ed and fell when
the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old
autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this
theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not
explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their
own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up
in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been
far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and
Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times
the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton
part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic"
race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in
persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English
are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great
civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and
are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor
Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive
racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie,
"about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe.
Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our
peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the
older stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power
among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the
underlying races."[19]

Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old
race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present
civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan
civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of
neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical
civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It
is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and
Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as
furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the
South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine,
Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and
Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and
character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatis