Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call “the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings. I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them. But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal. It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s book, offer the following historical axiom. According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life (animate existence as differentiated from inanimate existence) began when for once all physical and chemical elements were present in the ideal proportion necessary for the creation of the first living cell. Translate this into terms of history and you get this: “A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a very high form of civilization is only possible when all the racial, climatic, economic and political conditions are present in an ideal proportion or in as nearly an ideal condition and proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.” Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations. A race with the brain development of a cave-man would not prosper, even in Paradise. Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would not have composed fugues, Praxiteles would not have made statues if they had been born in an igloo near Upernivik and had been obliged to spend most of their waking hours watching a seal-hole in an ice-field. Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow domains. In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which afterwards moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from good.