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historical race is, and how, its character once formed, it
possesses, as the result of the laws of heredity such power that
its beliefs, institutions, and arts—in a word, all the elements
of its civilisation—are merely the outward expression of its
genius. We showed that the power of the race is such that no
element can pass from one people to another without undergoing
the most profound transformations.[7]
[7] The novelty of this proposition being still considerable and
history being quite unintelligible without it, I devoted four
chapters to its demonstration in my last book (“The Psychological
Laws of the Evolution of Peoples”). From it the reader will see
that, in spite of fallacious appearances, neither language,
religion, arts, or, in a word, any element of civilisation, can
pass, intact, from one people to another.
Environment, circumstances, and events represent the social
suggestions of the moment. They may have a considerable
influence, but this influence is always momentary if it be
contrary to the suggestions of the race; that is, to those which
are inherited by a nation from the entire series of its
ancestors.
We shall have occasion in several of the chapters of this work to
touch again upon racial influence, and to show that this
influence is so great that it dominates the characteristics
peculiar to the genius of crowds. It follows from this fact that
the crowds of different countries offer very considerable
differences of beliefs and conduct and are not to be influenced
in the same manner.
2. TRADITIONS
Traditions represent the ideas, the needs, and the sentiments of
the past. They are the synthesis of the race, and weigh upon us
with immense force.
The biological sciences have been transformed since embryology
has shown the immense influence of the past on the evolution of
living beings; and the historical sciences will not undergo a
less change when this conception has become more widespread. As
yet it is not sufficiently general, and many statesmen are still
no further advanced than the theorists of the last century, who
believed that a society could break off with its past and be
entirely recast on lines suggested solely by the light of reason.
A people is an organism created by the past, and, like every
other organism, it can only be modified by slow hereditary
accumulations.
It is tradition that guides men, and more especially so when they
are in a crowd. The changes they can effect in their traditions
with any ease, merely bear, as I have often repeated, upon names
and outward forms.
This circumstance is not to be regretted. Neither a national
genius nor civilisation would be possible without traditions. In
consequence man’s two great concerns since he has existed have
been to create a network of traditions which he afterwards
endeavours to destroy when their beneficial effects have worn
themselves out. Civilisation is impossible without traditions,
and progress impossible without the destruction of those
traditions. The difficulty, and it is an immense difficulty, is
to find a proper equilibrium between stability and variability.
Should a people allow its customs to become too firmly rooted, it
can no longer change, and becomes, like China, incapable of
improvement. Violent revolutions are in this case of no avail;
for what happens is that either the broken fragments of the chain
are pieced together again and the past resumes its empire without
change, or the fragments remain apart and decadence soon succeeds
anarchy.
The ideal for a people is in consequence to preserve the
institutions of the past, merely changing them insensibly and
little by little. This ideal is difficult to realise. The
Romans in ancient and the English in modern times are almost
alone in having realised it.
It is precisely crowds that cling the most tenaciously to
traditional ideas and oppose their being changed with the most
obstinacy. This is notably the case with the category of crowds
constituting castes. I have already insisted upon the
conservative spirit of crowds, and shown that the most violent
rebellions merely end in a changing of words and terms. At the
end of the last century, in the presence of destroyed churches,
of priests expelled the country or guillotined, it might have
been thought that the old religious ideas had lost all their
strength, and yet a few years had barely lapsed before the
abolished system of public worship had to be re-established in
deference to universal demands.[8]
[8] The report of the ex-Conventionist, Fourcroy, quoted by
Taine, is very clear on this point.
“What is everywhere seen with respect to the keeping of Sunday
and attendance at the churches proves that the majority of
Frenchmen desire to return to their old usages and that it is no
longer opportune to resist this natural tendency… . The
great majority of men stand in need of religion, public worship,
and priests. IT IS AN ERROR OF SOME MODERN PHILOSOPHERS, BY
WHICH I MYSELF HAVE BEEN LED AWAY, to believe in the possibility
of instruction being so general as to destroy religious
prejudices, which for a great number of unfortunate persons are a
source of consolation… . The mass of the people, then, must
be allowed its priests, its altars, and its public worship.”
Blotted out for a moment, the old traditions had resumed their
sway.
No example could better display the power of tradition on the
mind of crowds. The most redoubtable idols do not dwell in
temples, nor the most despotic tyrants in palaces; both the one
and the other can be broken in an instant. But the invisible
masters that reign in our innermost selves are safe from every
effort at revolt, and only yield to the slow wearing away of
centuries.
