In the “history of intellect” they stand high--and many illustrious names are numbered amongst them--but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they are inefficients. The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends upon how far its race-quality is successful in making these events historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won through (250 B.C.) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism. A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a _formless and therefore historyless mass_. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. _Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation._ World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The _Pax Romana_ had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warrior-groups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannæ seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their--peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and _for ever_. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed--world-peace never diminishes that--alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others--that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes. “_Lever doodt als Sklav_ (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian peasant-saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it. CHAPTER VII PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (A) HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES I