The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large populations in a primary civilisation, generate despotisms, was explicitly put in the eighteenth century by Walckenaer (_Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine_, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198). Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be fanciful and non-economic (cp. Volney, _Leçons d'Histoire_, 6ième séance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed. pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides that mountaineers tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to rulers, and coast-dwellers something midway between (_Esprit des Lois_, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not easy to conquer, doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched on in Gray's unfinished poem on the _Alliance between Government and Education_, written before the appearance of the _Esprit des Lois_, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had forestalled some of his best thoughts" (Gray's _Works_, ed. 1821, p. 274). The point is discussed more fully in Dr. Dunbar's _Essays on the History of Mankind_, 1780, Essay vi. (3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations, in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly. Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese, and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.