We considered in our last chapter the principal modes in which physical environment affects the character of a people—namely, (1) influence on temperament exerted chiefly through climate acting upon the bodily functions: (2) influence through the senses, exerting secondary effects upon the higher mental processes: (3) direct influence on the imagination. We concluded that these effects become innate in some degree; though whether they are impressed on the race by direct inheritance, or by processes of direct or of social selection, or in all three ways, remains an open question.
We distinguished, besides these direct modes of influence, two indirect modes by which physical environment affects the mind and character of a people: (1) by its selective action on individuals apart from its influence upon their minds: (2) by determining occupations and social organisation. We may consider them in turn.
It is recognised, as I pointed out above, that the races inhabiting hot moist countries are commonly indolent, while those of the moderately cold and moist climates tend to be extremely active and energetic.
This difference is well brought out by Mr Meredith Townsend in an essay on the charm of Asia for the Asiatics[111]; and he is speaking not of Asia in general but of Southern Asia. He says Asiatics “will not, under any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained habit of taking trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave like Prussian officials.” After quoting Thiers’ description of the immense labours of detailed administration which he supported while minister of State, he says “No Asiatic will do that.... One half the weakness of every Oriental government arises from the impossibility of finding men who will act as M. Thiers did.” These races, bred in the tropics, are in fact incurable lotus-eaters, their chief desire is for the afternoon life or, as is commonly said of the Malays throughout the Eastern Archipelago, they are great leg-swingers, they prefer to undertake no labour more arduous than sitting still swinging their legs. All this, though more or less true of the tropical races in general, is pre-eminently true of those inhabiting regions which are moist as well as hot, the Malays, the Burmese, the Siamese, the Papuans, the Negroes of the African jungle regions.
Such peoples have failed to acquire the energy which leads men to delight in activity for its own sake, not merely because a hot moist climate inclines directly to indolence, but rather because the prime necessities of life are to be had almost without labour; the heat dispenses with the necessity for clothing and shelter, while the hot sun and the moisture provide an abundance of vegetable food in response to a minimum of labour. Hence, no man perishes through lack of energy to secure the prime necessities of life; and there has been no great weeding out of the indolent by severe conditions of life, such as alone can produce an innately energetic race, one that loves activity for its own sake. For the same reason these same peoples also exercise but little foresight, they are naturally improvident; the abundance of nature renders it possible to survive and propagate without any prudent provision for the future.
Contrast with these races the northerly races—in Asia the Japanese, whose energy and industry we all recognise, and the northern Mongols or Tartars, who have so often overrun and conquered with fire and sword the less energetic peoples of the south, or the Goorkhas or Pathans of the highlands of northern India. But more especially contrast with them the English people. M. Boutmy rightly asserts that “the taste for and the habit of effort must be regarded as the most essential attribute, the profound and spontaneous quality, of the race[112].” It is displayed in the English love of sport and adventure and travel, especially in such recreations as mountain climbing, which is pre-eminently an English sport; also throughout our social life, in the intensity of commercial and industrial activity, often carried on ardently by men far removed from any necessity of making money. In our political life, where a vast amount of effort is constantly expended in achieving comparatively small results, we always seem to prefer to achieve any reform by the methods which give scope to and demand the greatest amount of public activity and effort. It is shewn also in the immense amount of public service rendered without remuneration, for the mere love of activity and the exercise of power. It is very striking in English colonies in tropical lands, and has been no doubt an important factor in our success in tropical administration and in colonisation.
Boutmy is inclined to attribute to this love of activity, as a secondary effect, the dislike of the mass of Englishmen for generalisations and for theoretical construction; for, he says, these are the results naturally achieved by the reflective mind, whereas the English mind gets no time for reflection, its attention is perpetually drawn off from general principles by its tendency to pursue some immediate practical end. Hence, he says, abstraction is subordinated to practical ends and does not soar for its own sake. This truth is well illustrated by the fact that all our English philosophers, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Bentham, Spencer, etc., have been practical moralists, and have conducted their investigations always with an eye to concrete applications to the conduct of the State or of private life.
Boutmy regards this love of activity, together with foresight and self-control, as racial qualities engendered by the severity of the climate, working chiefly by way of natural selection. In the prehistoric period more especially, when man had little knowledge of means of protection from climate and hardship such as have been developed by civilised societies, those individuals who were deficient in these qualities must have succumbed to the rigours of the climate, leaving their more energetic fellows to propagate the race.
