yet this phase of savagery, whatever it may have been like, will have been removed from the first beginnings of human culture by a long series of thousands of years. That such was the case, for instance, with the European blond is scarcely to be questioned;68 and it is at least highly probable that the other stocks now associated with the blond, though probably older, must also have come into being relatively late in the life-history of the species.
Vague as this dating may be, it signifies that the initial phase in the life-history of at least one, and presumably of all, of the leading races of Europe falls in a savage culture of a relatively advanced kind as compared with the rudest human beginnings. Therefore when these stocks began life, and so were required to make good their survival, the selective conditions imposed on them, and to which they were required to conform on pain of extinction, were the conditions of a savage culture which had already made some appreciable advance in the arts of life. They had not to meet brute nature in the helpless nakedness of those remote ancestors in whom humanity first began. Mutationally speaking, the stock was born to the use of tools and to the facile mastery of a relatively advanced technology.
And conversely it is a fair inference that these stocks that have peopled Europe would have been unfit to survive if they had come into the world before some appreciable advance in technology had been made. That is to say, these stocks could not by native gift have been fit for a wild life, in the unqualified sense of the term; nor have they ever lived a life of nature in any such sense. They came into the savage world after the race had lived through many thousand years of technological experience and (presumably) many successive mutational alterations of racial type, and they were fitted to the exigencies of the savage world into which they came rather than those of any earlier phase of savagery. The youngest of them, the latest mutant, emerged in early neolithic times, and since he eminently made good his fitness to survive under those conditions he presumably emerged with such an endowment of traits, physical and spiritual, as those conditions called for; and also presumably with no appreciable burden of aptitudes, propensities, instincts, capacities that would be disserviceable, or perhaps even that would be wholly unserviceable, in the circumstances in which he was placed. And since the other racial elements of the European population, at least the two main ones, do not differ at all radically from the blond in their native capacities, it is likewise to be presumed that they also emerged from a mutation under circumstances of culture, and especially of technology, not radically different in degree from those that first surrounded the blond.
The difference between these three racial stocks is much more evident in their physical traits than in their instinctive gifts or their intellectual capacity; and yet the similarity of the three is so great and distinctive even on the physical side that anthropologists are inclined to class the three together as all and several distinctively typical of a “white” or “caucasic” race, to which they are held collectively to belong. Something to the like effect seems to hold true for the distinctive groups of racial stocks that have made the characteristic civilisations of the Far East on the one hand and of southern Asia on the other hand; and something similar might, again, be said for the group of stocks that were concerned in the ancient civilisations of America.
It may be pertinent to add that, except for a long antecedent growth of technology, that is to say a long continued cumulative experience in workmanship, with the resultant accumulated knowledge of the ways and means of life, none of the characteristic races of Europe could have survived. In the absence of these antecedent technological gains, together with the associated growth of institutions, such mutants, with their characteristic gifts and limitations, must have perished.
On that level of savagery on which these European stocks began, and to which the several European racial types with their typical endowment of instincts are presumably adapted, men appear to have lived a fairly peaceable, though by no means an indolent life; in relatively small groups or communities; without any of the more useful domestic animals, though probably with some domestic plants; and busied with getting their living by daily work. Since they survived under the conditions offered them it is to be presumed that these men and women, say of the early neolithic time, took instinctively and kindly to those activities and mutual relations that would further the life of the group; and that, on the whole, they took less kindly and instinctively to such activities as would bring damage and discomfort on their neighbours and themselves.69 Any racial type of which this had not been true, under the conditions known then to have prevailed in their habitat, must have presently disappeared from the face of the land, and the later advance of the Western culture would not have known their breed. Some other racial type, temperamentally so constituted as better to meet these requirements of survival under neolithic conditions, would have taken their place and would have left their own offspring to populate the region.70
What is known of the conditions of life in early neolithic times71 indicates that the first requisite of competitive survival was a more or less close attention to the business in hand, the providing of subsistence for the group and the rearing of offspring - a closer attention, for instance, than was given to this business by those other rival stocks whom the successful ones displaced; all of which throws into the foreground as indispensable native traits of the successful race the parental bent and the sense of workmanship, rather than those instinctive traits that make for disturbance of the peace.72 But through it all the suggestion insinuates itself that the latest, or youngest, of the three main European stocks, the blond, has more rather than less of the pugnacious and predatory temper than the other two, and that this stock made its way to the front in spite of, if not by force of these traits. The advantage of the blond as a fighter seems to have been due in part to an adventurous and pugnacious temper, but also in part to a superior physique, - superior for the purpose of fighting hand to hand or with the implements chiefly used in warfare and piracy down to a date within the nineteenth century. The same physical traits of mass, stature and katabolism will likewise have been of great advantage in the quest of a livelihood under the conditions that prevailed in the North-sea region, the habitat of the dolicho-blond, in the stone age. Something to the same effect is true of the spiritual traits which are said to characterise the blond, - a certain canny temerity and unrest.73 So that the point is left somewhat in doubt; the traits which presently made the northern blond the most formidable disturber of the peace of Europe and kept him so for many centuries may at the outset have been chiefly conducive to the survival of the type by their serviceability for industrial purposes under the peculiar circumstances of climate and topography in which the race first came up and made good its survival.
In modern speculations on the origins of culture and the early history of mankind it has until recently been usual to assume, uncritically, that human communities have from the outset of the race been entangled in an inextricable web of mutual hostilities and beset with an all-pervading sentiment of fear; that the “state of nature” was a state of blood and wounds, expressing itself in universal malevolence and suspicion. Latterly, students of primitive culture, and more especially those engaged at first hand in field work, who come in contact with peoples of the lower culture, have been coming to realise that the facts do not greatly support such a presumption, and that a community which has to make its own living by the help of a rudimentary technological equipment can not afford to be habitually occupied with annoying its neighbours, particularly so long as its neighbours have not accumulated a store of portable wealth which will make raiding worth while. No doubt, many savage and barbarian peoples live in a state of conven-tional feud or habitual, even if intermittent, war and predation, without substantial inducement in the way of booty. But such communities commonly are either so placed that an easy livelihood affords them a material basis for following after these higher things out of mere fancy;74 or they are peoples living precariously hand-to-mouth and fighting for their lives, in great part from a fancied impossibility of coming to terms with their alien and unnaturally cruel neighbours.75 Communities of the latter class are often living in a state of squalor and discomfort, with a population far short of what their environment would best support even with their inefficient industrial organisation and equipment, and their technology is usually ill-suited to a settled life and unpromising for any possible advance to a higher culture. There
