season of cold and want. Their cultivation led to a sedentary life, to the clearing and tillage of the soil, to its irrigation, and to the study of the seasons and their changes.

The grain, once harvested, still required preparation to become an acceptable article of food. It must be soaked or crushed and in some way cooked. These processes stimulated inventive ingenuity, encouraged regular labour, and required specialisation of employment.

In the hunting and fishing stage of culture the fauna supplies the chief articles of food. To obtain it was man’s earliest school of thought. He had to surpass the deer in swiftness and the lion in strength, or devise means to circumvent them. We find the early cave-men had accomplished as much. They prepared pitfalls for the mammoth, traps for the sabre-toothed tiger, foils for the fleet reindeer, and did not hesitate to encounter even the formidable rhinoceros. Nets, hooks, and fishing-gear were thought out with which to lure and ensnare the denizens of the streams.

But a far more rapid advance in his culture condition came about when man bent his energies to the preservation, not to the destruction, of the lower animals. By the process of domestication he secured not only an abundant supply of food in their milk and flesh, but beasts of burden and draught, facilitating rapid intercourse and enabling him to conquer more rapidly the nature around him.

The mental growth of many peoples has been inseparably linked to a single animal. Thus the Tartars of the steppes have their horses, the Todas their cows, the Tuaregs their camels, without which their social organisations would be wholly lost.

The absence in America of any indigenous animal suited for burden or draught which could be domesticated was one of the fatal flaws in the ancient culture of the continent, drawing a line beyond which progress in many directions became impossible.

Salubrity.—By salubrity I mean the general tendency of a locality to maintain the normal functions of the body.

This depends chiefly on what is included in the term “climate,” for soils become unhealthy only through the action of climatic conditions. These may be classed under three headings:

1. Temperature, which considers both the actual amount of heat and also the rapidity or extent of its variations (the “range”).

2. Moisture, including rain- and snow-fall and the average humidity.

3. Variety, not merely in the two conditions above mentioned, but of seasons, winds, clouds, electricity, etc.

The last-mentioned has been too frequently overlooked or underrated by medical and ethnographic geographers. In reality, it is the most potent of the three in its results on the human body and mind. It is easy to show that it is not the extreme of heat or cold which acts injuriously on the system, but the continuance of the temperature. A climate with a marked seasonal contrast between summer and winter is confessedly more invigorating than one, no matter how delightful, which is practically the same from year-end to year-end.

To keep in health, to maintain the functions in their highest relative activity, is the condition of the most effective work. Neither the individual nor the ethnic mind can reach its best results unless the body is in a healthful condition. Hence, those localities which are prone to endemic diseases or to frequent epidemics can never maintain a population intellectually equal to spots more favoured in this respect.

The most marked and widespread of the endemic poisons is malaria, the result of a paludal germ which has not yet been isolated. Heat and moisture are requisite to its development, and immunity from it is unknown in any race.

Malaria is the curse of plains and lowlands, while mountainous regions have almost the monopoly of goitre and cretinism. These endemic maladies directly diminish the mental powers through disturbing the circulation of the brain. They contribute largely to the inferior intellectual status of mountaineers, already prepared by the isolation of their lives.

The most important ethnic question in connection with climate is that of the possibility of a race adapting itself to climatic conditions widely different from those to which it has been accustomed. This is the question of Acclimatisation.

Its bearings on ethnic psychology can be made at once evident by posing a few practical inquiries: Can the English people flourish in India? Will the French colonise successfully the Sudan? Have the Europeans lost or gained in power by their migration to the United States? Can the white or any other race ultimately become the sole residents of the globe?

It will be seen that on the answers to such questions depends the destiny of races and the consequences to the species of the facilities of transportation offered by modern inventions. The subject has therefore received the careful study of medical geographers and statisticians.

I can give but a brief statement of their conclusions. They are to the effect, first, that when the migration takes place along approximately the same isothermal lines, the changes in the system are slight; but as the mean annual temperature rises, the body becomes increasingly unable to resist its deleterious action until a difference of 18° F. is reached, at which continued existence of the more northern race becomes impossible.

They suffer from a chemical change in the condition of the blood-cells, leading to anæmia in the individual and to extinction of the lineage in the third generation.