That there is truth in the view is shown by the fact that the degree to which the love of activity is developed seems to vary roughly with the severity of the climate even among the closely allied races of Europe. As we pass northward from the coast of the Mediterranean, we find the quality more and more strongly marked; and it is in accordance with this principle that the dominant power, the leadership in civilisation, has passed gradually northwards in the historic period. Civilisation first developed in the sub-tropical regions, in which the abundance of nature first gave men leisure to devote themselves to things of the mind, to contemplation and inquiry; while the northern races were still battling as savages against the inclemency of the climate, were still being ruthlessly weeded out by the rigorousness of the physical environment, and so were being adapted to it, that is to say, were being rendered capable of sustained and vigorous effort. But, as the means of subduing nature and of protecting himself against nature have been developed by man, the dominance has passed successively northwards to peoples whose innate energy and love of activity were more highly developed in proportion to the severity of the selection exerted upon many preceding generations.
The severe climate has not been the only cause of this evolution of an energetic active type. No doubt military selection played its part also. The Northern races of Europe, more particularly the Nordic, the fair-haired long-headed race, underwent a prolonged and severe process of such military group selection, before branches of it settled in our island; and, among the qualities which must have tended to success and survival in this process, energy and capacity for prolonged and frequent effort, especially bodily effort, must have been one of the chief. Still, even such group selection was probably a secondary result of the direct climatic selection; for it must have been the love of activity and enterprise that led these peoples perpetually to wander, and so to come into conflicts with one another, conflicts in which the more energetic would in the main survive and the less energetic succumb. In part also it must have been determined in the third and the most indirect manner in which physical environment shapes racial qualities—namely, by determining occupations and modes of life, and through these the forms of social organisation, both of which then react upon the racial qualities.
In illustration of this third mode of action of physical conditions, let us take a striking difference of mental quality between the French and the English peoples, and inquire how the difference has arisen; a difference which is recognised by every capable observer who has compared the two peoples and which has been of immense importance in shaping the history of the modern world. I mean the greater sociability of the French and the greater independence of the English, a greater self-reliance and capacity for individual initiative. The difference finds expression in every aspect of the national life of the two peoples. The sociability and sympathetic character of the French, on which they justly pride themselves[113], is the inverse aspect of their lack of the characteristic English qualities, independence and self-reliance. In political life the difference appears in the centralised organisation of the French nation, every detail of administration being controlled by the central power through a rigidly organised hierarchy of officials, in a way that leaves no scope for initiative and independence in local administrations. Connected with this is the almost universal desire of educated men to become state functionaries, parts of the official machinery of administration, and the consequent excessive growth of this class of persons.
The same quality of the French shows itself in the tendency to prefer the monarchical rule of any man who shows himself capable of ruling, a tendency which constantly besets the republican State with a well-recognised danger. These are not local and temporary manifestations, but have characterised the French nation throughout the whole period of its existence. In the feudal period which preceded its formation, there was considerable local independence; but the feudal system was due to the dominant influence of Frankish chiefs, of the same race as our Saxon forefathers, who overran most of France as a ruling caste, but did not contribute any large element to the population, and whose blood therefore has been largely swamped. It appears in the greater violence among the French people of collective mental processes, those of mobs, assemblies, factions, and groups of all kinds. Each individual is easily carried away by the mass; there are none to withstand the wave of contagion and, by so doing, to break and check its force.
In England on the other hand political activity has always been characterised by extreme jealousy of the central power, and by the tendency to achieve everything possible by local action and voluntary private effort. All reforms are initiated from the periphery, instead of from the centre as in France. Great institutions, the universities, schools, colleges, hospitals, railways, canals, docks, insurance companies, even water supplies and telephones and many other things which, it would seem, should naturally and properly be undertaken by the State, or other official public body, have been generally set on foot and worked by individuals or private associations of individuals. Even vast colonial empires—India, Rhodesia, Canada, Sarawak, Nigeria, North Borneo—have been in the main acquired through the enterprise and efforts of individuals or associations of individuals; the State only intervening when the main work has been accomplished.
