Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/116

 108 BOOK REVIEWS

that !ove of effort in itself which is so characteristic of'Northemers and especially of the English people (pp. 220, 221). Northern races have taken more time to subdue nature, but in the battle with en- vironment they have acquired qualities in which the representatives of Southern civilisation were lacking and which enabled them to outdo the Southerners in the race for power (p. 222). We might also add that the races of the North have had a prolonged puberty as compared with Southern people, which corresponds to what takes place with individual representatives of the race to this very day.

The action of psychical environment is illustrated by the case of the French and English people. Demolins shows that the bulk of the population of Gaul belonged to tlie short dark round-headed race which started on its migration from the Eurasian steppe region. These tribes were pastoral nomads organised on what may be called patriarchal communistic principles. The clati represented by the patriarch was everything, the individual nothing. Tending the herds was an occupation which offered an easy subsistence, but no scope for individual effort. This is the prototype of the French system as we see it at present; a centralised government with sociable but not individualistic subjects. On the other hand the ancestors of the English were the Nordic tribes who settled in Scandinavia, where the indented coast and their seafaring occupation compelled them to adopt the small individual family as their unit of social organisation; hence for the Englishman to this very day his house is his castle and he relies on himself and not on the state to help him in emergency (p. 237). The theory really seems to account for the facts, but when we come to look into the matter with a critical eye we shall see that the relation between cause and effect is far from certain. We hear that pastoral nomads are necessarily communistic and lack individuality, and then we remember the data of an eye-witness like Vamb^ry who describes his Turkomans as 'an unruly folk with a superabundant quantity of individualism '. ' We are a folk without rulers ' is one of their proverbs. Well, if this is the prototype of the rule of the Roi Soieil, we must say that it is ' diablement chang4e en route'. And as for the small family, with seafaring or fishing as an occupation, we know many races who possess these forms of social and economic organisation without becoming the founders of the British Empire. McDougal! has much to say on the disadvantages of the crossing of races unless they are sub-races of the same stock, but he forgets to mention that some of these disadvantages such as the unreliable, un- stable character of the cross-breeds may be due to social rather than biological causes (p. 240). Following Sir H. Maine he thinks it possible that the chief difference between progressive and stationary people lies in the period of social evolution at which customs were codified in written law. An all too early fixation at a certain period of development