Before considering the question further, let us note yet another way in which the physical environment affects men’s minds and has been supposed directly to induce certain racial qualities. Buckle pointed out with great force the influence on the mind of what he called the external aspects of nature. He showed that where, as in India and the greater part of Asia, the physical features of a country are planned upon a very large scale; where the mountains are huge, where rivers are of immense length and volume, where plains are of boundless extent, and the sun very hot, there the forces of nature are exerted with an intensity that renders futile the best efforts of man, at any rate of man in a state of low civilisation, to cope with them. In such countries men are exposed to calamities on an enormous scale, great floods, violent storms and deluges of rain, earthquakes, excessive droughts resulting in famine and plague; and they are exposed to the attacks of many dangerous animal species, which are bred by the great heat in the dense and unconquerable forests. These disasters have repeatedly occurred on a scale such that in comparison with them the recent earthquake in California appears a mere trifle. Millions have been destroyed in a few hours in some of the floods of the Yellow River of China.
The magnitude of these objects and the appalling and irresistible character of such devastating forces produce, said Buckle, two principal and closely allied effects upon the mind; they stimulate the imagination to run riot in extravagant and grotesque fancies; at the same time, they discourage any attempt to cope with these great forces and to understand their laws, and thus keep men perpetually in fearful uncertainty as to their fate; for they cannot hope to control it by their own unaided efforts.
Hence, the encouragement of superstition; hence, the dominance of a degrading religion of fear throughout the greater part of such regions; hence, the supremacy of priests and religious orders and the discouragement of scientific reasoning. Hence, in the arts, the literature, and the religion of India, we see a dominant tendency to the grotesque, the enormous, the fearful; we see gods portrayed with many arms, with three eyes and terrible visages. The legends of their heroes contain monstrous details, as that they lived for many thousands or millions of years. “All this,” says Buckle, “is but a part of that love of the remote, that straining after the infinite, and that indifference to the present, which characterises every branch of Indian intellect. Not only in literature, but also in religion and in art, this tendency is supreme. To subdue the understanding, and indulge the imagination, is the universal principle. In the principles of their theology, in the character of their gods, and even in the form of their temples, we see how the sublime and threatening aspects of the external world have filled the mind of the people with those images of the grand and the terrible, which they strive to reproduce in a visible form, and to which they owe the leading peculiarities of their national culture.”[109]
That these peculiarities of the mental life of such peoples are causally related with those terrible aspects of nature is, I think, sufficiently established by Buckle. But if we admit this, there remain two questions: (1) Have these tendencies become innate racial qualities? (2) If so, how have they been rendered innate? Buckle did not raise these questions and offered no opinion in regard to them. But he seems to have assumed that these tendencies have become innate; and there is much to be said for that view. Yet, if that could be shown conclusively, it still would not prove inheritance of these acquired qualities. It may have resulted in some such way as this: the physical environment stimulates the imagination, and it represses the tendency to control imagination and superstition by reason and calm inquiry after causes; acting thus upon successive generations of men, it determines the peculiarities of the religious system and of the art and literature of the people. Individuals in whom the same tendencies are innately strong will then flourish under such a system; whereas those whose innate tendencies are in the direction of reason and scepticism will find the system uncongenial, unfavourable for the exercise of their best powers; they will fail to make their mark; they may, as in many instances of European inquirers, actually have lost their lives or their liberty through the religious zeal of those who maintain the traditional system. Thus the social environment, working through long ages, may have constantly determined a certain degree of selection of the innate tendencies congenial to it, and a weeding out of the opposed tendencies; until the former have predominated in the race[110].
We have here a very important principle which we must constantly bear in mind—namely, that not only the physical environment, but also the social environment, may determine the survival of those temperaments and qualities of mind best fitted to thrive in it, and, by handicapping those least fitted to it, may gradually bring the mental qualities of the race into conformity with itself. We shall later see other examples by which this principle is more clearly illustrated.
We conclude that, while physical environment may act powerfully upon the minds of individuals, moulding their acquired qualities in the three ways noticed—namely, influencing the mind through bodily habit, through the senses, and through the imagination—there is no sufficient evidence that the acquired qualities so induced ever become innate or racial characters by direct transmission. In those instances in which the racial qualities approximate to these direct effects of physical environment, it may well be because the physical environment has brought about adaptation of the race by long continued selection of individuals, or because it has determined peculiarities of social environment, which in turn have brought about adaptation of the racial qualities by long continued selection.
We considered in our last chapter the principal modes in which physical environment affects the character of a people—namely, (1) influence on temperament exerted chiefly through climate acting upon the bodily functions: (2) influence through the senses, exerting secondary effects upon the higher mental processes: (3) direct influence on the imagination. We concluded that these effects become innate in some degree; though whether they are impressed on the race by direct inheritance, or by processes of direct or of social selection, or in all three ways, remains an open question.
We distinguished, besides these direct modes of influence, two indirect modes by which physical environment affects the mind and character of a people: (1) by its selective action on individuals apart from its influence upon their minds: (2) by determining occupations and social organisation. We may consider them in turn.
It is recognised, as I pointed out above, that the races inhabiting hot moist countries are commonly indolent, while those of the moderately cold and moist climates tend to be extremely active and energetic.
This difference is well brought out by Mr Meredith Townsend in an essay on the charm of Asia for the Asiatics[111]; and he is speaking not of Asia in general but of Southern Asia. He says Asiatics “will not, under any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained habit of taking trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave like Prussian officials.” After quoting Thiers’ description of the immense labours of detailed administration which he supported while minister of State, he says “No Asiatic will do that.... One half the weakness of every Oriental government arises from the impossibility of finding men who will act as M. Thiers did.” These races, bred in the tropics, are in fact incurable lotus-eaters, their chief desire is for the afternoon life or, as is commonly said of the Malays throughout the Eastern Archipelago, they are great leg-swingers, they prefer to undertake no labour more arduous than sitting still swinging their legs. All this, though more or less true of the tropical races in general, is pre-eminently true of those inhabiting regions which are moist as well as hot, the Malays, the Burmese, the Siamese, the Papuans, the Negroes of the African jungle regions.
