Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive
racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie,
"about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe.
Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our
peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the
older stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power
among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the
underlying races."[19]

Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old
race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present
civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan
civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of
neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical
civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It
is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and
Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as
furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the
South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine,
Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and
Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and
character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of
their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared
higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained
warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen
God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And
though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ
himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and
not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediæval painters
of Germany and Holland.