Note 100 — Chapter XIII · THE HUMAN RACES ARE INTELLECTUALLY UNEQUAL; MANKIND IS NOT CAPABLE OF INFINITE PROGRESS

One is sometimes led to consider the government of the United States of America as an original creation, peculiar to our time; its most remarkable feature is taken to be the small amount of opportunity left for Government initiative or even interference. Yet if we cast our eyes over the early years of all the States founded by the white race, we shall find exactly the same phenomenon. “Self-government” is no more triumphant in New York to-day, than it was in Paris at the time of the Franks. It is true that the Indians are treated far less humanely by the Americans than the Gallo-Romans were by the nobles of Chlodwig. But we must remember that the racial difference between the enlightened Republicans of the New World and their victims is far greater than that between the Germanic conqueror and those he conquered.

In fact, all Aryan societies began by exaggerating their independence as against the law and the magistrates.

The power of political invention possessed by the world cannot, I think, travel outside the boundaries traced by two particular peoples, one of them living in the north-east of Europe, the other on the banks of the Nile, in the extreme south of Egypt. The Government of the first of these peoples (in Bolgari, near Kazan) was accustomed to “order men of intelligence to be hanged” as a preventive measure. We owe our knowledge of this interesting fact to the Arabian traveller Ibn Foszlan (A. von Humboldt, Asie centrale, vol. i, p. 494). In the other nation, living at Fazoql, whenever the king did not give satisfaction, his relations and ministers came and told him so. They informed him that since he no longer pleased “the men, women, children, oxen, asses,” &c., the best thing he could do was to die; they then proceeded to help him to his death as speedily as possible (Lepsius, Briefe aus Ägypten, Äthiopien, und der Halbinsel des Sinai; Berlin, 1852).