Such peoples have failed to acquire the energy which leads men to delight in activity for its own sake, not merely because a hot moist climate inclines directly to indolence, but rather because the prime necessities of life are to be had almost without labour; the heat dispenses with the necessity for clothing and shelter, while the hot sun and the moisture provide an abundance of vegetable food in response to a minimum of labour. Hence, no man perishes through lack of energy to secure the prime necessities of life; and there has been no great weeding out of the indolent by severe conditions of life, such as alone can produce an innately energetic race, one that loves activity for its own sake. For the same reason these same peoples also exercise but little foresight, they are naturally improvident; the abundance of nature renders it possible to survive and propagate without any prudent provision for the future.
Contrast with these races the northerly races—in Asia the Japanese, whose energy and industry we all recognise, and the northern Mongols or Tartars, who have so often overrun and conquered with fire and sword the less energetic peoples of the south, or the Goorkhas or Pathans of the highlands of northern India. But more especially contrast with them the English people. M. Boutmy rightly asserts that “the taste for and the habit of effort must be regarded as the most essential attribute, the profound and spontaneous quality, of the race[112].” It is displayed in the English love of sport and adventure and travel, especially in such recreations as mountain climbing, which is pre-eminently an English sport; also throughout our social life, in the intensity of commercial and industrial activity, often carried on ardently by men far removed from any necessity of making money. In our political life, where a vast amount of effort is constantly expended in achieving comparatively small results, we always seem to prefer to achieve any reform by the methods which give scope to and demand the greatest amount of public activity and effort. It is shewn also in the immense amount of public service rendered without remuneration, for the mere love of activity and the exercise of power. It is very striking in English colonies in tropical lands, and has been no doubt an important factor in our success in tropical administration and in colonisation.
Boutmy is inclined to attribute to this love of activity, as a secondary effect, the dislike of the mass of Englishmen for generalisations and for theoretical construction; for, he says, these are the results naturally achieved by the reflective mind, whereas the English mind gets no time for reflection, its attention is perpetually drawn off from general principles by its tendency to pursue some immediate practical end. Hence, he says, abstraction is subordinated to practical ends and does not soar for its own sake. This truth is well illustrated by the fact that all our English philosophers, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Bentham, Spencer, etc., have been practical moralists, and have conducted their investigations always with an eye to concrete applications to the conduct of the State or of private life.
Boutmy regards this love of activity, together with foresight and self-control, as racial qualities engendered by the severity of the climate, working chiefly by way of natural selection. In the prehistoric period more especially, when man had little knowledge of means of protection from climate and hardship such as have been developed by civilised societies, those individuals who were deficient in these qualities must have succumbed to the rigours of the climate, leaving their more energetic fellows to propagate the race.
That there is truth in the view is shown by the fact that the degree to which the love of activity is developed seems to vary roughly with the severity of the climate even among the closely allied races of Europe. As we pass northward from the coast of the Mediterranean, we find the quality more and more strongly marked; and it is in accordance with this principle that the dominant power, the leadership in civilisation, has passed gradually northwards in the historic period. Civilisation first developed in the sub-tropical regions, in which the abundance of nature first gave men leisure to devote themselves to things of the mind, to contemplation and inquiry; while the northern races were still battling as savages against the inclemency of the climate, were still being ruthlessly weeded out by the rigorousness of the physical environment, and so were being adapted to it, that is to say, were being rendered capable of sustained and vigorous effort. But, as the means of subduing nature and of protecting himself against nature have been developed by man, the dominance has passed successively northwards to peoples whose innate energy and love of activity were more highly developed in proportion to the severity of the selection exerted upon many preceding generations.
The severe climate has not been the only cause of this evolution of an energetic active type. No doubt military selection played its part also. The Northern races of Europe, more particularly the Nordic, the fair-haired long-headed race, underwent a prolonged and severe process of such military group selection, before branches of it settled in our island; and, among the qualities which must have tended to success and survival in this process, energy and capacity for prolonged and frequent effort, especially bodily effort, must have been one of the chief. Still, even such group selection was probably a secondary result of the direct climatic selection; for it must have been the love of activity and enterprise that led these peoples perpetually to wander, and so to come into conflicts with one another, conflicts in which the more energetic would in the main survive and the less energetic succumb. In part also it must have been determined in the third and the most indirect manner in which physical environment shapes racial qualities—namely, by determining occupations and modes of life, and through these the forms of social organisation, both of which then react upon the racial qualities.
In illustration of this third mode of action of physical conditions, let us take a striking difference of mental quality between the French and the English peoples, and inquire how the difference has arisen; a difference which is recognised by every capable observer who has compared the two peoples and which has been of immense importance in shaping the history of the modern world. I mean the greater sociability of the French and the greater independence of the English, a greater self-reliance and capacity for individual initiative. The difference finds expression in every aspect of the national life of the two peoples. The sociability and sympathetic character of the French, on which they justly pride themselves[113], is the inverse aspect of their lack of the characteristic English qualities, independence and self-reliance. In political life the difference appears in the centralised organisation of the French nation, every detail of administration being controlled by the central power through a rigidly organised hierarchy of officials, in a way that leaves no scope for initiative and independence in local administrations. Connected with this is the almost universal desire of educated men to become state functionaries, parts of the official machinery of administration, and the consequent excessive growth of this class of persons.
The same quality of the French shows itself in the tendency to prefer the monarchical rule of any man who shows himself capable of ruling, a tendency which constantly besets the republican State with a well-recognised danger. These are not local and temporary manifestations, but have characterised the French nation throughout the whole period of its existence. In the feudal period which preceded its formation, there was considerable local independence; but the feudal system was due to the dominant influence of Frankish chiefs, of the same race as our Saxon forefathers, who overran most of France as a ruling caste, but did not contribute any large element to the population, and whose blood therefore has been largely swamped. It appears in the greater violence among the French people of collective mental processes, those of mobs, assemblies, factions, and groups of all kinds. Each individual is easily carried away by the mass; there are none to withstand the wave of contagion and, by so doing, to break and check its force.
