his father and mother that he may live long in the land, a sanction
which entails continued adherence to the ancestral ways and ideas, and
which, being rooted in instinctive fear of innovation, has power over us
all.

Progress, then, has everywhere been the result, in the beginning, of
individual initiative in men who were possessed of the power of
personality, the "born" leaders of the world who, whether they figured
as chiefs or kings, witchdoctors or priests, prophets or lawgivers, were
all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits
have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities
favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is
no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders
will ever cease.

But although we believe that progress has been started always and
everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous
variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and
circumstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially
the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has
been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the
great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in
the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to
be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the
admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have
served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the
influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general
contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in
places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in
a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being