long-established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this
case the nation is usually spoken of as a “young,” and is correctly
spoken of as a “new,” nation; but the term should always be used with a
clear sense of the difference between what is described in such case,
and what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized
nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new
cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phœnician race
was in every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old
city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared
with England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and
culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean
for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that
the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use
the phrase “a new people,” in speaking of Canadians or Australians,
Americans or Africanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense
from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those
founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of
astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves
conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use
it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod,
and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests
struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities
and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred
were “new,” compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also
in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing
in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the
Cæsars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were
totally different. This is not true of those “new” nations which spring
direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States,
are all “new” nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with
whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the
general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The
differences between these “new” American and these “old” European
nations are not as great as those which separate the “new” nations
one from another, and the “old” nations one from another. There are in
each case very real differences between the new and the old nation;
differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the
same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type of civilization,
with its attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer
stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial
differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that
confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples
struggling from barbarism into civilization.
So, when we speak of the “death” of a tribe, a nation, or a
civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally
different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological
history being complete. Certain tribes of savages--the Tasmanians, for
instance, and various little clans of American Indians--have within
the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals
have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared.
Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are
now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the
veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those
white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed
into something absolutely different from what they were. In the
United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees,
Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes are in process of absorption
into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a
couple of years ago, one of the two senators, and three of the five
representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a
few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as
those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by
absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.
A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that
a civilization has “died out.” The nationality and culture of
the wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have
completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences dating
therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden form
as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the Roman Empire
was of no such character. There was complete change, far-reaching
transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation; but it would
not be correct to speak either of the blood or the culture of Old
Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the
permanence or evanescence of the various strains of blood that go to
make up every civilized nationality; but it is reasonably certain
that the blood of the old Roman still flows through the veins of the
modern Italian; and though there has been much intermixture, from
many different foreign sources--from foreign conquerors and from
foreign slaves--yet it is probable that the Italian type of to-day
finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient Latin. As for the
culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more true. It has
suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural growth, partly
by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion,
and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process
was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both
from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and
Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture
which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by
them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes,
as the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover,
the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe.
It has extended to and over half of that New World which was not even
dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life between the
birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New World was discovered by
one Italian, and its mainland first reached and named by another;
and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan’s empire,
the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the
Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes, and in
the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande
to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing
apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in
their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization.
When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient
Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to
describe totally different phenomena.
The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly
than their predecessors of a couple of generations back, how artificial
most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually
employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and
rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which
spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as
if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something
ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and
faith in their own and their fellow countrymen’s purity of descent
from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a
few generations earlier by the various noble families who traced
their lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course,
all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the
slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In
America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues,
English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the lines
of cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines of
cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure blood
of each race found speaking each language. Aryan and Teutonic are
terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but whether they have
any such ethnical meanings as were formerly attributed to them is so
doubtful, that we can not even be sure whether the ancestors of most
of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The
term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; but
when used to describe a race it means almost nothing until we find out
which one of several totally different terminologies the writer or
speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to designate
the short-headed, medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe,
from east to west, it denotes something entirely different from what
is meant when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents
of the Romans and the later Greeks; while, if used to designate any
modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the
term Anglo-Saxon itself.
Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization
and have played a dominant part in the world have been--and
are--artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of
including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs
to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially
national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great
artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the
parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward
or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very
powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is
far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed
we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from
one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they
become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed
sink into littleness.
An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided
according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as
stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance
whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities,
of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map would show a
general correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern
Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his
German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean
seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than
to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of
the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that
tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen
feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders,
their differences dwindling into insignificance compared with the
extraordinary, artificially produced resemblances which bring them
together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true
when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the
Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German
of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and
Yorkshireman in England.
In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive
relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or
semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing
analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal
world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the
phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial
groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of
instances in the history of life on this planet.
Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond of
speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show periods of
extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some
cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we can not as yet
even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any such case the
centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation will of course
fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become a dominant
force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which finds
its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote
to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere
particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement of
a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and
certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples
of failure of this kind; and the United States would have ranked with
them, and her name would have become a byword of derision, if the
forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of
soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national
danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a
seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the average woman
ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy children, if the
average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to
fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die
out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if
the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material
prosperity can offset.
But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially
inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great
slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a countryside of
peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like
acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the
citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the
state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does not
explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so far as
different matters were concerned; at one time as regards literature,
at another time as regards architecture, at another time as regards
city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome’s dissolution
at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the impoverishment
and depopulation of the empire, its fall would be quite sufficiently
explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had lost the
fighting edge--an essential even under a despotism, and therefore far
more essential in free, self-governing communities, such as those of
the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is rather that out
of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during the last days of
the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an empire able to
hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four centuries. But
why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary productiveness
have ceased about the beginning of the second century, whereas the
following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the shape
of city-building in the provinces, not only in western Europe, but in
Africa? We can not even guess why the springs of one kind of energy
dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another kind.
Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period
covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some
of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous
heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in
territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later
she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she
had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it could
not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it
needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great
Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government
was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to
permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to
rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But
the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies,
where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their
own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes,
or else by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were
very wealthy. They grew to believe that they could hire others to do
their fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own
fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make
ready fleets so efficient as either to insure them against the peace
being broken or else to give them the victory when war came. To be
opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost
certain cost of disaster in the future.
It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position
among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the
same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in
the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burnt itself
out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of great
warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great
Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed
the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.
In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it
was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy
teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the
Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no
decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so
many countries: no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no
general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first
a flowering time, in which the country’s men of action and men of
thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day;
then this period of command passed, and the state revolved in an eddy,
aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the
people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially
unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves
and play again a leading part.
In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really
Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries
when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and
frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout
Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism. It had
ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring forth
men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people cowered
in helpless misery among the horsehoofs of the barbarians, as the wild
northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities for
a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but in the end
it was seen that what came had been in part change and growth. It was
not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of
language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people
of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. In a
few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then for four or
five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which,
in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life,
in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their
utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or
to repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be compared with classic
Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or
Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came
for the third time a wonderful new birth.
Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance
in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one
time seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain
or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of
a national type can be found than in the case of the Greco-Roman
dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over
nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the
time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins
of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must
once have been. The overshadowing and far-reaching importance of what
occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New
Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North
Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the Po.
The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage
of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then
they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion,
and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they
vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside
them a new type, the Arab.