CHAPTER XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The need of a basis of right sentiments even greater than that of

improved political machinery to secure international union. We must

start from patriotism and enlighten and enlarge it. Of the three Western

nations which lead in the arts and sciences, France and England through

the war become closely allied in defence of a policy of the union of

free and pacific people throughout the world. The position of Italy,

Russia, and the United States. The increase of arbitral methods and the

formation of leagues of peace or even of a world-state are matters

calling for earnest thought; but the spread of the notion of humanity,

the co-operation of all mankind in a common work is more fundamental and

may be begun by any one at home. This idea, starting with the Stoics, is

fully developed with the advent of modern science. It shows itself in

many forms and the spread of exact science is its most powerful aid.

This is entirely independent of nationality and will be increasingly

concerned with the alleviation of human suffering and the improvement of

life.

The final test of a high international aim is the joint effort of the

stronger peoples to protect and assist the weaker and less advanced. The

case of Africa and the Brussels Conference of 1889. Analogy with the

treatment of the young at home.

I

THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that we

make appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the issue of the

conflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity of

mankind, centring as it must round Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of the

Roman Empire, a schism so serious as the present has threatened the

unity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the war

which it entailed down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was the

struggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The latter

was in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of the

independent nations of Europe against the overweening ambition and

aggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achieved

its purpose and survived the successful issue of the war for some years.

Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more enduring

than the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for the

present war.

The struggle at the Reformation was less like the present, either in its

causes or its course, but it has some features which make it a useful

point for a survey of the permanent unifying elements which hold and

will hold the West together in spite of occasional cataclysms and the

clash of rival interests and passion. A man like Erasmus, trembling

before the catastrophe, willing to make immense sacrifices to avoid an

open breach, uncertain of any final readjustment which might restore the

harmony of the world, was not unlike some among us who hoped against

hope that the enemy might be appeased, who thought that almost any peace

was better than any war, who still fear that the breach in unity is

vital or irreparable for generations.

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with a

cautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured trust. The right cause

triumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches and

for individuals, throughout the world. The evil features in the papal

system, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly but

completely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed.

Before a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquest

of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer

base.

Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European system

is, as we shall see throughout these essays, the necessary nucleus of

any civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsions

which have hitherto continued to occur in it from time to time are

moments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which it

exists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strength

and the weaknesses of the normal functions. We strive and hope for a

more lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patient

even in this grave attack. He has survived even more serious illness.

For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has ever

seen, its very greatness is the result of some of those modern

developments--scientific skill, improved communications, national

cohesion--on which ultimately the better organization of the whole

commonwealth of nations will be built. _Passi graviora_; we have

weathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when

the old Roman order and its sequel in the Catholic Church were at their

weakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform and

nationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with our

greater forces of the present to regain and create a Europe freer,

stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to the

depths.

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the

world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from

two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does

the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself,

and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography,

climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its

appearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings,

man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by two

features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is

more deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, by

affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And

he is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and

agreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force which he has

acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is

due to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physically

less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of

his own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by

his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert of

thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an

attachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for some

common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on

another. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes

quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the

dead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the

working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the social

factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter _a priori_, it is clear that the vast

community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in

recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and

momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types

are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly

relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The

former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and

the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The

latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities,

by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units

of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable

questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the

present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be

to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of

these smaller units, the family and the nation, with their various

intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means

conformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not been

made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families

to make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations,

and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the way

of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human

association have been taking shape, being altered and on the whole

improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for

our argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the

necessary constituent elements were articulated. This was the

Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the

Roman Empire of the second century A.D. It was the nucleus from which

the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was

there, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it

required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape.

It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we

owe most of the conflicts of modern history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of

pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight

and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization

would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a

culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a

similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely

severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the

human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture

although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet

the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of

itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be

created and sufficient leisure and independence secured for an

intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a

special concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. The

rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this,

and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end

of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all in

Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance

for the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to

act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous

spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these

land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean,

centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the

Phoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the

claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of

human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to

spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the

European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race.

The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions,

as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For

our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and

the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free,

self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by

living--and dying--with and for his fellows. This new type of human

community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was

a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement

of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers,

especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of

the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But

it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build

up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the

Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the

size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a

modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all

in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and

lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind.

When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal

genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established,

which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and

conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek

unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a

corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest

to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were

of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the

conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but

precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on

the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian

priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact

observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in

diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and

correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in

mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in

that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation

of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the

theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended

in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The

Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the

joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in

thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of

its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are

the measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly

combined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlike

the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what

came to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, without

scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked into

old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the

Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made the

Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It

rendered possible the holding together in one political system of the

multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth

for long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be

permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch of

his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in

their final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in more

than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side

of the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore

remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth

centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the

legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in

a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever

assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and

pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us

the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret

that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught

us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the

Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire,

and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it

through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the

framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and

civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman

missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the

Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest.

Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the

Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The

moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to

sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was

nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus

lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but

politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military

nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement

of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and

into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks,

Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when

they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the

area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as

nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the

geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and

England had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier

than any other countries of the West--England in a form which has lasted

substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been

torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of

the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under

Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But

Italy and Germany--and especially the latter--remained disintegrated

until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty

years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy,

naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic

enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the

right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched

in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national

life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political

existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt

shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as

France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings

and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states

offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with

European unity. We have to check and to assimilate--if the world is to

live as one--the one Power which has hitherto developed most

persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in

subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization

as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple

internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions

and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress

by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many

reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in

regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to

be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home.

Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human

effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must

be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against

theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan

items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of

European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It

lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which

supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured

for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and

pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full

force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal

structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have

absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual

fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and

derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the

moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect

and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and

the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy

and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge

and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a

more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed

in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love

of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences

of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to

Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit

at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of

the trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of their

course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and

Spain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths of

the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassable

through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern

traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the

Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and

when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the

sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined

abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one

organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom

and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and

disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted

that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity

of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were

extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose

his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth

century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the

turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope,

disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet

been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature

of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more

fully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthy

independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of

this could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the

Reformation.

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, the

growth of knowledge and its application to industry and social reform,

these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from the

mediaeval world, and we have to consider how far they make for the unity

of mankind.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments

and the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain,

Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger

and more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out

estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been

entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at

this period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recent

times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of

international strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring facts

or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the

account. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present

conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units were

least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and

social order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in the

Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government

we maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from

the Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like the

Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The

compact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, but

there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, who

have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his

_Perpetual Peace_, are guarantees of peace, stones in the Temple of

Humanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthens

this conclusion. In recent years all leading and progressive nations

have been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has been

conspicuously the case with ourselves, with the French, with the United

States, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe. Germany,

too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, has

had in this matter two distinct souls. Her social democrats and part of

her governing class have been consistent and successful in working for

the amelioration of the condition of the people, and have often

anticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first,

that a strong national government is needed to carry out wide social

reform, second, that in proportion as governments devote themselves

whole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted to

molesting their neighbours. Germany, unfortunately for herself and the

world, had no government which could speak for the whole people and be

responsible to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhere

else, would not have willed this war.

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of national

sentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led to frequent conflicts

between European nations ever since, also appears in a different light

if we study it in view of facts not dreamt of in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the early

navigators as rich estates to be cultivated for the benefit of

proprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independent

countries, eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), looking

forward to producing new types of life and government, hoping perhaps to

hold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. The

circle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the

discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in

new states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously

preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western

civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us,

too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the

British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is

essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the

centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any

third party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions

and institutions of their life, and not through any systematic

regulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected states

and dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in the

direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British

Empire or Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the

Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made of

the place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picture

does not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambition

throughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouring

with fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their

state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it

should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations

to one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross the

path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual

community among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man's power has

been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and

the world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in the

future. That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world,

especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain.

Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of

hatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from

the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in

the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are

partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all,

perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a

sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of these

instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many of

the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in

the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most

indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science,

and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse

between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and

strengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence,

therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching

of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind,

will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less

full and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds of

years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant

feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually

subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the

picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and

nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined

figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of

other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become

predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is

given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history.

Nationalism, once in defect in Western Europe, has been for some time

in excess. The remedy is not directly to attack it, except in the case

in which it gave us no choice, but to supply the limiting and

controlling ideas. Of all these, science fits the case most exactly,

because, as science, it can know no distinction between French or

German, English or Russian. There is no French physics or German

chemistry, and if we are told that the Prussians have their own theory

of anthropology, based on the predominance of a particular type of skull

which other anthropologists dispute, we are quite sure that in that case

science has not yet said her last word.

We put physical science first because it contains the largest number of

certain and accepted laws. The further we get from mathematical

exactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may,

as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of national

pique. But it would be easy to trace through all the sciences, and into

philosophy and religion, a growing unity of method and result before

which national differences often resolve themselves into a difference of

style. The style is the nation's, but the truth is mankind's.

We could not, indeed, be sure that if every one in Western Europe were a

trained scientist, wars would cease from the earth: certain professors

have taught us too well for that. But in so far as men come to recognize

that the great body of organized knowledge is a common possession, due

to the united efforts of different nations, and that it can only be

increased by joint action and may be increased to such a point that the

whole of life is a happier and nobler thing, so far they will be averse

to war. And in its various applications, to increasing production and

quickening communication, to lengthening life and healing sickness, to

protecting workers and cheapening food, men see the natural fruits of an

activity whose basis is common thought and its ultimate purpose the

common good.

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth of

science as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growth

of common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it.

True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups and

nations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learn

from a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do not

seek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has often

happened, and will happen again in private and public. But though

particular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is a

diminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common sense

and necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die;

and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those who

have sworn a never-dying hate.

II

UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES[1]

The new perspective, with all its shift of values, which is forced on us

by the war, touches the past no less than the present and the future.

However objectively we try to present to ourselves the data of history,

we cannot emancipate ourselves from the need to present them from a

point of view which must in the last resort be our own. We may bring

ourselves by training and criticism nearer to the centre of things, more

intimate with essential factors and remote from the trivial periphery;

but it is a matter of degree, and historical study an affair after all

of mental triangulation. Like a surveyor in the field, we are safest in

our determination of any third position if we have already knowledge of

two, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we were

indeed at the centre of things, I suppose we might take our round of

angles quite uselessly, unless we had also some divine gift of judging

distances.

So the historian accepts his limitations as the rules of the game,

and sets out to see unity askance. It is his rare chance, if events

shift _him_, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, half

his own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy to

find in a moment--as one might fail to recognize oneself in a

group-photograph--but none the less there, and intelligible only in

relation to its actual surroundings.

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric

archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all

of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency

and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A

few of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote from

Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in great

matters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and Francis

Balfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young;

but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all

countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing

against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very

worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and

emphatically' (_Der Mensch_, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the _i_

and cross the _t_ here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubled

von Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in the

polygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance to

treat their 'black brother' as if he were their relative at all.

Judgement in that ethnological controversy went by default, with the

victory of the North in the American Civil War; and in 1871 the lion lay

down with the lamb, even in London; inveterate foes in the Ethnological

Society and the Anthropological merging their fate in one

Anthropological Institute. In 1915 the reluctance of the 'tall fair

people who come from the north'--I borrow a phrase from Professor

Ridgeway--to fraternize with mere brunettes, beyond Rhine and Danube,

comes in its turn before the same tribunal as polygenism in 1862.

