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 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."