In England on the other hand political activity has always been characterised by extreme jealousy of the central power, and by the tendency to achieve everything possible by local action and voluntary private effort. All reforms are initiated from the periphery, instead of from the centre as in France. Great institutions, the universities, schools, colleges, hospitals, railways, canals, docks, insurance companies, even water supplies and telephones and many other things which, it would seem, should naturally and properly be undertaken by the State, or other official public body, have been generally set on foot and worked by individuals or private associations of individuals. Even vast colonial empires—India, Rhodesia, Canada, Sarawak, Nigeria, North Borneo—have been in the main acquired through the enterprise and efforts of individuals or associations of individuals; the State only intervening when the main work has been accomplished.
In their religion, too, the English are markedly individualistic; our numerous dissenting bodies have mostly dispensed with the centralised official hierarchy which in Roman Catholic countries mediates between God and man, and have insisted upon a direct communion with God; and we have many little churches each of which governs itself in absolute independence of every other. In the family relations the same difference appears very strongly. The French family regards itself, and is regarded by law, as a community which holds its goods in common; each child has his legal claim upon his share, relies upon his family for support in his struggle with the world, and is encouraged by his parents to do so. In the English family, on the other hand, the father is a supreme despot, who disposes of his property as he wills. The children are not encouraged to look for further support, when once they become adult, but are taught that they must go out into the world to seek their fortunes unaided. At an early age, the English boy is usually thrust out of the family into the life of a school in which, by his own efforts, he must find and keep his position among his fellows; and he lives a life which, compared with that of the French boy, is one of freedom and independence. In the distribution of the people on the land we see the same difference of mental qualities revealed. The French peasants are for the most part congregated sociably in villages and small towns; the English farmer builds his homestead apart upon his own domain. And this determines one of the most striking differences in the aspect of the rural districts of both countries. In the towns also the same tendencies are clearly shown; in the separate little homes of the English and in the large houses of the French shared by several families.
It is in the expansion in the world of the two peoples that the effects of this difference are most clearly expressed and assume the greatest importance. The English race has populated a vast proportion of the surface of the world, and rules over one-fifth of the total population. Whereas the French people, who have conquered large areas, have never succeeded in permanently colonising any considerable portion of their conquests and they have failed to maintain their domination in many regions where they have for a time established it. In every extra-European region where they have come into conflict with the English race they have been worsted.
The secret of the difference in the expansion of the two peoples is the difference of innate mental quality that we are considering, enhanced by the differences of custom and of political and family organisation engendered by it. For, like all other innate tendencies, the two to which we are referring obtain accentuated expression through moulding customs, institutions and social organisation in ways which foster in successive generations just those tendencies of which these institutions are themselves the traditional outcome and expression. Thus, it is the individualistic nature of the political, religious, and family organisation of the English people which, having been engendered by innate independence of character and having in turn accentuated it in each generation, has enabled the people to achieve its marvels of colonisation and tropical administration. We see these tendencies playing a predominant part in the history of every British colony.
The difference was well brought out by Volney, a French observer of the French and English colonists in the early days of the settlement of North America. He wrote “The French colonist deliberates with his wife upon everything that he proposes to do; often the plans fall to the ground through lack of agreement.” “To visit one’s neighbours, to chat with them, is for the French an habitual need so imperious that on all the frontier of Louisiana and Canada you will not find a single French colonist established beyond sight of his neighbour’s home.” “On the other hand, the English colonist, slow and taciturn, passes the whole day continuously at work; at breakfast he coldly gives his orders to his wife; ... and goes forth to labour.... If he finds an opportunity to sell his farm at a profit, he does so and goes ten or twenty leagues further into the wilderness to make himself a new home[114].”
It is the French authors themselves who have most insisted upon this mental difference between the French and the English, which seems to be determining a great difference in the destinies of the two peoples; and most of them, while justly valuing the sympathetic and sociable quality of the French mind, deeply regret its lack of the English independence[115]. There has been no lack of speculation and inquiry as to the origin and causes of this supremely important difference. It is perhaps worth while to glance at some of these attempts.
The most superficial attempt at explanation is to say that the political and social institutions of the French people foster in each individual the social tendencies in question, while the English institutions develop their opposites. It is true, but it obviously is not the explanation of the difference; for that we must go further back, in order to find the origin of these differences of institution.
An explanation a little less superficial is that the domination of the first Napoleon and the strong centralised system of administration established by him accounts for the difference. But the permanence, if not the very possibility, of that system, and the rise to power of Napoleon himself, were but symptoms of this deep-lying tendency of the French mind.
Buckle, recognising the profound difference which we are considering, summed it up in the phrases ‘the dominance of the protective spirit in France’ and of ‘the spirit of independence in England,’ He attributed the former partly to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in France with its centralised authoritative system, partly to the long prevalence of the feudal system of social organisation, under which every man was made to feel his personal dependence upon the despotic power of an independent noble and was accustomed to look to him for all initiative and guidance—was trained to obey a despot, whose absolute jurisdiction and whose title to his lands and rights was unchallenged. The system, he said, culminated in the despotism of Louis XIV, by the subjection of the previously independent nobles to the king, and was revived in a different form, immediately after the great revolution, by Napoleon.
The dominance of the spirit of independence among the English people he would explain also from the character of their political institutions during recent centuries. After recounting the political history of England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and after showing how the people during that period repeatedly succeeded in asserting its liberties against the encroachments of the kings, he wrote—“In England the course of affairs, which I have endeavoured to trace since the sixteenth century, had diffused among the people a knowledge of their own resources and a skill and independence in the use of them, imperfect indeed, but still far superior to that possessed by any other of the great European countries,” But he was not wholly satisfied with this explanation; he added—“Besides this, other circumstances, which will be hereafter related, had, as early as the eleventh century, begun to affect our national character and had assisted in imparting to it that sturdy boldness, and at the same time, those habits of foresight, and of cautious reserve, to which the English mind owes its leading peculiarities.”
When we turn to his account of the primary cause of English independence[116], we find that it was, in his view, that the feudal system was established by William the Conqueror in a form different from that obtaining on the continent. The nobles received their lands directly from the king as grants, and all land owners were made to acknowledge their direct obligation to him. The nobles were in consequence too weak to set up their own power against that of the king, and therefore they called the people to their aid in resisting the power of the king; hence, the people early acquired rights and privileges and the habit of organised resistance to the central authority. “The English aristocracy, being thus forced by their own weakness, to rely on the people, it naturally followed that the people imbibed that tone of independence and that lofty bearing, of which our civil and political institutions are the consequence, rather than the cause. It is to this, and not to any fanciful peculiarity of race, that we owe the sturdy and enterprising spirit for which the inhabitants of this island have long been remarkable.”
“The practice of subinfeudation, became in France almost universal.” The great lords subgranted parts of their lands to lesser lords, and these again to others, and so on—“thus forming a long chain of dependence, and, as it were, organising submission into a system.” In this country, on the other hand, the practice was actively checked. “The result was that by the fourteenth century the liberties of Englishmen were secured,” and the spirit of independence had become a part of the national character; that is to say, Buckle maintained that three centuries of a different form of the feudal system sufficed to produce this profound difference between the French and English peoples.
Boutmy also fully recognises the important difference between the innate qualities of the French and English; and he also would explain it as the effect of political institutions since the middle ages, but on lines somewhat different from Buckle’s—namely, that England was early ruled by a king invested with great power, and inclined to all the excesses of arbitrary rule. Hence the first need of the people was to fortify themselves against his power. All the law of England carries the imprint of this fear and this defiance. The parliament has been set up against the crown, the judges against parliament, and the jury against the power of the judges; and so, ever since the conquest, individuals have been accustomed to think, and to assert, that their persons, their purse, and their homes are inviolable; and that the State is an enemy whose encroachments must be resisted. This way of thinking has by long usage become instinctive, increasing from generation to generation; until the horror of servitude has become rooted in the Englishman’s temperament, and the desire of independence has become a native and primary passion.
Both Buckle and Boutmy agree, then, that the English love of liberty is due to England having been conquered and ruled by a powerful king, and that in France the opposite effect is to be attributed to the same cause—namely, the influence of despotic rulers. Surely this is to reverse cause and effect. If the English people had not already possessed the sturdy spirit of independence when they were conquered by the Norman, his strong centralised rule would only have rendered them still less independent and would have fostered the spirit of protection, as Buckle calls it. If the national characters had been reversed in this respect, how easy it would have been to show that the dependence of the English character was due to the strong rule of a foreign despot, William of Normandy, while the French independence was due to the existence in feudal times of many centres of independent power, the nobles, each capable of resisting the central authority! It was just because this spirit was theirs already that the English people resisted their kings and were able to secure their liberties by setting up institutions congenial to their nature, institutions and customs which have fostered in each individual and each generation the spirit of independence inherited as a racial quality, and which possibly, though by no means certainly, have further intensified the racial peculiarity.
Another cause for the difference of institutions is assigned by Sir Henry Maine. He pointed to the great influence of Roman law upon French institutions; he showed how the French lawyers, brought up in the school of Roman law and holding the Roman Empire as the ideal of a political organisation, threw all their weight upon the side of the monarchy, and in favour of centralised administration. More, perhaps, is due to this influence than to the causes assigned by Buckle and Boutmy; but no one of these alleged causes, nor all of them combined, can be accepted as adequate to explain the origin of the difference of national characters. These authors fail also to make clear how the political institutions can have modified character. Boutmy frankly assumes use-inheritance, which, as I have said, is, in the present state of science, an unwarrantable assumption.
That these qualities of the French and English peoples are innate racial qualities, evolved during the race-making or prehistoric period, is proved not only by the inadequacy of any assignable causes operating during the historic period, but also by the fact that similar qualities are described by the earliest historians as characterising the ancestors, or the principal ancestral stocks, of the two peoples, when they first appear in history. It is proved also by the fact that other branches of the Nordic race have displayed similar qualities, more especially the Dutch, and also the Normans, who, though they have long formed part of the French State in the political sense, and have suffered most of the political influences assigned as causes of the spirit of protection, not only displayed the spirit of independence in the highest degree ten centuries ago, but are admitted to be still distinguished from the bulk of the French people by the greater individualism of their character, just as they are still markedly different in physical traits. They offer one of the best examples of fixity of the physical characters of a race. No one can travel in Normandy without being struck by the very marked and distinctive physical type, which, according to all accounts, is that of the Norman who came over to England with the Conqueror; and there is every reason to believe that the mental qualities of the race have been equally fixed and enduring.
Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and other early historians have described for us the leading qualities of the Gauls on the one hand and of the Teutons on the other. Fouillée in his Psychology of the French People has brought together the evidence of these early historians on the point; it shows that the Gauls and the Teutons were distinguished very strongly by the same differences which obtain between the French and English peoples at the present time, especially the difference in respect of independence and initiative, the origin of which we are seeking to explain. The Gauls were eminently sociable people, sympathetic, emotional, demonstrative, vivacious, very given to oratory and discussion, vain and moved by the desire of glory, capable of great gallantry, but not of persevering effort in face of difficulties, easily elated, easily cast down. And, what from our point of view is especially important, they were readily led by the chiefs, to whom they were attached by the bonds of personal loyalty; and they were constantly banding themselves together in large groups, under such leaders as attained popularity by their superior qualities; and, again, they were dominated by the priestly caste, the Druids. The Gauls even had those family institutions which characterise the modern French and which have been held to be the expression of their recently acquired qualities and traditions; namely, the family had the character of a community in which the wife had equal rights with the husband, and the children were regarded also as members of the community having their equal claims upon the family property. And society was bound together by a system of patrons and clients, a system of personal dependence.
On the other hand, the Teutonic people, as described by the same ancient authorities, displayed a decided individualism in virtue of which their social organisation was more rudimentary. The father was supreme in the family, and his power and property descended to his eldest son. They were a more phlegmatic people, but of great energy and persistence. Unlike the Gauls, they were dominated by no priestly caste. The religious rites were conducted by the elder men.
The Gauls were a mixed people of whom the minority, constituting the nobility, were of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic race, while the majority, the mass of the common people, were of the short, dark, round-headed race. And these, as the numerous observations of the anthropologists show, constitute to-day the bulk of the population, except in Normandy and the extreme north-east of France.
