Page:The inequality of human races (1915).djvu/100

Rh according to their degree of political liberty and their forms of government, he is really making cleavages, within races, that he cannot justify, and assuming differences that do not exist. A more detailed discussion of the point would hardly be in place here, and I pass on. If I did open such an argument, I should begin (and rightly I think) by refusing to admit that Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and the rest were in any way inferior to towns such as Milan, Naples, and Rome.

Guizot himself anticipates such an objection. He does not allow that a people is civilized, "which is governed mildly, but kept in a state of repression "; yet he also refuses civilization to another people " whose material life is less easy and luxurious, though still tolerable, yet whose moral and intellectual needs have not been neglected. ... In the people I am supposing," he says, "pure and noble sentiments are fostered. Their religious and ethical beliefs are developed to a certain degree, but the idea of freedom is extinct. Every one has his share of truth doled out to him; no one is allowed to seek it for himself. This is the condition into which most of the Asiatic nations, the Hindus, for example, have fallen; their manly qualities are sapped by the domination of the priests."

Thus into the same limbo as the aristocratic peoples must now be thrust the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Peruvians, the Tibetans, the Japanese, and even the districts subject to modern Rome.

I will not touch on Guizot's last two hypotheses, for the first two have so restricted the meaning of civilization that scarcely any nation of the earth can rightly lay claim to it any more. In order to do so a people would have to live under institutions in which power and freedom were equally mingled, and material development and moral progress co-ordinated in one particular way. Government and religion would have strict limits drawn round them, beyond which they would not be allowed to advance. Finally, the subjects would necessarily possess rights of a very definite kind. On such an assumption, the only civilized peoples would be those whose government is both constitutional and 80