between this old South American island and North America, near what is
now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which the
teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this queer
southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or
formidable creatures which had attained their development in the
fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses,
tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer,
crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers
and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not
only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by
the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed
over the continent, but it was also changed through the development
wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they
were exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out.
Others developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and
thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South
America soon became populated with various new species of mastodons,
sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved
creatures of strange shapes and some of them of giant size, all of
these being descended from the immigrant types; and side by side with
them there grew up large autochthonous [TR: original autochthonus]
ungulates, giant ground sloths well-nigh as large as elephants, and
armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally of the armadillo
or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only held their own,
but actually in their turn wandered north over the isthmus and invaded
North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant
in species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because of its huge
size or odd type, and because of the terrific prowess of the more
formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in South America, and
flourished for a period which human history would call very long
indeed, but which geologically was short.
Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this
fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate
befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna
and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north.
Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all
the associated animals of large size, vanished, and South America,
though still retaining its connection with North America, once again
became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that
of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for
instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like
wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of
small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes
diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both of
the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among
the new and intrusive kinds. The change was widespread and
extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly
inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any
cause which would account for the extinction of so many species of
huge or moderate size, while smaller representatives, and here and
there medium-sized representatives, of many of them were left.
Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there
are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history of
human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the
development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or
transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races or
nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that we
use each of the words "birth" and "death," "youth" and "age," often
very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally
different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing
as an "old" or a "young" nation, any more than there is an "old" or
"young" family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must
be of exactly the same length for every existing individual, and for
every group of individuals, whether forming a family or a nation. All
that can properly be meant by the terms "new" and "young" is that in a
given line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid
change. This change may arise either from a new development or
transformation of the old elements, or else from a new grouping of
these elements with other and varied elements; so that the words "new"
nation or "young" nation may have a real difference of significance in
one case from what they have in another.
As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the
specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing,
generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when a
barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more
complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for
instance, in Western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and,
later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the
modern countries of Western Europe are descended from the states
created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be
called "new" or "young" states in the sense that part or all of the
people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not
been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on the
career of civilized communities. In the southern part of Western
Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants
already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the
new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence
then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had
come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities
with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors;
though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there
was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which
gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same
races which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a
slowly changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the
slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of
Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine
culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have
gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the
steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a 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 Phoenician 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 Afrikanders. 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 St. 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 cannot 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 cannot 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 country-side 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 cannot even guess why the springs of
one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of
another kind.