In their religion, too, the English are markedly individualistic; our numerous dissenting bodies have mostly dispensed with the centralised official hierarchy which in Roman Catholic countries mediates between God and man, and have insisted upon a direct communion with God; and we have many little churches each of which governs itself in absolute independence of every other. In the family relations the same difference appears very strongly. The French family regards itself, and is regarded by law, as a community which holds its goods in common; each child has his legal claim upon his share, relies upon his family for support in his struggle with the world, and is encouraged by his parents to do so. In the English family, on the other hand, the father is a supreme despot, who disposes of his property as he wills. The children are not encouraged to look for further support, when once they become adult, but are taught that they must go out into the world to seek their fortunes unaided. At an early age, the English boy is usually thrust out of the family into the life of a school in which, by his own efforts, he must find and keep his position among his fellows; and he lives a life which, compared with that of the French boy, is one of freedom and independence. In the distribution of the people on the land we see the same difference of mental qualities revealed. The French peasants are for the most part congregated sociably in villages and small towns; the English farmer builds his homestead apart upon his own domain. And this determines one of the most striking differences in the aspect of the rural districts of both countries. In the towns also the same tendencies are clearly shown; in the separate little homes of the English and in the large houses of the French shared by several families.
It is in the expansion in the world of the two peoples that the effects of this difference are most clearly expressed and assume the greatest importance. The English race has populated a vast proportion of the surface of the world, and rules over one-fifth of the total population. Whereas the French people, who have conquered large areas, have never succeeded in permanently colonising any considerable portion of their conquests and they have failed to maintain their domination in many regions where they have for a time established it. In every extra-European region where they have come into conflict with the English race they have been worsted.
The secret of the difference in the expansion of the two peoples is the difference of innate mental quality that we are considering, enhanced by the differences of custom and of political and family organisation engendered by it. For, like all other innate tendencies, the two to which we are referring obtain accentuated expression through moulding customs, institutions and social organisation in ways which foster in successive generations just those tendencies of which these institutions are themselves the traditional outcome and expression. Thus, it is the individualistic nature of the political, religious, and family organisation of the English people which, having been engendered by innate independence of character and having in turn accentuated it in each generation, has enabled the people to achieve its marvels of colonisation and tropical administration. We see these tendencies playing a predominant part in the history of every British colony.
The difference was well brought out by Volney, a French observer of the French and English colonists in the early days of the settlement of North America. He wrote “The French colonist deliberates with his wife upon everything that he proposes to do; often the plans fall to the ground through lack of agreement.” “To visit one’s neighbours, to chat with them, is for the French an habitual need so imperious that on all the frontier of Louisiana and Canada you will not find a single French colonist established beyond sight of his neighbour’s home.” “On the other hand, the English colonist, slow and taciturn, passes the whole day continuously at work; at breakfast he coldly gives his orders to his wife; ... and goes forth to labour.... If he finds an opportunity to sell his farm at a profit, he does so and goes ten or twenty leagues further into the wilderness to make himself a new home[114].”
It is the French authors themselves who have most insisted upon this mental difference between the French and the English, which seems to be determining a great difference in the destinies of the two peoples; and most of them, while justly valuing the sympathetic and sociable quality of the French mind, deeply regret its lack of the English independence[115]. There has been no lack of speculation and inquiry as to the origin and causes of this supremely important difference. It is perhaps worth while to glance at some of these attempts.
The most superficial attempt at explanation is to say that the political and social institutions of the French people foster in each individual the social tendencies in question, while the English institutions develop their opposites. It is true, but it obviously is not the explanation of the difference; for that we must go further back, in order to find the origin of these differences of institution.
An explanation a little less superficial is that the domination of the first Napoleon and the strong centralised system of administration established by him accounts for the difference. But the permanence, if not the very possibility, of that system, and the rise to power of Napoleon himself, were but symptoms of this deep-lying tendency of the French mind.
Buckle, recognising the profound difference which we are considering, summed it up in the phrases ‘the dominance of the protective spirit in France’ and of ‘the spirit of independence in England,’ He attributed the former partly to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in France with its centralised authoritative system, partly to the long prevalence of the feudal system of social organisation, under which every man was made to feel his personal dependence upon the despotic power of an independent noble and was accustomed to look to him for all initiative and guidance—was trained to obey a despot, whose absolute jurisdiction and whose title to his lands and rights was unchallenged. The system, he said, culminated in the despotism of Louis XIV, by the subjection of the previously independent nobles to the king, and was revived in a different form, immediately after the great revolution, by Napoleon.
