Note 35 — Chapter III · THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY

We are far from implying that there are no pure sub-varieties of Europeans even at the present day. In sequestered valleys and villages there undoubtedly are still folk who have not mingled their blood for at least two thousand years, and the inhabitants of certain Welsh valleys, Cornish hamlets, and villages in Brittany and Spain, though now divided from each other by speech, and nationality, may be absolutely of one blood and one descent. That even the artificial national lines which were drawn in the middle ages, and which form the basis of our national divisions at the present day, do coincide in some ways with more or less organic distinctions, we fully allow. In that great medley of Teutonic peoples who inhabit the German Empire to-day, there does really appear one mental characteristic which might almost mark them off from the rest of Europeans as a distinct variety; this is the musical talent. All the greatest composers have been Germans, almost every peasant and burgher you meet finds music an important element in his existence. Yet is this peculiarity wholly organic? The English are the least musical of all European nations, yet it is notorious that a family of English children reared in Germany exhibit often the same serious passion for music, the same knowledge of it, and even the same power of producing it. No two European nations are more unlike than the French and English, yet perhaps the most typical Frenchman we ever met was an Englishman born in Paris. And there can be little doubt that a French boy reared from birth in English surroundings would share the true Anglican worship for rough outdoor games, and if fed plentifully from youth upward on large quantities of beef, pudding, and ale, and leading an outdoor life, would at least as much resemble the typical John Bull of big belly, double chin, and red face, as do the Englishmen of America and the Colonies! The fact is that nine-tenths of what are popularly known as national peculiarities are not even skin-deep. This is proved when men of different nationalities are thrown into the crucible of Colonial life; after two generations spent there, if exposed to the same conditions and using the same speech, the nationality is almost undiscoverable. We in the Colonies, who stand at a vantage for perceiving how real up to a certain point are the European national peculiarities, and yet how essentially superficial, know that even the Irishman, whose peculiarities are more marked than those of any other purely European race, cannot with any certainty be distinguished from his fellows of other blood after a couple of generations, if born in a Colony. Even in the case of the Semitic Jew who does form a distinct variety, breeding more or less true, national characteristics are vulgarly attributed to blood which are undoubtedly the result of circumstance. A Jew severed from his social atmosphere and brought up in a society in which wealth was at a discount and scientific and literary attainment at a premium, would no doubt turn that intellectual fertility which is the gift of his blood into those directions; and though his descendants would undoubtedly inherit his nose, they would probably show no inherent tendency to lend money at sixty per cent.