NATIONAL EUGENICS: RACE-CULTURE AND HISTORY[76] The reader will not expect to be insulted here with any discussion of the garbage and gossip, records of scoundrels, courts and courtesans, battles, murder and theft, which we were taught at school, under the great name of history.[77] If history be, as nearly all historians have conceived it, and as Gibbon defined it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,” it is an empty and contemptible study, save for the social pathologist. But if history, without by any means ignoring great men or underrating their influence, is, or should be, the record of the past life of mankind, of progress and decadence, the rise and fall of Empires and civilisations, and their mutual reactions; if it be the record of the intermittent ascent of man, “sagging but pertinacious”; if this record be subject to the law of causation, and therefore susceptible, in theory, at least, of explanation as well as description; if its factors are at work to-day and will shape the destiny of all the to-morrows; if it be neither phantasmagoria nor panorama nor pageant nor procession but _process_, in short, an organic drama,--then, indeed, it is more than worthy of all the study and thought of all who ever study or ever think. Especially must it appeal to us, who boast a tradition greater than the world has ever yet seen, and kinship with men who represent the utmost of which the human spirit has yet shown itself capable,--to us who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake, but to whom the names of all our Imperial predecessors, from Babylon to Spain, serve as a perpetual _memento mori_. Our special question here is whether there are inherent and necessary reasons why our predecessors' fate must sooner or later be ours. Must races die?--or, if we are sceptical about races and more especially about the so-called Anglo-Saxon race, must civilisations, states, or nations die? What comment does modern biology, or the theory of organic evolution, make upon the familiar words of Byron in his address to the ocean?-- “Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-- Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters wasted them while they were free And many a tyrant since: their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage.” And these, a few pages earlier in the same poem:-- “There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom and then Glory--when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption--barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but _one_ page”....