Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/847

Rh its reserve, it is freely open to ideas which it would have sternly refused in its cold, unsolvent, peaceful stage.

For this reason we find races which have dwelt long in self-satisfied barbarism suddenly leaping into civilization when they assume the role of conquerors. The savage hordes of Timur developed, in a few generations, into the comparatively civilized Mogul people of India. From the Saxon pirates who conquered England an Alfred the Great soon arose. The Norman invaders of France quickly threw aside their barbarism and emerged into chivalry.

This rapid change in mental conditions is not displayed by conquered nations. They remain sullen and obstinate. Though conquered physically, they continue mentally on the defensive. Yet the mental resistance of a subject people to their conquerors is only temporary. There is nothing more difficult than to raise fixed barriers in the mind against the influx of thought. The conquerors force on their subjects new social customs and new political institutions. No one can hinder himself from thinking and comparing, and the mind involuntarily opens to take in the advantageous ideas which may be thus presented to it. It is usually religious infusion that is longest resisted. Yet this, too, makes its way rapidly if there is a strong effort to enforce it. Witness the quick outflow of Mohammedanism through the conquered nations of Asia and Africa.

The results of invasion in this direction depend largely on the comparative civilization of the conquerors and the conquered. If a barbarous people overflows a civilized, the mental level of the conquerors is sure to be raised, but that of the conquered is very likely to be lowered. Yet the result is not a mean between the two grades of advancement; for ideas are hard to kill out. Unlike material possessions, they are capable of unlimited duplication. An idea is the one human possession that can be at once kept and given. Thus the ideas of the conquered infuse themselves irresistibly into the minds of their barbarian conquerors, becoming the mutual property of both peoples. If the conquering race be the most advanced, the process is somewhat different. They are likely to avail themselves of all the good they can obtain from the subjected people, and usually endeavor to force-upon them their own form of mental discipline and social organization. Resistance to this influence is ineffective if the subjection be long continued. Roman thought and Roman civilization followed Roman conquest over half the ancient world. And when Rome was finally overflowed by barbarians, the persistent Roman thought exercised its lifting force on these conquering tribes, gradually reproducing the downtrodden civilization.

Another consideration naturally flows from the above review