m of
their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared
higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained
warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen
God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And
though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ
himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and
not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediaeval painters
of Germany and Holland.

It is no doubt true that the invaders and the immigrants have often
achieved more in their new surroundings than in their homelands, as the
Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten
that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of
their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their
making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the
spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before they
arrived.

Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the
determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people,
admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system
of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar
with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland
we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of
many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race,
white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of
conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through
prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not
to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have
priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his
mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is
succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith
to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when,
in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a
new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from
the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued,
tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human
advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder
the new, and when he finds he can no long