such widely separated races as the Red Indians of our own times and the
Northmen who roamed over the seas in the days of Alfred the Great.

The North American Indians, though they achieved no civilisation to be
compared with the cultures of Mexico and Peru, yet conserved a very high
degree of initiative in other directions. According to competent
observers, these people have shown a capacity for wiliness and a power
of divination of the obscured workings of nature and of the human mind
which have never been surpassed elsewhere. That the high moral and
mental status of these people is fully recognised by their European
successors is proved by the fact that many Americans in high stations
to-day actually boast of having in their veins the blood of the North
American Indian. And yet these highly gifted people had not when
Columbus discovered America attained to the knowledge of iron. Despite
the advantages of a most favourable environment and a stimulating
climate, the Red Indians were in point of mechanical development behind
the earliest Bantu; they had no iron implements, no tillage and no
settled or permanent abodes, and whatever may have been the cause of
their lack of development, the fact remains that there was no
achievement despite undeniable capacity.

The early Scandinavians who lived in a state of barbarism ages before
and long after Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece and Rome developed
their various civilisations, furnish another illustration of the fact
that there may well be capacity without accomplishment, for no one can
doubt the keenness of the minds of these people who have advanced to the
front ranks of human endeavour. These rude sea-rovers must have lived in
what is generally supposed to have been a most stimulating climate
during long ages while other races in Southern Europe and in Asia built
up mighty civilisations within environments that seem to have been far