The dominance of the spirit of independence among the English people he would explain also from the character of their political institutions during recent centuries. After recounting the political history of England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and after showing how the people during that period repeatedly succeeded in asserting its liberties against the encroachments of the kings, he wrote—“In England the course of affairs, which I have endeavoured to trace since the sixteenth century, had diffused among the people a knowledge of their own resources and a skill and independence in the use of them, imperfect indeed, but still far superior to that possessed by any other of the great European countries,” But he was not wholly satisfied with this explanation; he added—“Besides this, other circumstances, which will be hereafter related, had, as early as the eleventh century, begun to affect our national character and had assisted in imparting to it that sturdy boldness, and at the same time, those habits of foresight, and of cautious reserve, to which the English mind owes its leading peculiarities.”
When we turn to his account of the primary cause of English independence[116], we find that it was, in his view, that the feudal system was established by William the Conqueror in a form different from that obtaining on the continent. The nobles received their lands directly from the king as grants, and all land owners were made to acknowledge their direct obligation to him. The nobles were in consequence too weak to set up their own power against that of the king, and therefore they called the people to their aid in resisting the power of the king; hence, the people early acquired rights and privileges and the habit of organised resistance to the central authority. “The English aristocracy, being thus forced by their own weakness, to rely on the people, it naturally followed that the people imbibed that tone of independence and that lofty bearing, of which our civil and political institutions are the consequence, rather than the cause. It is to this, and not to any fanciful peculiarity of race, that we owe the sturdy and enterprising spirit for which the inhabitants of this island have long been remarkable.”
“The practice of subinfeudation, became in France almost universal.” The great lords subgranted parts of their lands to lesser lords, and these again to others, and so on—“thus forming a long chain of dependence, and, as it were, organising submission into a system.” In this country, on the other hand, the practice was actively checked. “The result was that by the fourteenth century the liberties of Englishmen were secured,” and the spirit of independence had become a part of the national character; that is to say, Buckle maintained that three centuries of a different form of the feudal system sufficed to produce this profound difference between the French and English peoples.
Boutmy also fully recognises the important difference between the innate qualities of the French and English; and he also would explain it as the effect of political institutions since the middle ages, but on lines somewhat different from Buckle’s—namely, that England was early ruled by a king invested with great power, and inclined to all the excesses of arbitrary rule. Hence the first need of the people was to fortify themselves against his power. All the law of England carries the imprint of this fear and this defiance. The parliament has been set up against the crown, the judges against parliament, and the jury against the power of the judges; and so, ever since the conquest, individuals have been accustomed to think, and to assert, that their persons, their purse, and their homes are inviolable; and that the State is an enemy whose encroachments must be resisted. This way of thinking has by long usage become instinctive, increasing from generation to generation; until the horror of servitude has become rooted in the Englishman’s temperament, and the desire of independence has become a native and primary passion.
Both Buckle and Boutmy agree, then, that the English love of liberty is due to England having been conquered and ruled by a powerful king, and that in France the opposite effect is to be attributed to the same cause—namely, the influence of despotic rulers. Surely this is to reverse cause and effect. If the English people had not already possessed the sturdy spirit of independence when they were conquered by the Norman, his strong centralised rule would only have rendered them still less independent and would have fostered the spirit of protection, as Buckle calls it. If the national characters had been reversed in this respect, how easy it would have been to show that the dependence of the English character was due to the strong rule of a foreign despot, William of Normandy, while the French independence was due to the existence in feudal times of many centres of independent power, the nobles, each capable of resisting the central authority! It was just because this spirit was theirs already that the English people resisted their kings and were able to secure their liberties by setting up institutions congenial to their nature, institutions and customs which have fostered in each individual and each generation the spirit of independence inherited as a racial quality, and which possibly, though by no means certainly, have further intensified the racial peculiarity.
Another cause for the difference of institutions is assigned by Sir Henry Maine. He pointed to the great influence of Roman law upon French institutions; he showed how the French lawyers, brought up in the school of Roman law and holding the Roman Empire as the ideal of a political organisation, threw all their weight upon the side of the monarchy, and in favour of centralised administration. More, perhaps, is due to this influence than to the causes assigned by Buckle and Boutmy; but no one of these alleged causes, nor all of them combined, can be accepted as adequate to explain the origin of the difference of national characters. These authors fail also to make clear how the political institutions can have modified character. Boutmy frankly assumes use-inheritance, which, as I have said, is, in the present state of science, an unwarrantable assumption.