The Teutons or Germans of Caesar and Tacitus, on the other hand, were of the fair Nordic race; and the Anglo-Saxons who overran Britain, together with the Danes and Normans, who, with the Saxons, formed the principal ancestral stock of the English, were of this same Nordic race, or Northmen, as we may call them.
Now, it might seem useless to attempt to arrive at any conclusions as to the influences that shaped these races in prehistoric times. But an attempt has been made by one of the schools of French sociologists, which, in spite of its speculative character, seems to be worthy of attention. This is the school of ‘La Science Sociale,’ founded seventy years ago by Fredericq le Play and more recently led by Ed. Demolins and H. de Tourville. Aided by a number of ardent disciples, they have made a special study of the influence of physical environment in determining occupations and social organisation, and in moulding indirectly through these the mental qualities of peoples. That is their great principle. They rightly, I think, insist upon the relatively small importance of political institutions in moulding a people, regarding them as secondary results of the factors which, determining the private activities of men and women at every moment of their lives from the cradle to the grave, exert a far greater and more intimate influence upon their minds. In two fascinating volumes[117] Demolins has summed up the principal results of this school and attempted to trace the conditions that have determined the differentiation of all the principal races of the earth; and de Tourville has applied the same principles and traced their effects in European history[118].
It is a curious fact that the work of the Le Play school is almost entirely ignored by the other French sociologists and anthropologists. It is seldom referred to by them, and outside France also it has not received the attention it deserves. Much of it is of the nature of brilliant speculation, and is regarded no doubt as unsound by many more sober minds. Yet, when we attempt to understand the evolution of man in the prehistoric period, brilliant speculation becomes a necessary supplement to the work of measuring skulls and digging up ruins, to which some less ingenious workers confine themselves. And, of all the conclusions of the Le Play school, their account of the origin of the distinctive characters of the Northmen is one of the most striking and satisfactory; while their account of the origins of the Gauls and of their peculiar social organisation and well marked mental traits is also among their best work.
In the foregoing chapter we noticed certain well-marked and generally recognised differences of national character presented by the French and the English peoples—namely, the greater independence of the English, the greater sociability of the French people; and we noted how these differences of national character show themselves throughout the institutions of the two nations, and how they have played a great part in determining the difference of their histories; especially, we saw, how they are of prime importance, when we seek to account for the greater expansion of the English people throughout the world.
We then noticed several attempts that have been made, by Buckle, Boutmy, Maine and others, to account for these differences as results of differences of political institutions during the last thousand years. We found that all these attempts fail, and that the differences of political institutions, which these authors have regarded as the causes of the differences of national character, are really the expressions of a fundamental racial difference; that, in short, these authors have inverted the true causal relation. I then drew attention to the work of the school of Le Play and especially to its fundamental principle—namely, that, while peoples are in a state of primitive or lowly culture, their geographical or physical environment determines their occupations and, through their occupations, their social organisations, especially their domestic organisation; and that particular modes of occupation and of social organisation of a primitive people, persisting through many generations, mould the innate qualities and form the racial character.
I said that two brilliant workers of the school—namely, Demolins and de Tourville—had applied this principle to account for those differences between the national characters of the French and English peoples which we were considering. I have now to reproduce their account in as condensed a form as possible.
Demolins claims to show that the short dark round-headed people, who formed the bulk of the Gauls and also of the population of modern France, came, in prehistoric times, from the Eurasian steppe region, reaching France by way of the valley of the Danube, a long narrow lowland region confined on the north by the Carpathians and mountains of Bohemia, on the south by the Balkans and Swiss Alps. He supposes that, for long ages, they had lived as pastoral nomads on the steppes. By examining the nomads who still lead the pastoral life on the steppes, he shows the kind of social organisation to which this pastoral life inevitably gives rise and under which they lived; and he traces the effects which such occupation and such social organisation produce on the mental qualities of a people.
The system is the patriarchal system par excellence. It is something very different from the Roman system characterised by the patria potestas, which the writings of Sir H. Maine have perhaps tended to confuse with the true patriarchal system. The patriarchal system of the pastoral nomads is essentially a communal system, under which all the brothers, sons, and grandsons of the patriarch form, with their families, a community which holds all the property, consisting of flocks and herds, in common; each member having his claim to his share of the produce, each doing his share of the common labour, and each having a voice in the regulation of the affairs of the family. Such a system represses individualism; there is no individual property, there are no individual rights, duties, or responsibilities; no scope for individual initiative; the individual is swallowed up in the community; superior energy or enterprise bring no superior rewards, but rather tend to social disorganisation and to the detriment of the individual who displays them. Further, the work of looking after the herds of cattle is easy and delightful, calling for no sustained exertion; and the herds provide every necessary article of food, clothing, and shelter. Beyond the family group there exists no political organisation; for the group is self-supporting and independent, it has no need of relations with other groups, and each group lives far apart from others, wandering in some ill-defined region of the immense plain.
The peculiarities of this social organisation and of this mode of life are clearly created by the physical environment, by the boundless grassy plains, which enable each family group to maintain a large troup of cattle, chiefly horses. At the same time, these conditions render necessary the co-operation of all the members of the family in the common work of tending the cattle; while the necessity of continually moving on to fresh pasture prevents the growth of any fixed forms of property and of any more elaborate social organisation.
It is an extremely stable and persistent mode of life and of social organisation. So long as the geographical conditions remain unchanged, it is difficult to see how any change would take place in it, how any progress towards civilisation could begin. And, as a matter of fact, the people who have remained in these regions continue to lead just the same patriarchal, pastoral, nomadic life. Long ages of this mode of life may well put upon a people the stamp of sociability and communism and kill out individualism and individual initiative! Demolins points out in a very interesting way how these effects of the patriarchal system of the pastoral nomads are displayed most clearly still by the population of southern Russia, who, of all the settled European peoples descended from such pastoral nomads, have suffered fewest disturbing influences; how still the individual is subordinated to the community, to the mir, by which all private life and industrial activity is directed and which is the owner of the principal property, namely the land; and how, in consequence, the people remain devoid of all individual initiative and enterprise.
