Ο CHAPTER XLVI UNIFORMITIES СНАР. The Mer gence of Small Peoples NE grand outcome of the social processes is that there is uniformity where there was diversity. In prehistoric times mankind must have comprised thousands of racial stocks which, although springing originally from a small number of parent Groups stems, had gradually become more or less differentiated physi- into Great cally from long continuance in diverse natural environments. and Races The formation of larger and yet larger societies, however, has facilitated displacement, migration, crossing and blending, the result being that innumerable kindreds and peoples have disappeared by amalgamation, leaving a small number of great races. counting tens of millions, yea, even hundreds of millions, of human beings. While anthropologists discriminate various racial types in each of the great modern peoples, e.g., the English, the French, the Germans, the Italians, there can be no doubt that many ancient stocks have vanished in the melting pot leaving not a trace. STRUGGLE AND SURVIVAL AMONG CULTURES Incipient cultures have been merged as well as incipient races. Consider the destiny of the civilization of those Chinese who more than thirty centuries ago came down the Valley of the Wei River. It has been spread and spread until half a billion people in Eastern Asia light their tapers at its flame. Uncounted savage tribes and barbarian hordes have succumbed to its influence. Says Metchnikoff: 1 Whatever these heterogeneous tribes have of civilized life, Kalmucks of the Russian steppes and Annamites of Tonkin, Tunguses of Siberia, Manchus of the Amur and the Ussuri, mariners of Fokien and Canton, emanates from one and the same center of civilization, the Land of the Hundred Families." . . . Nor can one doubt that 1 "La civilization et les grands fleuves," p. 321. CHAP. and the Saracenic The Struggle fying Forces with Homo if Japan had not had the good fortune to light her torch at the fire of the Celestial Empire, she would perhaps have remained like the Philippines with their Tagals and their Visayas. Nestorian Christianity came, flourished for a time and vanished. The Jews of Kaifeng-fu lost their language and their religion and became Chinese in all but physiognomy. The conquering Manchus have forgotten their language and literature. "China," it has been finely said, "is a sea which salts everything which flows into it." Or take the Near East. What wealth of contrast would have been noted in Homer's day in the country between Bokhara and Morocco! But the Saracen flood passed over it and now it has the sameness of an ancient beach from which the sea has retired. No sooner is one south of the Caucasus than the eye notes such characteristic "Eastern" features as "shaven heads and mustachios, instead of the full beard; the middle girt by the gay sash or the fancy ornamental belt; brimless caps of lambskin and huge black mantles of shaggy felt; embroidered heelless slippers or soft-soled boots; baggy cotton trousers tied in at the ankles; strings of beads for the man's idle hands to play with; merchants sitting cross-legged on beautiful hand-woven rugs; barefoot, veiled women and women draped with festoons of coins; finger nails and grizzling beards stained with henna; shepherds who look as if they live on locusts and wild honey; importunate beggars with the air of having an assured social position; diminutive donkeys, Biblical asses, camels of the desert and slow-moving oxen at the plow; piles of pomegranates, and long, sweet grapes; sacks of goatskin, with the hair turned inside, distended with wine or olive oil; draft animals bedecked about the head with beads to avert the evil eye; heifers treading out the grain on threshing floors; bricks of mud and straw drying in the sun; white-washed mud huts with flat roofs; domed marabouts, and Moorish architecture." 2 All down the stream of history diversifying forces have been of Diversi- at work and homogenizing forces have been at work; but often they are quite out of balance. During the pushing out of the Roman frontiers and the diffusion of the classic culture the likeness-producing forces had the upper hand. After the break-up of the Empire and the decay of communications, i.e., after the fifth century A.D., the diversifying forces came on top, as we 2 Ross, "Russia in Upheaval," pp. 51-52. genizing Forces see plainly in the development of a whole sisterhood of Romance languages out of the Latin. Could one have aviated about the earth, say fifteen thousand years ago, when the cultures of Egypt and Babylonia were in their infancy, one would have come upon thousands of isolated petty societies each with its more or less distinctive tools, weapons, speech, folkways, standards, and cult, embodying the experience which generations of men had accumulated in a particular locality. Since then differencing forces have been active as well as assimilating forces, but the latter have been stronger. The net result is that to-day we find mankind aggregated into half a hundred political units and three-score or four-score self-conscious nationalities, while nine-tenths of them speak some one of a score of leading tongues and adhere to one or another of half a dozen great religions. THE EXTENSION OF PLANES OF UNIFORMITY CHAP. XLVI -Extension In other words, communicating men tend to gravitate into a of Planes common plane of belief or practice. In early times only those of of Unithe same group, the same stock, or the same valley fell into Xformity these common planes. But culture gains radiant energy until such elements as the Arabic speech, the written characters of China, the religion of Islam, or the game of chess overcome all rival culture elements in their neighborhood and draw myriads of people into one plane. While such planes of uniformity have been extended and broken countless times, the improvement of communication causes them to form on an ever vaster scale. Never before our time has a convention, like the dress suit, or a sport, like tennis, or a convenience, like the sewing machine, been so widely diffused over the earth. Civilization, which once was fluvial — as on the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Hoang Ho; then maritime as on the Persian Gulf, the Ægean, the Mediterranean, the Yellow Sea; then oceanic as was possible after Columbus and Magellan: has lately become planetary. Generally, no doubt, peoples have been more alike than the regions they inhabit. Consequently, those elements of culture spread farthest which are best suited to human nature and those prosper least which, bearing the impress of a particular geographical environment, are handicapped in appealing to men in any other environment. Drawn from Eastern pastoralism, the |