THE RACE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 389 

race into a country. If we take these two circumstances into account, 
we have the status of Europe and Africa before the Roman conquest. 
In Africa we find Berbers and the immigrant. Punics, in western 
Europe Iberians, Ligurians, the immigrant Celts, and plenty of other 
races of whom we have no sufficient knowledge. The ethnology 
of Italy seems to be more varied; our information is here richer. 
Apart from the old inhabitants and the immigrant Aryans there were 
the enigmatical Etruscans, who cannot be connected with any other 
people. The Balkan peninsula and the countries south ‘of the Danube 
were inhabited by Aryans and perhaps by remnants of an older po- 
pulation. Asia Minor was from very ancient times a melting-pot for 
many different races. Syria was inhabited by Semitic tribes which 
the policy of the Assyrians had transplanted and mixed up. In Egypt 
the old stable race preserved itself, but the mixing up with the 
foreign masters of the land and immigrants here also caused a ming- 
ling of races which may possibly have been an important. factor in 
the trouble and decline at the end of antiquity. 
When under the shelter of Roman peace and Roman administra- 
tion all these races — those mentioned are only the most important 
of the races known — were mingled with each other, the result was 
an unlimited bastardizing. Bastardizing conveys perils which cosmo- 
politanism did not acknowledge but which modern science has shown 
to be real. “The race is a group of men with definite hereditary 
dispositions which through the above described natural selection have 
become to a certain degree firm and fixed. There are races of more 
and lesser value. Bastardizing between two races which differ from 
each other to more than a certain degree results in the deterioration 
of the race, at least viewed from the standpoint of the better of the 
two. The aversion to mixed marriages, e. g. to marriages between 
Europeans and negroes, is consequently just from a genetic point of 
view. The danger is yet more insidious if the races are on the one 
hand so different that the bastardizing involves the peril of a deteri- 
oration of the race, but on the other hand do not differ so much 
in externals that the aversion to mixed marriages makes itself felt. 
This aversion is however a very feeble defence against the mixing up 
of races, and its strength depends on the mind of the age. 
The crossing of races, through which a better race is superseded 
by a worse, is however neither the ,only peril nor the greatest. A 
race that is at least to a certain degree pure is physically and psychi- 
cally a fixed type, which precisely through the firmness and fixedness 
