This, in any case, leads to another problem. Were the Greeks more or less altruistic than other races? If you could show that altruistic races had survived while the Greeks perished, there might be a presumption that the want of altruism was the cause of their decay. But this again does not seem to be the case. Hardly one of the ancient races, indeed, has survived unvaried. The Romans were at least as brutal as the Greeks, and, one would say, as far from "altruistic". Yet they overpowered the Greeks. How, then, can it be inferred that the Greeks perished because of defective altruism? The struggle for existence was between races equally defective to all appearance in that quality; and it must be a sophistry to signalise its absence in one as the cause of its disappearance. There is, indeed, one race to which every one would turn as the most prominent example of survival, namely, the Jews. The Jews have enormous merits and great intellectual endowments; but can anybody say that they were altruistic in the sense of being cosmopolitan? Are they not conspicuous, beyond any race, for the narrower forms of altruism, rejection of a cosmopolitan creed, even when it arose among them, and exclusive devotion to the welfare of their own people? I think that it would be perfectly easy to argue that the Greeks died out just because of their cosmopolitan and therefore dispersive tendencies, and that the Jews have held out from a judicious adherence to narrower views of self-preservation. But personally I regard all such "arguments" as really belonging to the extra-scientific regions of rhetorical illustration.