THE INFLUENCE OF RACE IN HISTORY. 497 



Two fundamental psychological elements to be always studied 

 among any people are character and intelligence. Character is 

 infinitely more important to the success of an individual or a race 

 than intelligence. Rome, in her decline, certainly possessed more 

 superior minds than the Rome of the earlier ages of the republic. 

 Brilliant artists, eloquent rhetoricians, and graceful writers ap- 

 peared then by the hundred. But she was lacking in men of 

 manly and energetic character, who may perhaps have been care- 

 less of the refinements of art, but were very careful of the power 

 of the city whose grandeur they had founded. When it had lost 

 all of these, Rome had to give way to peoples much less intelligent 

 but more energetic. The conquest of the ancient, refined, and let- 

 tered Graeco-Latin world by tribes of semi-barbarous Arabs con- 

 stitutes another example of the same kind. History is full of such. 



While character thus plays the chief part in the historical 

 development of a people, it is intelligence that prevails in deter- 

 mining their civilization ; but it must be creative, and not assimi- 

 lative only. Peoples having only an assimilative intelligence, like 

 the Phoenicians of old and the Mongolians and the Russians of the 

 present time, are capable of appropriating more or less of foreign 

 civilization, but can not make civilization advance. Peoples 

 endowed with a certain intelligence, like the Greeks in antiquity 

 and the Arabs in the middle ages, have been the factors of all the 

 general progress by which mankind has profited. 



The most superficial observation soon demonstrates that the 

 several individuals composing a race differ from one another in 

 physical aspect as well as in moral and mental constitution ; but 

 a little more attentive observation will show that under these 

 apparent diversities is hidden a mass of characteristics common 

 to all the individuals of the race, the aggregation of which con- 

 stitutes what has justly been named the national character of 

 a people. When we speak of an Englishman, a Japanese, or a 

 negro, we at once attribute to him — and without hardly ever being 

 much mistaken — a collection of general traits which are a kind of 

 precise condensation of the characteristics of his race. These na- 

 tional characteristics, created among homogeneous peoples by the 

 long-continued influences of the same mediums, the same insti- 

 tutions, and the same creeds, play a fundamental, though invis- 

 ible, part in the life of peoples. 



In human races, as in animal species, some offer many varie- 

 ties, others but few. The fewer varieties a race presents — or the 

 less they diverge from a mean type — the more homogeneous it is. 

 Such, for example, is the modern English race, in which the 

 ancient Briton, the Saxon, and the Norman have been effaced to 

 form a wholly new and quite distinct type. If, on the contrary, 

 the groups have been juxtaposed without having been sufficiently 



