A LEADING Social feature distinguishes America from the European nations. This is the union of the utmost individual independence and equality with a well-regulated social and political organization. This radical difference already existed in the germs out of which sprang the ancient, the European civilization, and this new world. In both cases, the embryo was different. Different was the historical process of formation. A principle begot the American society; force and conquest were the parents of the ancient one.

To the various characteristics of races are nowadays ascribed the various manifestations of social structures and civilizations, in their progressive unfolding. Such characteristics, wholly physical in their nature, are set up as exclusive and omnipotent agencies in the development of human destinies. They are supposed to constitute the power of man to elevate his existence, to elaborate the various conditions of his social culture. To those charac

teristics are subordinated all the other incentives and inspirations, which stimulate man's unappeasable activity; nay, they are said to constitute his mental and moral essence.

By the oscillations which mark the development of the world's history, the centre, the focus of civilization, became displaced from South to North. Now a verdict contrary tolistorical evidence: proclaims the so-called southern races of every region, of each hemisphere, to be deprived. of initiative, of active powers, in the labors and struggles for social amelioration. On account of the climate, and of certain presumed anatomical dissimilarities, they are declared to be too weak morally for freedom; too weak physically to be its supports and sanctuary,

In man, however, as in the universe, every thing is wonderfully united. In all regions and in all conditions, hẹ is endowed with the germs of similar passions, inclinations, tendencies, aspirations. Their development and play, actuated by the events and conditions which surround and press upon him, carry man decidedly astray at times in a special direction, or keep him more fully under the influence of his purer and indestructible essence. This law -if positive, well-defined laws are to be recognized-is human in its nature, all-embracing, and more elastic and expanding than that which, according to the variety of races and of their dwellings, distributes their participation and significance in the eternal epos of our social destinies.

Societies, nations, and states move, act and live by the combination of facts and events of the external world with internal human impulses and propensities. Sometimes the higher human powers succumb under the pressure of external, and merely material circumstances. Herein the true cause is to be found, amidst many explications, of the fluctuations of civilization, of its slow march, of its difficult expansion even in one and the same nation, dwelling in

the same region. Moreover, because, by the fortuitous concourse of events, a nation, mostly forming a small branch of what ethnologically is called race, and favored by peculiar combinations, has often become a leader of a given epoch, such ascendency was not predestined nor permanent. There have been several Ionic States, but only one Athenæ, and the Beotians were likewise Greeks. The same phenomenon is reproduced in the development of all the cardinal and secondary races.

The lights which illuminate the orbits of the human race were not enkindled simultaneously, but one by one. They radiated in various directions. Neither North nor South, neither this nor that primordial race, nor any branch issuing therefrom, has been, in ancient or in Christian times, the exclusive and predestined holder of the sacred fire. So neither the man of the North nor that of the South, is exclusively endowed with the love of liberty, or with exclusive mental and physical powers to secure and to sustain it. There is no social or historical law by which a special race is intrusted with the highest gifts which alone constitute the supremacy of man over the inferior creation. The tendency to happiness is common to all, as well as the efforts for amelioration. These tendencies manifest themselves differently, and at various epochs among various nations. They are evoked by accidents of human character, and constitute the brightest phenomena in the ascending movement of humanity. Their investigation unravels the laws by whose action nations appear and march on the stage of history.

And if there is an absolute historical law, revealed by the uninterrupted labor of the human race, by its struggles with nature and with itself, by the bloody as well as the luminous pages which fill history, by the efforts for ameliorating the moral and material state wherein consists

civilization, by the religious and philosophical speculations enkindled in the succession of ages, by the multifarious manifestations of the human spirit in literature, in refinement, in arts, in industrial, mechanical, and agricultural pursuits-it is the law of the successive appearance of races and nations in the course of history. It is the law of transmission from one to another of the sacred fire of civilization; it is the succession of nations to each other on the foreground of the events of ages. Not simultaneously in all places, and by all races and nations, but in succession. is civilization to be elaborated. When the time had arrived for calling a people to light and truth, it mattered. not whether it lived amid the snows of Scandinavia, or on the burning plains of India. The cause of this law has hitherto been hidden, unexplained, but the law speaks to the mind from all the pages, from all the events, from all the evolutions of history. There is no absolute reason why the light of civilization should not have spread simultaneously over the plains of Iran and over those of Germany-especially as branches of the same stock, of the same family or race, extended, moved, lived, worked, suffered and enjoyed over this space. But perhaps more than forty centuries elapsed before the light, already shining and evoking a higher life south of the Himalaya and along the Indus, reached the Rhine and the Atlantic. And in that space and time, how many, and how variously endowed actors, how many fertile ideas, and mental and social manifestations, what various utterances of the human mind have filled the ages, succeeded to each other, all of them in turns initiators and initiated into the great, mysterious and nevertheless luminous sanctuary of human development and progress. In this succession, each race or nation, in its time, brought its offerings, elaborated one or even many ideas, according to its own peculiarity, according to

special data and conditions. But the impulse, the aspiration towards progress and amelioration, the ethereal sparks of this life-giving fire, how different its manifestations; it was and is glimmering in the mind, in the bosom of man in all regions, all climes, and all physical conformations. A luminous current of culture runs throughout the whole history of the race, and constitutes its development. Sometimes rapid and broad, then at times slow and dimmed, but never interrupted. The tyranny exercised over historical and philosophical studies and comprehension, by the narrow-minded, one-sighted classicisms,-a tyranny resulting in a blind confidence and devotion to the axioms and verdicts of Greek and Roman writers,-overclouded the judg ment of sound, impartial reason. Thus, on Greek civilization and philosophy was bestowed a power of virtual originality and self-creation unjustified by the investigation into the history of human development. In our times, another tyranny prevails and overshadows the mind; a tyranny more exclusive, because concentrating in one race all the better and higher endowments of man, endowments constituting the higher essence in which consists the culture of our time. It is presumptuously asserted, that only northern races are enabled to achieve civilization, in all its various mental, social, and material manifestations; that only a few northern nations are the exclusive bearers and the agents of the culture of the globe. Thus the modern post-Roman civilization-according to this haughty verdict -is exclusively worked out by the German mind, the German race. On this continent, freedom, democracy, activity, those highest goods and conditions of the happiness of man, are to form in their turn, preëminently, if not exclusively, the lot of a single family—the Anglo-Saxon one. How little history justifies all this sweeping range of assertions, can be shown by taking the evidence even at random