Those philosophers of history who pretend to explain every historic development from the quality of “races,” give as the center of their strategic position the alleged fact, that only the Germans, thanks to their superior “political capacity,” have managed to raise the artistic edifice of the developed feudal state. Some of the vigor of this argument has departed, since the conviction began to dawn on them that in Japan, the Mongol race had accomplished this identical result. No one can tell what the negro races might have done, had not the irruption of stronger civilizations barred their way, and yet Uganda does not differ very greatly from the empires of the Carolingians or of Boleslaw the Red, except that men did not have in Uganda any “values of tradition” of mediæval culture: and these values were not any merit of the Germanic races, but a gift wherewith fortune endowed them. Shifting the discussion from the negro to the “Semites,” we find the charge made that this race has absolutely no capacity for the formation of states. And yet we find, thousands of years ago, this same feudal system developed, by Semites, if the founders of the Egyptian kingdom were Semites. One would think the following description of Thurnwald were taken from the period of the Hohenstaufen emperors: “Whoever entered the following of some powerful one, was thereafter protected by him as though he had been the head of the family. This relation ... betokens a fiduciary relation similar to vassalage. This relation of protection in return for allegiance tends to become the basis of the organization of all Egyptian society. It is the basis of the relations of the feudal lord to his sergeants and peasants, as it is that of the Pharaoh to his officials. The cohesion of the individuals in groups subject to common protecting lords, is founded on this view, even up to the apex of the pyramid, to the king himself regarded as ‘the vicar of his ancestors,’ as the vassal of the gods on earth.... Whosoever stands without this social grasp, a ‘man without a master,’ is without the pale of protection and therefore without the law.”[133] The hypothesis of the endowment of any particular race has not been used by us, and we have no need of it. As Herbert Spencer says, it is the stupidest of all imaginable attempts to construct a philosophy of history. The first characteristic of the developed feudal state is the manifold gradation of ranks built up into the one pyramid of mutual dependence. Its second distinctive mark is the amalgamation of the ethnic groups, originally separated. The consciousness formerly existent of difference of _races_ has disappeared completely. There remains only the _difference of classes_.