THE ROMANES LECTURE
1910
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES
IN HISTORY
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
DELIVERED
BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
JUNE 7TH, 1910
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH
35 WEST 32D STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON: HENRY FROWDE
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH
Romanes Lecture
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received,
speaks in this university of ancient renown, cannot but feel with
peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught
as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and
all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the
minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who
dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations
are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are
not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one
thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of
the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who
came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our
people is slowly changing so that constantly the race tends to become
more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are
of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that,
as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among
the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my
ancestors, Holland or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to
Oxford in ‘the spacious days of great Elizabeth,’ would have felt far
more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the
things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the
things of the body.
More than ever before in the world’s history we of to-day seek to
penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind
but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we
see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we
look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages,
from the immemorial past when in ‘cramp elf and saurian forms’ the
creative forces ‘swathed their too-much power,’ down to the yesterday,
a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man
became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet;
and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and
death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of
animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly
complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we
speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in
the history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances
in scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held
by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other
pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science,
for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the
earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the
air; of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary
achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which
have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial
conditions—for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary
life during the last three generations have been greater than in all
the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life
than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history.
A hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know
something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather
against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge.
At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in
scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and
the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in
the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect
naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain
tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This
is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have
scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history
of man, especially in its early stages, in connexion with what biology
shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen
a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both
positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position the
more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an
attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter
of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely
as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree
that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative
worth and interrelationship are just as necessary in historical
study as in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, though
interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category
of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the
always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction.
But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to
insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which
is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth
seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific
historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book
is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as
a painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a
branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch
of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science
encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding
encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the
great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is
broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of
books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which
shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great
historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay,
we need merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the
new facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal.
Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No ‘scientific’ treatise
about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that
Joinville’s place is in both history and literature; no minute study
of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot—and Marbot is
as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the
branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art of
presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than the
layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics which
can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of realization,
it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must
essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians
of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an honourable,
but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces
books which are not literature must rest content with the honour,
substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who
gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to use.
Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of
literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the
scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who
would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of
the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of
that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great
name of Darwin. Of course there is no exact parallelism between the
birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth,
growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a
certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there
are homologies.
How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are
more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the
interpretation of human history, we cannot at present say. The
historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man
is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance
is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is
advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and,
moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of
vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full significance,
are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The research
which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first;
but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly
to pose the problem, also requires us to say that with our present
knowledge we can offer no complete solution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of
the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the
higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.
Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time
necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many
hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed
by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we
find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian
life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as
we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of
man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him,
we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind,
though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day.
Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type,
in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most
imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned
into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution, which seemed
clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The
scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the
relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation,
by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their
writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which
our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case
the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such
partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we
have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development
of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some
facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes
for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts
as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes,
of which we can give no adequate explanation.
Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of
terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species
we must remember that such expressions as ‘a new species,’ or as ‘a
species becoming extinct,’ are each commonly and indiscriminately
used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course
the ‘new’ species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared
later on the globe’s surface than those of any old species tottering to
extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily
trace its ancestral descent back through countless generations,
through aeons of time, to the early stages of the appearance of life on
the globe. All that we mean by a ‘new’ species is that from some cause,
or set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly
develops into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that while
in one form of life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and
the old species continues to exist, in another form of life there is a
deviation from the ancestral type and a new species appears.
Similarly, ‘extinction of species’ is a term which has two entirely
different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and
leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because, as the generations
go by, there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced.
Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case it
changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the small
three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the same
period of the world’s history, back in the middle of the mammalian age.
Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely disappeared
and that nothing like either is to be found in the world to-day. But
whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no
descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave descendants,
and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages went by, finally
developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and
zebras of to-day.
The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in
the development of human societies is striking. A further analogy
is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of
intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes
highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great
development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so extreme
that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, it
disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly come from the
less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, and striking
types, of the preceding era.
When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide
one period of palaeontological history from another, we can sometimes
assign causes, and again we cannot even guess at them. In the case
of single species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the
explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in
the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in
vegetation, might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge
herbivores with a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity
of food, and with teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two
kinds of plants could furnish this food. Again, we now know that the
most deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower forms
of life, such as insects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the
blood by insects. There are districts in South America where many
large animals, wild and domestic, cannot live because of the presence
either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there
is a terrible genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host
of microscopic creatures which are deadly to certain of the higher
vertebrates. One of these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to
all domestic animals, and this although harmless to the closely-related
wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to man himself, being
the cause of the ‘sleeping sickness,’ which in many large districts
has killed out the entire population. Of course the development or the
extension of the range of any such insects, and any one of many other
causes which we see actually at work around us, would readily account
for the destruction of some given species or even for the destruction
of several species in a limited area of country.
When whole faunal groups die out, over large areas, the question is
different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the
knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogaeal continent, for
instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial
period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal
life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied
fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna
succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.
But in many other cases we cannot so much as hazard a guess at why a
given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these
inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America
toward the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had
been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very
time that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication
with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South
America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while
others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths,
and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian
fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
during his career on this earth.
Towards the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land
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 arctogaeal 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 armour 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 ungulates, giant ground
sloths wellnigh as large as elephants, and armoured 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 connexion 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 neighbours;
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
Caesars of Byzantium; their social problems and aftertime 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 humour 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 countryman’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, Aeneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course,
all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the
slightest connexion 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
neighbour 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.
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 burned 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 endeavour 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 horse-hoofs 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 Graeco-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.