This is the general law of the relation to race and climate. Like most laws, it has its exceptions, depending on special conditions. A stock which has long been accustomed to change of climate adapts itself to any with greater facility. This explains the singular readiness of the Jews to settle and flourish in all zones. For a similar reason a people who at home are accustomed to a climate of wide and sudden changes, like that of the eastern United States, supports others with less loss of power than the average.

A locality may be extremely hot, but unusually free from other malefic influences, being dry, with regular and moderate winds, and well drained, such as certain areas between the Red Sea and the Nile, which are also quite salubrious.

Finally, certain individuals and certain families, owing to some fortunate power of resistance which we cannot explain, acclimate successfully where their companions perish. Most of the instances of alleged successful acclimatisation of Europeans in the tropics are due to such exceptions, the far greater number of the victims being left out of the count.

If these alleged successful cases, or that of the Jews or Arabs, be closely examined, it will almost surely be discovered that another physiological element has been active in bringing about acclimatisation, and that is the mingling of blood with the native race. In the American tropics the Spaniards have survived for four centuries; but how many of the Ladinos can truthfully claim an unmixed descent? In Guatemala, for example, says a close observer, not any. The Jews of the Malabar coast have actually become black, and so has also in Africa many an Arab claiming direct descent from the Prophet himself.

But along with this process of adaptation by amalgamation comes unquestionably a lowering of the mental vitality of the higher race. That is the price it has to pay for the privilege of survival under the new conditions. But, in conformity to the principles already laid down as accepted by all anthropologists, such a lowering must correspond to a degeneration in the highest grades of structure, the brain-cells.

We are forced, therefore, to reach the decision that the human species attains its highest development only under moderate conditions of heat, such as prevail in the temperate zones (an annual mean of 8°–12° C.); and the more startling conclusion that the races now native to the polar and tropical areas are distinctly pathological, are types of degeneracy, having forfeited their highest physiological elements in order to purchase immunity from the unfavourable climatic conditions to which they are subject. We must agree with a French writer, that “man is not cosmopolitan,” and if he insists on becoming a “citizen of the world” he is taxed heavily in his best estate for his presumption.

The inferences in racial psychology which follow this opinion are too evident to require detailed mention. Natural selection has fitted the Eskimo and the Sudanese for their respective abodes, but it has been by the process of regressive evolution; progressive evolution in man has confined itself to less extreme climatic areas.

The facts of acclimatisation stand in close connection with another doctrine in anthropology which is interesting for my theme, that of “ethno-geographic provinces.” Alexander von Humboldt seems to have been the first to give expression to this system of human grouping, and it has been diligently cultivated by his disciple, Professor Bastian.

It rests upon the application to the human species of two general principles recognised as true in zoölogy and botany. The one is, that every organism is directly dependent on its environment (the milieu), action and reaction going on constantly between them; the other is, that no two faunal or floral regions are of equal rank in their capacity for the development of a given type of organism.

The features which distinguish one ethno-geographic province from another are chiefly, according to Bastian, meteorological, and they permit, he claims, a much closer division of human groups than the general continental areas which give us an African, a European, and an American subspecies.

It is possible that more extended researches may enable ethnographers to map out, in this sense, the distribution of our species; but the secular alterations in meteorologic conditions, combined with the migratory habits of most early communities, must greatly interfere with a rigid application of these principles in ethnography.

The historic theory of “centres of civilisation” is allied to that of ethno-geographic provinces. The stock examples of such are familiar. The Babylonian plain, the valley of the Nile, in America the plateaux of Mexico and of Tiahuanuco are constantly quoted as such. The geographic advantages these situations offered,—a fertile soil, protection from enemies, domesticable plants, and a moderate climate,—are offered as reasons why an advanced culture rapidly developed in them, and from them extended over adjacent regions.

Without denying the advantages of such surroundings, the most recent researches in both hemispheres tend to reduce materially their influence. The cultures in question did not begin at one point and radiate from it, but arose simultaneously over wide areas, in different linguistic stocks, with slight connections; and only later, and secondarily, was it successfully concentrated by some one tribe,—by the agency, it is now believed, of cognatic rather than geographic aids.

Assyriologists no longer believe that Sumerian culture originated in the delta of the Euphrates, and Egyptologists look for the sources of the civilisation of the Nile valley among the Libyans; while in the New World not one, but seven stocks partook of the Aztec learning, and half a dozen contributed to that of the Incas. The prehistoric culture of Europe was not one of Carthaginians or Phœnicians, but was self-developed.