The Evolution of StatesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
History
The Evolution of States
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Europe -- Politics and government; Great Britain -- Politics and government; Political science -- History
But if anything has been proved by the foregoing analyses, it is that
race theories are, for the most part, survivals of barbaric
pseudo-science; that culture stage and not race (save as regards the
need for mixture), conditions and not hereditary character, are the
clues to the development of all nations, "race" being a calculable
factor only where many thousands of years of given environments have
made a conspicuous similarity of type, setting up a disadvantageous
homogeneity. It was simply their prior and fuller contact with Greece
and Rome, and further their greater mixture of stocks, that civilised
the Galli so much earlier than the Germani. On the other hand, the
national failure in Spain and Italy of the Teutonic stocks, as such,
proves only that idle northern barbarians, imposing themselves as a
warrior caste on an industrious southern population, were (1) not good
material for industrial development, and (2) were probably at a
physiological disadvantage in the new climate. Southerners would
doubtless have failed similarly in Scandinavia.
I know of no thorough investigation of the amalgamation of the
stocks, or the absorption or disappearance of the northern. There
is some reason to suppose that early in Rome's career of conquest
there began in the capital a substitution of more southerly
physiological types--eastern and Spanish--for those of the early
Latins. But the Italians at all times seem to have undergone a
climatic selection which adapted them to Italy, where the
northerners, whether Celt or Teuton, were not so adapted. The
supposed divergence of character between northern and southern
Italians, insisted on by the former in our own time, certainly
cannot be explained by any Teutonic intermixture; for the Teutons
were settled in all parts of Italy, and nowhere does the
traditional blond type remain. Exactly such differences, it should
be remembered, are locally alleged as between Norwegians and Danes,
northern and southern Germans, and northern and southern English.
If there be any real generic and persistent difference of
temperament (there is none in variety of moral bias and mental
capacity) or of nervous energy, it is presumably to be traced to
climate. Some aspects of the problem are discussed at length in
_The Saxon and the Celt_, pt. i, §§ 4, 5.
§ 2
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