Our subject, 'Unity in Prehistoric Times', embraces three main topics:

(1) the unity of human effort and reason everywhere in Man's struggle

with Nature and with his Fellow-man; (2) the special conditions which

favoured or hindered unity of prehistoric culture in what has been

called elsewhere the 'north-west quadrant' of the Old-World land-mass

west of Ararat and the Median hills and north of Sahara, the cradle and

nursery of the modern 'western world'; and (3) the convergent lines of

advancement within that region, which can be traced through the

centuries before Roman policy let Greek culture penetrate almost as deep

into peninsular Europe as Alexander's conquests had opened to it the

inlands of the Near East.

When we speak of unity in human affairs, and particularly just now, when

the supreme unity seems to some to be nationalism, and to others the

negation, or rather the supersession of nationalism, we mean the rather

complex outcome of several distinct things. This complexity was

confessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believe

in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.'[2]

Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as

a peculiarly delicate test of conformity--and to regard language,

alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation of

the same human reason; distinguishing therefore two kinds of unity--one

physical or morphological, as of one animal species in an animal

kingdom, the other cultural or psychological, as of the sole incarnate

occupant of a realm of mind; and classifying the 'Science of Man'

accordingly. But, in essentials, that Athenian creed will serve: our

latest ethnologists, and statesmen too, are faced with the same league

of problems.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS AN ANIMAL SPECIES

Whatever Greek statesmen thought about the gulf between Greek and

Persian, or Greek and Barbarian generally, Greek ethnologists raised no

fundamental barrier between the different sorts of Man. Good naturalists

as they were, and experienced breeders of farm-stock, they accepted

white, brown, and black men; and were prepared to accept any other breed

that Nearchus or Pytheas might confront them with, as members of one

brotherhood, just as they accepted white, brown, or black sheep, with

horns of Ammon or with none. Eratosthenes, most philosophical, and

therewith most _political_ of them all, was bred in Cyrene, where some

Greeks seem to have been black; and he worked in Alexandria, where the

University was a human Zoo like that of London or Berlin. Their simple

farmer's theory of natural selection attributed 'scorched-faced'

Aethiopians to sunburn, and other racial types to large factors of

region and régime. The classical treatise is that of Hippocrates 'On

Air, Water, and Places'.[3]

In the modern world, too, no serious doubt was cast on the specific

unity of mankind, handed down from antiquity, until Linnaeus and Buffon

had refined upon the biological notions of genus and species (for both

of which there is only one word in Greek), and had defined species by

the criterion of fertility. Now not only the great explorers, but every

ship's captain, knew by this time that white men, at all events, would

form fertile unions with all known kinds of humanity. But in the

eighteenth century it became known also, and in the same empirical way,

that the fertility of unions between white men and black was imperfect;

and as this was the only human cross for which there was any large

quantity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distance

between these races was greater than had been supposed. On the other

hand, eighteenth-century formulators of the 'Rights of Man' challenged

reconsideration of the current practice of negro slavery; and the upshot

was a controversy. Abolitionists contended that the 'black brother' was

indeed a blood brother, and entitled to the 'Rights of Man'; their

opponents replied that the negro, being (as they held) of another

species, might justly be treated in all respects as one of white man's

domestic animals, and be his property as well as his drudge. At the turn

of the century, the adherence of Cuvier gave prestige to Polygenesis on

its scientific side: and it took all the reasonableness of Prichard in

the next generation to turn the tide even in England. But the issue of

the American Civil War, to which reference has already been made,

coincided so closely in time with the work of Darwin and Lyell on the

real meaning of species and on the antiquity of man, that the

controversy was closed without bitterness. The new phase of Polygenism

which seems now to be opening, with successive discoveries of the

quaternary stratification of races, and Keith's analysis of the family

tree of the _Hominidae_, starts from wholly different data,

unembarrassed by fears or hopes of a 'Neanderthal' origin for the Negro,

or for any living or recent _Homo_.

The 'human family' then seems re-established as something more than a

platform phrase; and separatists (who are always with us) have had to

fall back upon another criterion of disunity.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS A RATIONAL ANIMAL

Omitting language for a moment (which since first telling of the 'Tower

of Babel' story has somewhat fallen from grace as a symptom of unity

among mankind), or rather, subsuming it as one of the most essential

exhibitions of rationality, and indeed its chief instrument, we come to

Man's unity as a creature possessed of reason, and expressing this

reasoning habit in specific modes of living, under whatever external

surroundings. These being almost infinitely various, it is not always

easy to compare examples of Man's reaction to them. For proof of the

uniformity of human reasoning, indeed, we have to begin almost from an

animal plane. 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food,

subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and

cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?' And not only

is men's hunger, and their sensitiveness to 'the same summer and winter'

similar: their ways of satisfying hunger, their conduct of the

food-quest, their elementary organizations 'for the sake of maintaining

life', as Aristotle expressed it, exhibit one mental type throughout. In

the domestication of nature's gifts it is the same: in the fashioning of

implements and weapons, the improvisation of clothing and shelter, the

almost instinctive impulse to 'play with fire' which repels other

animals. Style and finish may vary, and do vary widely from one province

of culture to another; but in their last mechanical analysis, a spade is

a spade all the world over, and a celt a celt.

It was the service of the late General Pitt-Rivers in this country, and

of Klemm more laboriously abroad, to establish this aspect of the

'Evolution of Culture' beyond controversy: as it was the work of Boucher

de Perthes, and of Sir John Evans and Sir John Lubbock to proceed in the

reverse direction, from a criterion of utility to a hypothesis of

design, and the conclusion that certain stones, of reputedly prehuman

antiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains like

ours. Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented by

other work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula of

comparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides.[4] We can infer, that

is, something about early stages of an advanced culture from the

present-day practices of savagery.

Yet, across this 'primitive culture', to use a phrase which has become

classical, so reasonable, and therewith so full of uniformities, in its

intimate interplay of hand and tongue with brain, patches of shadow

fall; a chaos of such incredible absurdities and (in the widest sense)

of 'barbarities', that the charitable hypothesis that here and there man

has lost his way and just _stopped thinking_ hardly seems adequate to

account for things, and writers like Lévy-Bruhl are provoked to the

pessimist guess that there can be a savage logic which is different from

ours and yet is 'logical' in some coherent sense; which _stets verneint_

the conclusions, and even the axioms, which are clear as day to us; and

is a 'knowledge of evil' side by side with the knowledge of good.

But examples of this 'primitive thought', when we come to analyse them,

all seem to resolve themselves into one or other of the ordinary sorts

of fallacy, as our own logic-books expound them. If the study of them

proves anything at all, it is the familiar aphorism that, while there is

only one right way of doing and thinking, there are countless ways of

going wrong. Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) that

the world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages of

reason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was no

word either for the devil or for sin in their language. For the Greek

all human wrongdoing came under the one simple category of [Greek:

hamartia], 'making a mistake', or better 'making a miss'. It is the

slang of target-practice, for the correlative [Greek: otochazein], used

of all happy guesses at truth, is likewise only the word for '_aiming_

straight'.

But why make mistakes? Why these failures of co-ordination between

design and execution, between nature's truth and man's theory and

practice? Why this declining from the best into sloppy or antiquated

work, to name only two main sorts of technological fallacy? Again the

answer comes down, past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist. It is only

in superficial appearance that 'though reason is common to all, most men

live as if they had a way of thinking of their own',[5] Heraclitus'

momentary despair anticipating Lévy-Bruhl almost verbally. Once

penetrate, with Heraclitus himself, below the surface, and 'all men have

it in them to understand themselves and to think straight'.[6] It is

failure to think, not some distinct and illogical sort of thinking, that

is the cause of the trouble: the lapse of that 'organized common sense'

which is the content of all 'science'.

Such disorganization of common sense, 'idiotic' thinking, in the

Heraclitan sense of an [Greek: idia phronêsis], can be as cumulative,

fallacy on fallacy, and as elaborately wrong, as the fabric of knowledge

is cumulatively and elaborately right. 'Hath this man sinned, or his

parents, that he was born blind?' That is the tragedy of primitive

culture: for the brains are there and the eyes; only they have never

seen anything straight, because in the world they were bred up in there

was nothing left straight to be seen.

Lucretius hit upon half the trouble when he referred the organized

absurdities of his contemporaries to hereditary fear: which in the last

analysis is a derangement of the higher activities extending to

abdication. Its onset is an ataxy; and its culmination a paralysis. In

its mental aspect it is failure of the Will-to-know; acceptance of an

inferiority to which ignorance consigns us.

The other half of the trouble, less clearly diagnosed by Lucretius, but

detected, as we have seen, by Heraclitus, is hereditary pride, based on

ignorance no less than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul',

the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well as

after, that we know how things stand, when in fact we do not. Like fear,

in its mental aspect, it is a failure of the Will-to-know; once again,

an acceptance of the inferior status of the ignorant.

Organized fears, then, lead to _tabu_, the systematic inhibition of

experiment which might conflict with hypothesis; and organized pride, to

_magic_, with its systematic disregard of the results of each experiment

that is made, when it does so conflict with hypothesis. And it is these

two superstructures of ignorance, inhibiting and insisting by turns,

which add the glamour of irrationality to so much of the behaviour of

mankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Beset

by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer

alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it

thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not',

the fallacious substitution of 'shalt not' for 'mayst' cannot fail to

endanger advancement. It may be over the chipping of a flint axe, or a

trade-union rule about a high-speed lathe; but if the craftsman conforms

to opinion as such, and not through positive concurrence of his own

judgement with it, he has accepted the fallacious conclusion as his own,

and lets his work fall to second-hand and to second-best.

Wide uniformities of conduct and of material culture may therefore

result from ignorance, no less than from knowledge, and unless we have

very full acquaintance with the region and external conditions, it is

not easy to decide whether any one of these uniformities is wisely

uniform or not. The record of the dealings of quite well-meaning

conquerors with the institutions and arts of their subjects is full of

tragedies of this kind. I call to mind an example in Paraguay, where

abstention from infanticide, after conversion to Christianity, nearly

wrought the extinction of a native tribe, for the population at once

began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the

committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to

the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was

averted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to

indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go on

living, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So with

devotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration of

wide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundings which make up

the Home of Man. Were Nature uniform, in a geographical sense, from pole

to pole, civilization might be practically as well as ideally one,

though it may fairly be doubted whether in such a world civilization,

such as we know, would arise; but with the present distribution of land

and water, temperature and rainfall, and the complex of plants and

animals which results from their interaction, unity among the phenomena

of culture ceases to be practicable, and it has become hard for some (as

we have seen) even to keep their faith in the unity of human reason.

It was not, in fact, till a rather later stage in the growth of science,

either in the old world, or in our own, that anyone troubled himself

about the existence of such unity at all. That men of alien blood should

behave in alien and incomprehensible ways seemed to the Greek and to the

navigators of the Renaissance equally natural. And Herodotus and Bodin,

to name only pioneers and masters, are agreed as to the cause. Variety

in Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is the

response of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experience

added intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits of

life, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequent

and obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery is

implicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotle and Locke.

Had Europe broken into the Great East in Locke's day, as the Greeks

broke into Persia in Aristotle's, we might have had completer analogy

between the ethnology of Montesquieu and that of Eratosthenes than we

can actually trace. The defect in the writer of the _Lettres Persanes_

is in his knowledge of Persia, not of Paris and London: Eratosthenes, as

we remember, was born in Cyrene and worked in Alexandria.

MAN IN CONFLICT WITH NATURE IN THE NORTH-WEST QUADRANT OF THE OLD WORLD

We come now, from this rather general survey of human faculty, to the

more pertinent question, what sort of unity do we find in human

achievement within that region, or rather within those regions, of the

Old World where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to take

their rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half the

answer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region but

with a cluster of regions in all climates from Arctic tundra to Sahara

and the Nile, and in all altitudes from alpine to maritime. Unity of

prehistoric culture, in such conditions, can at best be but a question

of degree.

