and foster stagnation.  Nevertheless the influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism “A man is more like the age he lives in than he is like his father and mother.”

Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when the “blue” blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old autochthonous streams.  Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been far less provocative to progress.  To-day the theories of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent “Nordic” race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great civilisations.  The fact that great civilisations have been built up and are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive racial genius and merit.  “All the talk,” says Professor Flinders Petrie, “about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe.  Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our peoples.  Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the older stocks come again to the top.  The majority of the men of power among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the underlying races."[19]