The Celts arriving in Gaul retained these qualities and something of the patriarchal organisation, although they were no longer simply pastoral nomads; for, in the course of their migrations, they had been forced to take up agriculture and the rearing of other domestic animals, especially the pig, through lack of sufficient open steppe land. While in this disorganised condition in Gaul, they were overrun by tribes of the Nordic race, who established themselves as a conquering nobility, superimposing upon the rudimentary political organisation of the Celts a loose military organisation of clans; each clan was led by a popular warrior who attached to himself by his personal qualities as large as possible a number of clients or clansmen, acquiring rights over their land and property, in return for the patronage and protection he offered them. These nobles with their blood relatives were the tall fair-haired Gauls described by Caesar. The Celts lent themselves readily to this system based on personal loyalty and leadership, owing to their lack of independence of character engendered by long ages of the patriarchal communal régime. And the new social organisation fostered and developed still more through many generations the spirit of dependence, the tendency to look for authoritative guidance and control to some recognised centre of power.
Under the two circumstances, the long régime of patriarchal communism and the subsequent prevalence for many generations of the clan system, we may see, according to Demolins, the causes of those deep-seated tendencies of the French nation (summed up by Buckle in the phrase the spirit of protection) which throughout their history have played so large a part in shaping the destinies of the people, and which are still the source of grave anxiety to many patriotic Frenchmen.
It is interesting to note that among the Celtic populations of the British Isles the same features have been clearly displayed. We see among them the clan-system with its dual ownership of the soil, which has been perpetuated in Ireland to the present day and has received more formal and legal recognition from the British government in its recent legislation. We see the strong clannish spirit and relative lack of independence. These qualities are clearly shown by the Celtic Irish, even when they have been compelled by necessity to emigrate to America. There they are not found to be pioneers on the frontiers of civilisation, but rather remain herded together in clannish communities in the cities of the eastern states, where they create such powerful unofficial associations as ‘Tammany Hall.’
Demolins’ account of the genesis of the spirit of independence and enterprise of the Anglo-Saxons is still more interesting and seductive. He supposes that their ancestors also came originally in very remote times from the Eurasian steppes; but that is a disputable point and forms no essential part of his argument. They settled in prehistoric times around the coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea, especially in Scandinavia. And the physical peculiarities of this region impressed upon their descendants the qualities which have enabled them to play a leading part in the destruction of the Roman power and in the development of the civilisation of modern Europe, and which have established them in almost every part of the world as a dominant race, increasing in power and numbers at the expense of other peoples.
What, then, are these physical conditions?
Scandinavia is a mass of barren mountains coming down in almost all parts abruptly to the sea. Its coast line is indented by innumerable fiords and bordered by thousands of small islands; and the sea which washes these coasts is warmed by the Gulf Stream. This sea, owing to its warmth and to the existence of a great bank which lies near the surface and runs parallel to the coast line, is extremely rich in fish. Hence, the Nordic tribes who settled in Scandinavia inevitably became a sea-faring folk, spreading slowly along the coasts in small boats, supporting themselves in large part upon the fish which they caught in the sea; for the land is barren, while the sea offers ideal conditions for fishing in small boats. But, unlike the herds of pastoral peoples, sea-fishing does not provide all the necessities of a simple life. It must be combined with agriculture. Hence, the ancient Northmen became a race of hardy seafarers who at the same time practised agriculture.
The character of the land which was available for the necessary but supplementary agriculture was all important. It consisted, as it does still, of small isolated strips of cultivatable soil at the feet of the mountains where they plunge into the sea. On such land it was impossible for the family to retain the form of a patriarchal community. The fertile areas were too small to support such communities, and the individualistic form of family was inevitably evolved. On each small plot of cultivatable land a little farm was formed, a homestead in which lived a family restricted to father, mother, and children. As the children grew up, it was impossible to support them on the one small farm or to divide it among them; one son alone was chosen as the inheritor of the paternal farm; and each of the others had to seek a new piece of land, build a new homestead, and acquire his own boat.
Thus, the family was forced to become the individualistic family; and the home of each such family was necessarily isolated, widely separated from that of every other, owing to the scattered distribution of the little areas of fertile soil. Thus were formed the first homes in the English sense of the word; the home in which the father rules supreme over his own little household, brooking no interference from outside; the home in which the children are brought up to look forward to establishing, each child for himself, similar independent individualistic homes. Such homes have been established by the Northmen in every part of the world in which they have settled; and they are peculiar to them and their descendants.
It is obvious that all the very limited domains of the Scandinavian coasts must have been fully occupied in the way described in a comparatively few generations after the process of settlement began. This seems to have occurred about the fourth or fifth century A.D. Then the younger sons, for whom there was no place at home and for whom there remained no spots suitable for homesteads in their native land, were sent out into the world to seek their fortunes. They banded themselves together to man single boats, or formed fleets of boats; and, leaving their parents and women-folk behind, set out to conquer for themselves new homesteads. Large numbers, sailing to the southern shores of the Baltic and up the Weser and the Elbe, settled on the plains of Saxony; and from this new centre they again spread, as the Anglo-Saxons to England, and as the Franks to Gaul. Others settled directly in northern France and became the Normans. Others, the Varegs, penetrated the plains of Russia and established themselves as princes over the Slav population.
This was a migration such as had never before been seen; bands of armed men, all young or in the prime of life, coming not as mere robbers, but seeking to conquer for themselves and to settle upon whatever land seemed to them most desirable. Everywhere they went they conquered and either exterminated or drove out the indigenous population, as in the south and east of England, or established themselves as an aristocracy, a ruling military caste, as the Franks in the north-east of Gaul. And everywhere they established firmly their individualistic social organisation, especially the isolated homestead of the individualistic family, characterised by the despotic power of the father and by great regard for individual property and for the rights of the individual as against all State institutions and public powers. In hostile countries the homestead became a fortified place, or at least was furnished with a fortified keep or castle; and in those regions, such as Gaul, in which the indigenous population was not exterminated, the feudal system was thus initiated. Everywhere they carried their spirit of independence, enterprise, and initiation.
It was the swarming of the young broods of Northmen in search of new homes that caused the Romans to describe these Northern lands as the womb of peoples, and to regard them with wonder and something of fear.
