PHYSICAL EVOLUTION 209 



proper to his northern home and the high civilisation that has 

 grown up there. The black man wants but little, and can't see 

 why he should work hard to supply the wants of the white man. 



When civilisation begins to make progress, a difficult problem 

 presents itself, which those who dwell in tropical or sub-tropical 

 climates have failed to solve. This problem is to retain the 

 energy that is born of conflict, when conflict ceases to be an 

 every-day business. Where nature is generous and does not 

 insist that her favours shall be wrung from her, there is not that 

 perpetual weeding out of the unenergetic on which race-vigour 

 depends. Civilisation cannot make progress unless it rests on a 

 basis of physical energy, always ready to combat new difficulties 

 as they arise. In northern lands physical energy has survived, Northern 

 though war comes only at comparatively rare intervals, and then 

 occupies only a small part of the nation. And the explanation 

 of this fact is, I .believe, that in the cold north it has required, 

 till recent inventions changed the face of affairs, the hard work 

 of a strong man to get food from the earth for himself and his 

 wife and family. The quality required has been not so much 

 patient endurance, the Kismet attitude of mind when things go 

 contrary, as combativeness, a determination not to succumb 

 to a cruel environment. In northern climates, therefore, energy 

 remained after civilisation had made wars less common. There 

 was still conflict with physical difficulties. And having this 

 basis, life has been in every way keener. Eager competition is 

 the characteristic of the northern civilisation. Nor has it suffered 

 so much as civilised states in the south from despotism. There 

 has generally been energy sufficient in the mass of men to obtain 

 some measure of freedom, though often after long years of sub- 

 mission. And this survival of energy we must attribute to the 

 physical conditions with which the race has to wage perpetual 

 warfare. 



This is quite in accord with what I have maintained in the 

 first part of this book, viz., that for any species the most im- 

 portant part of its environment, that which has most to do with 

 guiding the course of its evolution, consists of the other species 

 with which it is brought into contact. Each nation, as each wild 