Modern ethnology, emancipated from a belief in an immediate

consanguinity of mankind, by the spread of less infantile views about

Noah's Ark, goes on to question the sufficiency of language as a bond

of union, and forthwith stumbles over the Tower of Babel.

Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result.

Geology gives us a very long margin of time since the north-west

quadrant began to be reinhabited by human beings after the Ice Age, and

assumed approximately its present distribution of land and water.

Archaeology, which in this aspect is the special stratigraphy of man,

sanctions an extension of time, since not merely human beings but

organized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which far

exceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of any

known Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any region

where it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only does

archaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedentary for

a while on this or that site over the face of Europe and its

neighbourhood; it traces not merely one 'prehistoric culture', but a

number of distinct types of such culture, each with its own geographical

distribution, and with distributions which expand and contract at

different times, superseding one type of culture here, and another

there, and in turn superseded by others.

It is not easy to bring home the extent of this diversity to those who

are not familiar with the physical condition of a Europe which was as

yet largely in the 'backwood' stage of exploitation. But it will give

some idea of the range of contrast, if we revert to the method of

Thucydides,[7] and compare the unexploited Europe of the days before

agriculture, with unexploited America at the time of its discovery by

Europeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the north

temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which

characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those

of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron

and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in the

south-east, buffalo-hunting Sioux on the prairie, predatory Apaches and

Blackfeet in the foothills, and littoral and riparian fisher-folk on the

Pacific slope: just as recognizable now, in their distributions and

overlaps, by the fashions of their pipe-bowls and other débris, as are

the representatives of the 'row-grave' culture or the makers of

'band-keramik' in Central Europe.

Keeping in mind this analogy of prehistoric Europe with pre-Columbian

North America, let us classify the problems of subsistence which these

Old World regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him

all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as

well, how he is to formulate solutions which shall show any trace of

uniformity, and yet be solutions for him of the one Protean problem, how

to sustain life here and now?

Along the Arctic seaboard, homogeneous from Behring Strait nearly to the

North Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristic

tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a

habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the

shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts,

and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large

northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long,

or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals

imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through

the forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealing

a march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treat

them so: _they_ had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach them

otherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over from

Asia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they had

eaten them all.

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet,

interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and

eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many

of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the

place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest

world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft

with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for

sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up

the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People

are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the

prairie buffalo and drive _him_ over the hunting grounds; some sport,

too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come

hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and

underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that

the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those

people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots.

Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have

to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like

their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their

first string, as we bow-men say.

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks

perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character,

rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the Lake

Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded

among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux

in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller

scale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian.

Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature

grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland,

where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as

they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely

subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the

Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its

scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, as

the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough

and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than

earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which

the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work

their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a

cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how

truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a

poor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelike

Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where

food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely the

foodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, who

make up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among the

Redskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'.[8] In the Old World,

as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits of

rainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which the

rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm

summer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has

access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times,

and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of the

Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and

penetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds and

rainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Roman

legends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, and

superseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, and

acorn.[9] And when the 'nobler grasses' came, it was barley and red

wheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still.

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Far

north along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mild

Atlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancient

limit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) of

the austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern region

grain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from

both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have

been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic

and Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitive

hoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early monuments

of this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, are

the 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia.[10] The fine flower of

it is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean.

Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the

great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different régime; vast

featureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea and

Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of

the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all,

he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn

sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain

Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the

Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor'

of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another

group of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of

sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their

margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now

and then.

From the human point of view, the profound difference between the

northern and the southern group of these grasslands, which collectively

lie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, is

this. The southern grassland sustains sheep and goats almost

exclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliest

about 2000 B.C.) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport,

on camels and asses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the other

hand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horses

habitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, where

it passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and

ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization,

wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north

again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and

perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary

centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons

for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial

pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed

chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users of

Asia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls

in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the

Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted

already, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they are

all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory

Scythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folk

within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies,[11] and they seem mainly to

have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all,

the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present

is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to

break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all

more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man

can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except

in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more,

and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But

it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it

was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of

the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone,

or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The

presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even

Egypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems to

dispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewhere

in this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I may

perhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staple

foods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valued

for their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for their

flesh.

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to suffer

regional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreen

flora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer grass makes the

large cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bred

exclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and while

cheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, butter and animal-fats are

replaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, a

characteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted against

summer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A Bread-and-Olive culture results,

familiar to all visitors to Mediterranean lands. In the deciduous

forests of South-Central Europe there is grass in the clearings, and

milk enough; but goats and sheep are restricted, as the undergrowth

becomes deeper and denser, and the prime giver of fats is the

forest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach the

Bread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportion

as the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summer

permits open meadow-land, with perennial grass, and the possibility of

hay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is something

over to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of the

north-western plains adds Beef. When there is coarse grain in plenty, of

course, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox at

the plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not for

draught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in this

final phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture passes over eventually into

the New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather a

long story to tell, and full of platitudes, but the gist of it is by

this time clear. Whatever be the superstructure of social institutions,

of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men have

built upon it, the régime which has made the Western World what it is,

from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically a

Bread culture; based on that combination of pastoral and agricultural

life in which large cattle co-operate with man in the laborious

preparation of the soil which cereal crops require. But the Bread

culture itself is always supplemented by some form of milk product, of

which cheese is typical. It is almost always supplemented further by

some special provision of fats; in Mediterranean conditions by olives

and oil, involving extensive tree culture; in the forest region by pig's

meat; and on the Atlantic seaboard by butter and beef.

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culture

go the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, the

ciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copious

cereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. In

details, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused;

but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of a

coherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regional

foodquests.

RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle of

man with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. The

first is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is without

qualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintain

itself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equally

every breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to those

conditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations of

language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical

or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back

in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it

preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of

languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It

certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles,

before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more

before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed,

it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has

changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of

culture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than to

associate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as the

food-quest with the migrations of any racial type.

Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anything

but a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as

'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man in

our audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinct

breeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in the

whiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structure

and physique, including resistance to certain types of climate and

regional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of their

response to Nature's challenges of hardship or indulgence. Of these

three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white

men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes)

is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the

'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological

propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution;

either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to

see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the

cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian

grassland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsular

Europe as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to represent

indigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played in

European history seems to result partly from his great physical

strength, surpassed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly from

his reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains,

but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partnership with himself.

Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man'

knows another, and coheres with him politically.

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the

slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that

he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian

grasslands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of

the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent

to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the

heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east

he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at

last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between

Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in

fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity

between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.

But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at

the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula,

and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially

continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the

Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than

in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the

Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so

much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as

whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their

predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is

difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or

political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of

prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their

English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that

ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and

left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has

been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough

Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there

has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will

be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform

basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of

Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity

with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying

influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and

a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe'

amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in

French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language;

while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a

chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the

fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which

resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of

the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought

in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its

linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate,

Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have

reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the

re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is

concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was

set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the

region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe

has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right

lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they

co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the

North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves

of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to

the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we

get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If

northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have

reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full

extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in

building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War.

In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical

transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great

Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of

Europe to unite it.

And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults

which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove

far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (_Germania_, chap. 9) are

common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are

either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within

walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion,

which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this

labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and

aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like

first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not

Caesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of a

Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and

though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts,

stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most

imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to

the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of

the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic,

not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry

things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten

us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are

terribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our

_Bandkeramik_ and _Schnurkeramik_ and _Urfirnissmalerei_ and all that

sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the

_centum_ and _satem_ languages. But even if we could collate the

'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvölker' as recent enthusiasts propose, we

should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a

common language.

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, though

they were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. In

modern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniform

than milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. But

there is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything

more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as

the introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware;

and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole,

but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in a

sequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed.

Bronze, for example, took some thousands of years to permeate the

continent of Europe; iron perhaps as many hundreds; platinum a little

more than fifty years; and radium less than five.

What we do get from this material evidence, however, is a quite

indisputable sequence of styles in time in each locality where we can

hit upon stratified remains. Dead men, they say, tell no tales;

potsherds are as truthful and eloquent as they are, for the very reason

that, once broken, they are dead and done with, and are allowed to lie

quiet in their rubbish heaps. Intervals indeed we cannot so easily

measure; but of sequences we can be sure, and by comparing the sequences

on different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread and

supersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally,

with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes by

which innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this as

to the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is no

measure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of art can travel, ideas

can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and

language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the

customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A

few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in

culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or

cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of

decadence.

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at this

point to the significance of engines of war, among this class of

transferable inventions. Little has been done in a systematic way on

this topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change in

equipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizes

not only armies but states, when it is a question of survival or defeat,

has its illustration in many phases of warfare, and ranks among the

great levellers of national or regional pride.

The recorded movements of peoples in historic times, and the previous

movements inferred from language, and other symptoms, indicate a

long-established distribution of what might be described in

meteorological phrase as _man-pressure_; certain regions being

characterized either always or repeatedly by high man-pressure, and an

outward flow of men into the cyclonic areas or vortexes of low

man-pressure in the human covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typical

high-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crises

of Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regions

of low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South European

peninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternately

accepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examples

are the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again can

hardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simple

avenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the Hellespont

Region. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes of

these recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movements

themselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, are

matters of history.

Conspicuous among such movements are the westward drift from Asia into

peninsular Europe, in its three parallel columns, through tundra,

forest, and steppe; and the southward drifts, subsidiary to this, from

East Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of the

Adriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in detail, as we have

seen, by the physique of the regions; and therewith is determined the

kind of life which each set of folk must be living if it is to survive

the journey.

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a more

general uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physical

character would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual men

often respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change their

mode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react far

more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate

members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a

change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must

either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on

their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here

and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman

or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of

Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond

Jordan, and to canonize a new code of behaviour suited to a new set of

needs. This social inertia, of which political history is the sorry

record, is of course least perceptible, and most effective, when the

region of transition is graduated gently; and we have already seen that

this is conspicuously so around the parkland margin of the northern

grassland, where it faces on peninsular Europe. Let us follow this clue

in detail.

We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, every

group of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with the

particular type of social organization which enabled it to make good,

either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or

(if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minor

and beyond. The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Sea

cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from

the Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of

the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as

the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the

pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribes

either had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of the

corresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since they

entered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robbery

like the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin;

the Chatti of Tacitus' day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike that

of the Five Nations.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral

condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of

European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social

organization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes. We

may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest

régime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside

peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is

characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and

persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its

liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later

into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent

drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes.

Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same

function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from

Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs

intermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of its

history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of

intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great

goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in

the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes

joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in

the _Femmes savantes_ of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France,

which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the _fin-de-siècle_ Europe

of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.

No one would suggest that this patriarchal and tribal structure favoured

political unity or large enterprises of any kind. In fact, throughout

the early history of Europe these coherent kinship groups, with their

inner insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive

resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an

insuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these could

hold together, they would rule the world' is the judgement of Herodotus

on Scythia, of Thucydides on Thrace, of Polybius and Caesar upon Gaul,

of Tacitus on Germany: each with the unspoken afterthought 'but thank

goodness that they cannot!'