3. TIME
In social as in biological problems time is one of the most
energetic factors. It is the sole real creator and the sole
great destroyer. It is time that has made mountains with grains
of sand and raised the obscure cell of geological eras to human
dignity. The action of centuries is sufficient to transform any
given phenomenon. It has been justly observed that an ant with
enough time at its disposal could level Mount Blanc. A being
possessed of the magical force of varying time at his will would
have the power attributed by believers to God.
In this place, however, we have only to concern ourselves with
the influence of time on the genesis of the opinions of crowds.
Its action from this point of view is still immense. Dependent
upon it are the great forces such as race, which cannot form
themselves without it. It causes the birth, the growth, and the
death of all beliefs. It is by the aid of time that they acquire
their strength and also by its aid that they lose it.
It is time in particular that prepares the opinions and beliefs
of crowds, or at least the soil on which they will germinate.
This is why certain ideas are realisable at one epoch and not at
another. It is time that accumulates that immense detritus of
beliefs and thoughts on which the ideas of a given period spring
up. They do not grow at hazard and by chance; the roots of each
of them strike down into a long past. When they blossom it is
time that has prepared their blooming; and to arrive at a notion
of their genesis it is always back in the past that it is
necessary to search. They are the daughters of the past and the
mothers of the future, but throughout the slaves of time.
Time, in consequence, is our veritable master, and it suffices to
leave it free to act to see all things transformed. At the
present day we are very uneasy with regard to the threatening
aspirations of the masses and the destructions and upheavals
foreboded thereby. Time, without other aid, will see to the
restoration of equilibrium. “No form of government,” M. Lavisse
very properly writes, “was founded in a day. Political and
social organisations are works that demand centuries. The feudal
system existed for centuries in a shapeless, chaotic state before
it found its laws; absolute monarchy also existed for centuries
before arriving at regular methods of government, and these
periods of expectancy were extremely troubled.”
4. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
The idea that institutions can remedy the defects of societies,
that national progress is the consequence of the improvement of
institutions and governments, and that social changes can be
effected by decrees— this idea, I say, is still generally
accepted. It was the starting-point of the French Revolution,
and the social theories of the present day are based upon it.
The most continuous experience has been unsuccessful in shaking
this grave delusion. Philosophers and historians have
endeavoured in vain to prove its absurdity, but yet they have had
no difficulty in demonstrating that institutions are the outcome
of ideas, sentiments, and customs, and that ideas, sentiments,
and customs are not to be recast by recasting legislative codes.
A nation does not choose its institutions at will any more than
it chooses the colour of its hair or its eyes. Institutions and
governments are the product of the race. They are not the
creators of an epoch, but are created by it. Peoples are not
governed in accordance with their caprices of the moment, but as
their character determines that they shall be governed.
Centuries are required to form a political system and centuries
needed to change it. Institutions have no intrinsic virtue: in
themselves they are neither good nor bad. Those which are good
at a given moment for a given people may be harmful in the
extreme for another nation.
Moreover, it is in no way in the power of a people to really
change its institutions. Undoubtedly, at the cost of violent
revolutions, it can change their name, but in their essence they
remain unmodified. The names are mere futile labels with which
an historian who goes to the bottom of things need scarcely
concern himself. It is in this way, for instance, that
England,[9] the most democratic country in the world, lives,
nevertheless, under a monarchical regime, whereas the countries
in which the most oppressive despotism is rampant are the
Spanish-American Republics, in spite of their republican
constitutions. The destinies of peoples are determined by their
character and not by their government. I have endeavoured to
establish this view in my previous volume by setting forth
categorical examples.
[9] The most advanced republicans, even of the United States,
recognise this fact. The American magazine, The Forum, recently
gave categorical expression to the opinion in terms which I
reproduce here from the Review of Reviews for December, 1894:—
“It should never be forgotten, even by the most ardent enemies of
an aristocracy, that England is to-day the most democratic
country of the universe, the country in which the rights of the
individual are most respected, and in which the individual
possesses the most liberty.”
To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions
is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an
ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of
elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these
two factors to act. This is the plan the Anglo-Saxons have
adopted, as their great historian, Macaulay, teaches us in a
passage that the politicians of all Latin countries ought to
learn by heart. After having shown all the good that can be
accomplished by laws which appear from the point of view of pure
reason a chaos of absurdities and contradictions, he compares the
scores of constitutions that have been engulfed in the
convulsions of the Latin peoples with that of England, and points
out that the latter has
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