The Irish Race in the Past and the Present | Page 4

When we take two extreme types of the human species--the Ashantee
of Guinea, for instance, and any individual of one of the great civilized
communities of Europe-the phenomenon of which we speak strikes us
at once. But it may be remarked also, in comparing nations which have
lived for ages in contiguity, and held constant intercourse one with the
other from the time they began their national life, whose only
boundary-line has been a mountain-chain or the banks of a broad river.
They have each striking peculiarities which individualize and stamp
them with a character of their own.
How different are the peoples divided by the Rhine or by the Pyrenees!
How unlike those which the Straits of Dover run between! And in Asia,
what have the conterminous Chinese and Hindoos in common beyond
the general characteristics of the human species which belong to all the
children of Adam?
But what we must chiefly insist upon in the investigation we are Now
undertaking is, that the life of each is manifested by a special
physiognomy deeply imprinted in their whole history, which we here
call character. What each of them is their history shows; and there is no
better means of judging of them than by reviewing the various events
which compose their life.
For the various events which go to form what is called the history of a
nation are its individual actions, the spontaneous energy of its life; and,
as a man shows what he is by his acts, so does a nation or a race by the

facts of its history.
When we compare the vast despotisms of Asia, crystallized into forms
which have scarcely changed since the first settlement of man in those
immense plains, with the active and ever-moving smaller groups of
Europeans settled in the west of the Old World since the dispersion of
mankind, we see at a glance how the characters of both may be read in
their respective annals. And, coming down gradually to less extreme
cases, we recognize the same phenomenon manifested even in
contiguous tribes, springing long ago, perhaps, from the same stock,
but which have been formed into distinct nations by distinct ancestors,
although they acknowledge a common origin. The antagonism in their
character is immediately brought out by what historians or annalists
have to say of them.
Are not the cruelty and rapacity of the old Scandinavian race Still
visible in their descendants? And the spirit of organization displayed by
them from the beginning in the seizure, survey, and distribution of
land--in the building of cities and castles--in the wise speculations of an
extensive commerce--may not all these characteristics be read
everywhere in the annals of the nations sprung from that original stock,
grouped thousands of years ago around the Baltic and the Northern
Seas?
How different appear the pastoral and agricultural tribes which have,
for the same length of time, inhabited the Swiss valleys and mountains!
With a multitude of usages, differing all, more or less, from each other;
with, perhaps, a wretched administration of internal affairs; with
frequent complaints of individuals, and partial conflicts among the
rulers of those small communities--with all these defects, their simple
and ever-uniform chronicles reveal to us at once the simplicity and
peaceful disposition of their character; and, looking at them through the
long ages of an obscure life, we at once recognize the cause of their
general happiness in their constant want of ambition.
And if, in the course of centuries, the character of a nation has
changed--an event which seldom takes place, and when it does is due
always to radical causes--its history will immediately make known to
us the cause of the change, and point out unmistakably its origin and
source.
Why is it, for instance, that the French nation, after having lived for

near a thousand years under a single dynasty, cannot now find a
government agreeable to its modern aspirations? It is insufficient to
ascribe the fact to the fickleness of the French temper. During ten
centuries no European nation has been more uniform and more attached
to its government. If to-day the case is altogether reversed, the fact
cannot be explained except by a radical change in the character of the
nation. Firmly fixed by its own national determination of purpose and
by the deep studies of the Middle Ages--nowhere more remarkable than
in Paris, which was at that time the centre of the activity of Catholic
Europe--the French mind, first thrown by Protestantism into the vortex
of controversy, gradually declined to the consideration of mere
philosophical utopias, until, rejecting at last its long-received
convictions, it abandoned itself to the ever-shifting delusions of
opinions and theories, which led finally to skepticism and unbelief in
every branch of knowledge, even the most necessary to the happiness
of