But while it hindered larger growths of political structure, so long as

it remained intact, and furnished a strong social skeleton upon which to

frame manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements,

patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed

to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to

penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the

Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal

society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of

individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the

federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the

village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct

offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the

city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary,

at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural

outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who

first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest

advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to

one another', so that the members of hitherto autonomous clans became

friends instead of enemies, and were thenceforth citizens all, in one

and the same city-state, that terminated that period of migrations and

political chaos which separates the Minoan from the Hellenic Age in

Greek lands. Rome's mission among the tribal societies of Italy is

essentially the same; and it is the lack of any such missionary of

political enlightenment beyond the frontier of the Roman State in its

imperial fullness, that makes early mediaeval problems, which were

essentially the same, so slow to be solved.

We are now hard upon the borderland of history, and we take leave of a

peninsular Europe--for the grassland stands still outside, as a distinct

geographic entity--in which the diverse races, and languages, and

religious schemes, and material cultures, are almost wholly propagated

under the forms of societies of one homogeneous type, autonomous,

indeed, like the states in the loosest of federations, and involved

annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but

sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were

based on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of

'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribal

customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted aliens

they were wont to 'make war like gentlemen'. To Homer's audience it was

sure proof that Odysseus was really 'at the back of nowhere', when the

Cyclops was unable to behave when a stranger came to his cave: he was 'a

monster, of knowledge not according to the rules'.[12] It was a

criticism of despair, like that of M. Lévy-Bruhl: for the Cyclops had

the 'will to power'.[13]

Here, then, was a social structure and a political world, an _oikoumené_

where _men_ could _live_, tolerant of fairly wide variations in detail,

within a general uniformity: for tribal society in Middle Italy or even

in Western Greece, as we first catch sight of it, was by no means

homogeneous with tribal society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesar

and Tacitus. But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was a

coherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problems

of adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struck

by that Bread-culture with which we were concerned just now. For the

patriarchal tribal societies, as we watch them still in Albania for

example, are neither more nor less than the political aspect of that

culture, and their varieties and deviations stand in close correlation

with the varieties which we have seen the Bread-culture assume.

In the same way, the break-down of this social structure proceeds, step

by step, in relation with the two great changes to which normal

Bread-culture is exposed. On the one hand, primitive self-sufficiency

(the retrospective ideal of Greek political thought) was infringed

irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient

Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes and they

grow wheat to sell'; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secure

against shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain. Once in

oversea contact with lands like these, it became more economical to buy

grain thence, and to pay for it by increasing the production of oil and

wine, than to grow everything at home; and a new and 'limitless' source

of wealth emerged in the process of exchange.

On the other hand, oil and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops

and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start

doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth,

and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly)

introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less

'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any

kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, like

its commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skill

and push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan. When the poet

cursed the discovery of metals, he put his finger on the 'key-industry'

of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention of

shipping, he struck at the root-trouble of all, which had revealed to

autonomous Bread-cultured tribes in peninsular Europe lands otherwise

constituted and endowed by Nature, the exploitation of which seemed in

the beginning so easy and obvious, but is, in fact, so profound a

revolution for the societies whose members have attempted it. The tree

of the knowledge of good and evil was for him the shipbuilding pine.[14]

But the dissolution of early European society and culture under the

stress of contact with regions outside Europe is no matter of

prehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presented

that society and culture as Man's reasoned attempt to 'live well' in an

exclusively European world.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Marett, _Anthropology_. Home University Library.

J.L. Myres, _The Dawn of History_. Home University Library.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This chapter has not had the advantage of Prof. Myres's

revision, in view of the rest of the book which he has not seen. Being

for some time abroad on war-work, it was impossible to communicate with

him; and it is therefore thought best to print his paper just as it was

written some months before the lectures were delivered.]

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, viii. 144. After the battle of Salamis, when the

Athenians are invited by Xerxes' envoy to desert the Greek cause, they

say they cannot betray what 'is of one blood and of one speech, and has

establishments of gods in common, and sacrifices, and habits of life of

similar mode'.]

[Footnote 3: For details see the section on Herodotus in _Anthropology

and the Classics_; and E.E. Sikes, _The Anthropology of the Greeks_.]

[Footnote 4: Thucydides i. 6 (Greek: polla d' an kai alla tis

apodeixeie, to palaion Hellênikon omoiotropa tô nun barbarikô

diaitômenon).]

[Footnote 5: (Greek: tou gar logon eontos xynon, zôousin oi polloi ôs

idian echoutes phronêsin).]

[Footnote 6: (Greek: anthrôpoisi pasi metesti ginôskein eautous kai

sôphroneein).]

[Footnote 7: Thucydides, i. 5. He too, as it happens, is illustrating a

primitive Old World, round the Aegean shores of Greece, by the

contemporary West in the backwoods of Aetolia.]

[Footnote 8: Farrand, _The Basis of American History_, 1904, p. 270.]

[Footnote 9: The [Greek: balanêphagoi andres], 'acorn-eating men', of

Greek traditional ethnology.]

[Footnote 10: Bicknell, _The Prehistoric Rock Engravings in the Italian

Maritime Alps_, Bordighera, 1902; _Further Explorations_, 1903. I begin

to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which accompany the

drawings of oxen, ploughs, and men with hoes may represent the

cultivation plots.]

[Footnote 11: I owe valuable information about the Gipsies to my friend

Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but he is in no way

responsible for this interpretation of it.]

[Footnote 12: _Odyssey_ ix. 428 (Greek: pelôr, athemistia eidôs).]

[Footnote 13: _Odyssey_ ix. 214-15:

(Greek: andr' epeleusesthai megalên epieimenon alkên,

agrion, oute dikas en eidota oute themistas.)]

[Footnote 14: Horace, _Epode_ xvi. In his 'better land'--

Non huc Argoo contendit remige pinus,

Neque impudica Colchis intulit pedem....

Iuppiter illa piæ _secrevit_ litora genti,

Ut inquinavit ære tempus aureum;

Ære, dehinc ferro duravit sæcula; quorum

Piis secunda, vate me, datur fuga.]