These qualities and habits continued to be displayed in the highest degree by the Normans after their first settlement in the north of France. The younger sons kept up the good old fashion of going out into the world to seek a fortune or rather a territory, which often was a dukedom or a kingdom. Their most characteristic performance was the conquest of the greater part of Italy. A little before William of Normandy and his companions secured for themselves domains in this country, Norman knights, engaging in enterprises that might well have seemed absolutely foolhardy, had established themselves in Mediterranean lands. Some two thousand Normans, arriving Viking fashion in their small ships, conquered Sicily and the south of Italy and divided these lands among themselves; and for a time they introduced order and a settled mode of life among the peoples of those parts. The leading spirits among them were ten sons of one Norman gentleman, Tancrède de Hauteville, the father of twelve sons of whom two only remained at home, while each of the others carved out for himself a domain in Italy. As Demolins remarks, these families, retaining undiminished their individualistic tendencies and spirit of independence, were veritable factories of men for exportation.
The modern Frenchman, says Demolins, would regard as the height of folly the enterprises of the old Northmen, who, mounted on their frail ships, quitted each spring the coast of Scandinavia, launched out on the wild sea, landed, a mere handful of men, on the coasts of Germany, Britain, or Gaul, and there with their swords carved out domains and made new homesteads. It was thus that the ancestors of Tancred had acquired the manor of Hauteville, and it was thus that his sons conquered Italy and Sicily.
It was in a very similar way that, in a later age, men of the same breed carried to the new world the same individualistic institutions and the same spirit of independence, and in doing so, laid the sure foundations of the immense vigour and prosperity of the American people.
There is one almost more striking illustration of the great and lasting effects upon character and institutions of the mode of life of the Northmen determined by their physical environment. It is furnished by the character and habits of the people who still dwell in the plains between the mouths and lower parts of the Weser and the Elbe, a region which was naturally one of the first to be conquered and occupied by the Northmen. This territory is an infertile sandy plain, and at the time of the coming of the Northmen had but scanty population; hence, instead of becoming the military and ruling caste of a subject people, the Northmen became themselves peasants and farmers. In doing so, they retained all the characteristic features of the individualistic family and have perpetuated them, together with the spirit of enterprise and independence, undiminished to the present day.
In this region each farm is a freehold which has remained in the hands of the same family for long periods, in many cases for hundreds of years. Each farm has its isolated homestead inhabited by the head of the family, his wife and young children, and one or two hired servants. Each homestead is well nigh completely self-supporting and lives almost independent of the outside world. In spite of the isolation, which might have been expected to engender an extreme conservatism and backwardness of culture, these farmers have continued to exhibit the old Northmen’s spirit of enterprise and their power of voluntary combination in the pursuit of individual ends. They were the first in Europe to establish a society for the scientific study of agriculture, and they have thus maintained themselves in the first rank as cultivators of the land, quite without State assistance. In the same way and at an early date they established schools for their children. They have continued to produce large families and have retained the custom of handing over the farm and homestead intact to one son, chosen for his ability to manage it; while all the other sons keep up the old custom of going out into the world to seek their fortunes, in the shape of new homesteads.
Most striking of all, they still do this in the old Norse fashion as nearly as possible. In one district these farmers combined their efforts some sixty years ago and built a ship which, since that time, has sailed every year to South Africa, carrying there the surplus sons in search of new domains for themselves. In that far country their spirit of independence finds satisfaction in establishing new homesteads, new families of the individualistic type, and in perpetuating their traditions of enterprise and self-reliance.
It is because the modern Scandinavians are of the same stock, fashioned for long ages by the same physical environment, that they have continued to emigrate in large numbers to North America, where some of their ancestral race landed centuries before Columbus was born, and where, in the newly opened territories of Canada and the United States, they are generally recognised as being among the best of the settlers.
Demolins does not enter into the question—How did the institutions and mode of life of these or other peoples, determined by physical environment, bring about adaptation of racial qualities to the environment? He seems to assume in all cases use-inheritance. But if, as seems possible or even probable, this is a false assumption, we may still see clearly that, in the case of the Northmen at least, adaptation may well have been effected by selection. The conditions of life of these Northmen were such that in each generation the majority of men could become fathers of families only after carrying through successfully an enterprise in which a bold independence of spirit was the prime condition of success.
Those who were deficient in the spirit of independence must have shrunk from these wild expeditions in search of new homes to be won only by the sword, or must in the main have failed to attain the end; remaining at home, or returning there after failing in the enterprise to which they proved unequal, to finish their days as bachelor uncles at the paternal hearth. This process, carried on for many generations, would lead to the evolution of just those qualities which are characteristic of their descendants in all the many parts of the earth where they now rule. Not only must such social selection have been operative during the period of settlement of Scandinavia; but each great migration to a new area must have sifted out the most independent and enterprising spirits to be the founders and fathers of the new branch of the race[119]. Thus the descendants of the pilgrim fathers were the product of three such processes of severe selection; the migration from Scandinavia to Northern Germany; that from Germany to England; and that from England to America. No wonder that they proved themselves well able to cope with the hardships and dangers of a new continent inhabited by savages only less fiercely tempered than their own stock by many generations of warfare! When we thus find the same institutions and the same mental traits characterising, from the dawn of history to the present time, all the widely separated branches of one racial stock and of this stock alone, we realize how powerful over the destiny of nations is the influence of racial character formed in the long prehistoric ages; we see how futile it is to attempt to explain the mental traits of a people by the history of their political institutions during a few recent centuries; we understand that these institutions are the effects, not the causes, of those mental qualities and that, even among the peoples who have attained the highest degree of civilisation, racial qualities remain of supreme importance.
Before passing on to the consideration of evolutionary changes during the historic period, a few words must be said about the crossing and blending of races. Such blending has been, no doubt, one of the principal causes of the great variety of human types at present existing on the earth. It has been going on for long ages in almost all regions; but especially in Europe and Africa. All existing stocks (with few exceptions) are the products of race-blending. No one of the existing European peoples is of unmixed stock; every one is the product of successive mixtures and blendings of allied stocks; and the mixing and blending still goes on; while in America (both north and south) the greatest experiments in race-blending that the world has yet seen are taking place before our eyes.
Authors differ widely as to the results of the crossing of human races and subraces. Some assert that the effect of crossing of races is always bad, that the cross-bred progeny is always inferior to the parent stocks. They make no allowance for unfavourable conditions, especially the lack of the strong moral traditions of old organised societies. Others maintain the opposite opinion. Both opinions are probably correct in a certain sense. I think the facts enable us to make with some confidence the following generalisation. The crossing of the most widely different stocks, stocks belonging to any two of the four main races of man, produces an inferior race; but the crossing of stocks belonging to the same principal race, and especially the crossing of closely allied stocks, generally produces a blended subrace superior to the mean of the two parental stocks, or at least not inferior.
This generalisation cannot yet be based on exact and firmly established data, unfortunately; but it is in harmony with old established popular beliefs, and with what we know of the crossing of animal breeds; and it is borne out by a general inspection of many examples. For instance, the blending of the white, negro, and American stocks, which has been going on in South America for some centuries, seems to have resulted in a subrace which up to the present time is inferior to the parent races; or at any rate to the white race. So the mulattoes of North America and the West Indies, although superior in some respects to the pure negroes, seem deficient in vitality and fertility, and the race does not maintain itself. The Eurasians of India are commonly said to be a comparatively feeble people. The blend of the Caucasian with the yellow race is also generally of a poor type. Examples abound in Java of people of mixed Javanese and Dutch blood; and they are for the most part feeble specimens of humanity. It is generally recognised that a recently blended stock may produce a few individuals of exceptional vigour and capacity and physical beauty. But setting these aside, the blended stock seems to be inferior in two respects: (1) a general lack of vigour, which expresses itself in lack of power of resistance to many diseases and in relative infertility; so that the blended stock can hardly maintain its numbers; (2) a lack of harmony of qualities, both mental and physical. It may be that such lack of harmony is the ground of the relative infertility of blended stocks. It expresses itself in the inharmonious combination of physical features, characteristic of the mongrel. The negro race has a beauty of its own, which is spoilt by blending.
As regards mental constitution, although we cannot directly observe and measure these disharmonies of composition, there seems good reason to believe that they exist. The soul of the cross-bred is, it would seem, apt to be the scene of perpetual conflict of inharmonious tendencies. This has been the theme of many stories, and, though no doubt many of them are overdrawn, there is no reason to doubt that they in the main depict actual experience or are founded on close observation.
It is on the moral, rather than the intellectual, side of the mind that the disharmony seems to make itself felt most strongly; and the moral detachment of the cross-bred from the moral traditions of both the parent stocks is possibly due in part to a certain lack of innate compatibility with those traditions, as well as to social ostracism; the cross-bred can assimilate neither tradition so easily and completely as the pure-bred stocks.
It is possible, though this is a still more speculative view, that the same is true of the intellectual constitution of the mind.
The superiority of subraces formed by the blending of allied stocks seems to fall principally under two heads: (1) a general vigour of constitution; (2) a greater variety and variability of innate mental qualities. The greater variability of qualities of a subrace renders that race more adaptable to changing conditions; for racial adaptability depends upon the occurrence of abundant spontaneous variations. A large variety of innate qualities renders a race capable of progressing rapidly in civilisation; it renders it more capable both of producing novel ideas and of appreciating and assimilating the ideas, discoveries, and institutions of other peoples; and such imitative assimilation from one people to another has been a main condition of the progress of culture.
It is, of course, well recognised that the great centres of development of culture have been the places where different peoples have come most freely into contact, notably the centre of the old world where Asia, Africa, and Europe meet together. This was the area in which the three great races of Europe came first into contact and mingled freely. Some authors attribute the fertilising influence upon culture wholly to the blending or contact of cultures; but there is good reason to believe that it is largely due also to race-blending.
We might compare in this respect the three great culture areas of the old world—Europe, India and China. The Chinese afford an instance of one relatively pure race occupying a very large area. In spite of its early start and great mental capacities, its culture has stagnated. The stock was perhaps too pure. India on the other hand seems to owe its peculiar history largely to the fact that its population in almost all parts has been made up from very widely different races—white, yellow and black; the heterogeneity has been too great for stability and continued progress. In Europe different branches and sub-branches of the white race, that is of stocks not too widely different in constitution, have undergone repeated crossing and recrossing.
It is worth while to point out that, if our generalisation is valid, it follows that race-blending has been an important factor in the progress of civilisation. And the generalisation has also an important bearing upon one of the most urgent problems confronting the statesmen of the world at the present time, and not only the statesmen but all the citizens of the civilised states, especially the citizens of the British Empire and of America. For it justifies abundantly the refusal of the white inhabitants of various countries to admit immigrants of the yellow or negro race to settle among them; and it justifies, and more than justifies, the objection to intermarriage with those other races which Englishmen have upheld wherever they have settled, and which most other peoples have not upheld[120].
In all the currents of heated discussion as to the rights and wrongs of the treatment of other races, this question of the kind of subrace which will result from intermarriage is generally left in the background; whereas its importance is far greater than that of all other considerations taken together. Some, like Sir S. Olivier[121], are content to approve race-blending on the ground that it improves the inferior race. But the racial qualities of the leading peoples of the world are too precious to be squandered in the process of improving in some uncertain degree the quality of the overwhelming mass of humanity of inferior stocks; the process would probably result in the total destruction of all that humanity has striven and suffered for in its nobler efforts.
It is an interesting question—When two races or subraces are crossed, do they ever produce a homogeneous and true subrace, exhibiting a true and stable blend of the qualities of the parental stocks? Or does the blend always remain imperfect, with many individuals in whom the qualities of one or other of the parental stocks predominate? The answer seems to be that a stable subrace may be formed in this way, though usually not until free intermarriage has gone on for many generations. According to the most recent doctrine of heredity, the Mendelian, every human being is a mosaic or patchwork of unit qualities, organs, or capacities, each of which is inherited wholly from one of the parents and not at all from the other. If this view is well founded, it follows that there can be no true blending of these unit qualities. But still the mosaic may be so finely grained and the unit qualities derived from the two parents so closely interwoven, that each individual may present an intimate mixture of the parental qualities, may represent for all practical purposes a blending of the two stocks.