That these qualities of the French and English peoples are innate racial qualities, evolved during the race-making or prehistoric period, is proved not only by the inadequacy of any assignable causes operating during the historic period, but also by the fact that similar qualities are described by the earliest historians as characterising the ancestors, or the principal ancestral stocks, of the two peoples, when they first appear in history. It is proved also by the fact that other branches of the Nordic race have displayed similar qualities, more especially the Dutch, and also the Normans, who, though they have long formed part of the French State in the political sense, and have suffered most of the political influences assigned as causes of the spirit of protection, not only displayed the spirit of independence in the highest degree ten centuries ago, but are admitted to be still distinguished from the bulk of the French people by the greater individualism of their character, just as they are still markedly different in physical traits. They offer one of the best examples of fixity of the physical characters of a race. No one can travel in Normandy without being struck by the very marked and distinctive physical type, which, according to all accounts, is that of the Norman who came over to England with the Conqueror; and there is every reason to believe that the mental qualities of the race have been equally fixed and enduring.
Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and other early historians have described for us the leading qualities of the Gauls on the one hand and of the Teutons on the other. Fouillée in his _Psychology of the French People_ has brought together the evidence of these early historians on the point; it shows that the Gauls and the Teutons were distinguished very strongly by the same differences which obtain between the French and English peoples at the present time, especially the difference in respect of independence and initiative, the origin of which we are seeking to explain. The Gauls were eminently sociable people, sympathetic, emotional, demonstrative, vivacious, very given to oratory and discussion, vain and moved by the desire of glory, capable of great gallantry, but not of persevering effort in face of difficulties, easily elated, easily cast down. And, what from our point of view is especially important, they were readily led by the chiefs, to whom they were attached by the bonds of personal loyalty; and they were constantly banding themselves together in large groups, under such leaders as attained popularity by their superior qualities; and, again, they were dominated by the priestly caste, the Druids. The Gauls even had those family institutions which characterise the modern French and which have been held to be the expression of their recently acquired qualities and traditions; namely, the family had the character of a community in which the wife had equal rights with the husband, and the children were regarded also as members of the community having their equal claims upon the family property. And society was bound together by a system of patrons and clients, a system of personal dependence.
On the other hand, the Teutonic people, as described by the same ancient authorities, displayed a decided individualism in virtue of which their social organisation was more rudimentary. The father was supreme in the family, and his power and property descended to his eldest son. They were a more phlegmatic people, but of great energy and persistence. Unlike the Gauls, they were dominated by no priestly caste. The religious rites were conducted by the elder men.
The Gauls were a mixed people of whom the minority, constituting the nobility, were of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic race, while the majority, the mass of the common people, were of the short, dark, round-headed race. And these, as the numerous observations of the anthropologists show, constitute to-day the bulk of the population, except in Normandy and the extreme north-east of France.
The Teutons or Germans of Caesar and Tacitus, on the other hand, were of the fair Nordic race; and the Anglo-Saxons who overran Britain, together with the Danes and Normans, who, with the Saxons, formed the principal ancestral stock of the English, were of this same Nordic race, or Northmen, as we may call them.
Now, it might seem useless to attempt to arrive at any conclusions as to the influences that shaped these races in prehistoric times. But an attempt has been made by one of the schools of French sociologists, which, in spite of its speculative character, seems to be worthy of attention. This is the school of ‘La Science Sociale,’ founded seventy years ago by Fredericq le Play and more recently led by Ed. Demolins and H. de Tourville. Aided by a number of ardent disciples, they have made a special study of the influence of physical environment in determining occupations and social organisation, and in moulding indirectly through these the mental qualities of peoples. That is their great principle. They rightly, I think, insist upon the relatively small importance of political institutions in moulding a people, regarding them as secondary results of the factors which, determining the private activities of men and women at every moment of their lives from the cradle to the grave, exert a far greater and more intimate influence upon their minds. In two fascinating volumes[117] Demolins has summed up the principal results of this school and attempted to trace the conditions that have determined the differentiation of all the principal races of the earth; and de Tourville has applied the same principles and traced their effects in European history[118].
It is a curious fact that the work of the Le Play school is almost entirely ignored by the other French sociologists and anthropologists. It is seldom referred to by them, and outside France also it has not received the attention it deserves. Much of it is of the nature of brilliant speculation, and is regarded no doubt as unsound by many more sober minds. Yet, when we attempt to understand the evolution of man in the prehistoric period, brilliant speculation becomes a necessary supplement to the work of measuring skulls and digging up ruins, to which some less ingenious workers confine themselves. And, of all the conclusions of the Le Play school, their account of the origin of the distinctive characters of the Northmen is one of the most striking and satisfactory; while their account of the origins of the Gauls and of their peculiar social organisation and well marked mental traits is also among their best work.