III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

It might appear the height of paradox to preface a discourse on the

Ancient World by asserting the conviction that the only genuine and

important history is contemporary history. Yet reflection on this

doctrine will show that it is not only consistent with a serious and

steady interest in what is called Antiquity (and indeed in the past in

general), but its only rational basis and justification. Were the past

really past it were dead--dead and done with, and it were wisdom for us

who are alive to let the dead bury their dead. Much of what has been

done and suffered under the sun is indeed gone beyond recall, and is

well buried in forgetfulness. In such forgetfulness lies the fact and

evidence of progress. 'Vex not its ghost'; no necromancy will or should

evoke the departed spirits or avail to make them utter significant

speech to living men. The chain of links which once bound stage to stage

of human history is somewhere for ever broken; and as we retrace, in the

memory of the race or in that of individual, the Ariadne-clue which we

here call 'the unity of History' it vanishes somewhere beyond our vision

into the dark backward and abysm of time. True, of late Archaeology and

Anthropology have cast their search-lights into the darkness, piercing a

little deeper than of old into the mists that surround the origins of

our civilization; but before that dimly illuminated region of

pre-history there still lies, and will always lie, an impenetrable pall.

As again in thought we move forward down the stream of time, the light

available to us for a while increases, increases till we reach the

present where it threatens to blind us with its dazzling excess, and

then suddenly fades and is quenched in the twilight and final darkness

by which the future is hidden from us. Of the whole stream of history

our best or utmost intelligence illuminates but a short reach, and that

imperfectly.

'Our ignorance is infinitely greater than our knowledge,' and the wise

historian is sobered but not discouraged by this reminder of the limits

of his possible understanding. Neither the remote past nor the distant

future can be the objects of knowledge nor, properly speaking, the

subjects of judgement. If our insatiate curiosity has bounds thus

eternally set to its satisfaction, we remember also that it is not

either in the past or the future that we live, that we act and are acted

upon, determine or have determined for us what we do or are to do, what

we suffer or are to suffer. The present alone is real, and of the real

alone is genuine knowledge possible. But if this is so, it is also so

that of this alone does it import us to ascertain the true nature. What

we have to discover (or perish in our blindness) is what we now are and

where we now stand. All other so-called knowledge or understanding, save

as it ministers to the framing of a true judgement concerning our

present selves and our present situation and world, is but vanity or

lumber, at best a rhetorical device for bringing before ourselves or

others what we so judge concerning the one and the other. Genuine

understanding, however it disguise itself as chronicle or prophecy, is

always of the present or nothing.

But this present is not the momentary meeting-place of two eternities or

the brief span of time which psychologists have named 'the specious

present'. Its content is whatsoever is not the dead past or the unborn

future; it is whatever is still or already alive, whatever is yet or

already operative and formative in our inward selves or our outward

environment--in a word what is contemporary, contemporary with our

present doings and sufferings. To such a present it is idle to attempt

to fix limits of date before or behind. A new conception of the unity of

History rises before us as we realize that the Past and the Future are

not _severed_ by the Present, but that these meet and are made one in

its living and concrete actuality. This is the fact, the centre to which

all radii converge and from which they diverge again; and in the Present

the Past and the Future live and are, together and all at once.

Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit

and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we

expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim

at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we

realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what

is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our

environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary

with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not

merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the

present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their

dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the

forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still

live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while

still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious

gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming

oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves

and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor

will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the

labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes

before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of

'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it,

spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical

connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which is

also its present--import is an account of what we now are and the

situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its

message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a

quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of

sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense

useless to us unless in the end we can say '_De nobis fabula

narratur_'--it is _our_ history to which we have been listening.

This is especially true of the history of the Ancient World--the world

of classical antiquity. It is not a dead world; its deeds and thoughts

are not past but still live, still 'breathe and burn' in us. They are

largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are

made. Not merely, I repeat, in the sense that then were the foundations

of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours

of our ancestors. We _are_ the Greeks and the Romans, made what we now

are by their deeds and thoughts and experiences, our world their world,

at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted but always one and

single. Our births and deaths are but a sleep and a forgetting in the

unbroken biography of a spirit, not above but in us all, which is the

hero of the history of European civilization, itself a part of the

history of Humanity. Thus the history of Antiquity, and especially of

Classical Antiquity, is the record of the thoughts and deeds of our own

youth.

Our deeds (and also our thoughts) still travel with us from afar,

And what we have been makes us what we are.

This is the spirit and the conviction in which I would invite you to

approach the study of Classical Antiquity--not merely in that of

gratitude and reverence, not certainly in that of idle and futile

curiosity, but as seekers for knowledge of yourselves and your world.

For what other knowledge matters?

This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be

lifelong. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are

others who would and do bid you begin earlier. I can only ask you to

begin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later or

elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present

selves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stop

too soon and so to overleap the intervening period--the 'Middle

Ages'--between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, you

have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and

instructive journey across the--to me--unknown or imperfectly explored

land. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers

here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern

mind and its world--our mind and our world--lies later and elsewhere

than in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind

and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the

one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other--not from the

same point of view--in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the

deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the

East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization--and I

specially remember that we are Englishmen--is not only in origin but in

essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in

its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and

a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same

vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened

by reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in this

country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the

languages and literature of Classical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen,

co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France and

Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization--and

not European civilization only--is, I reiterate, in essence still

Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance is

not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally

legitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritual

kinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those

of blood provably exist at all.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak--the dreams, the plans,

the hopes and aspirations--are assuredly ours also, the stuff and

substance of our being, our inner _genius_, our guiding and controlling

selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we

believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed.

If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are

small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by

professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which

is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with

other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving,

deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe

and the world.

In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these

influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of

consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can

sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political

superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form

the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions,

are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual

sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them,

for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of

the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so

widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from

the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories.

So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and

to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more

organized fullness and more efficacious potency, the primordial unity

which interests and passions have with rude violence, at least in

appearance, disrupted and dissolved and so for a time arrested or

enfeebled.