ed of the power of
personality, the "born" leaders of the world who, whether they figured
as chiefs or kings, witchdoctors or priests, prophets or lawgivers, were
all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits
have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities
favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is
no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders
will ever cease.

But although we believe that progress has been started always and
everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous
variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and
circumstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially
the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has
been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the
great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in
the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to
be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the
admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have
served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the
influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general
contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in
places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in
a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being
discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people
themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor
yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything
else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a
nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element
in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that
has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the
age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."

Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the
beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was
supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and
conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated
through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby
succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that wan