discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people
themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor
yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything
else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a
nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element
in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that
has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the
age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."

Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the
beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was
supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and
conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated
through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby
succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when
the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old
autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this
theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not
explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their
own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up
in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been
far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and
Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times
the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton
part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic"
race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in
persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English
are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great
civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and
are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor