dles, will probably learn to decorate their
handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the aesthetic taste thus aroused
will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the facades of their wooden
huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
naive expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
the savage breast, but the aesthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.

Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
to any great extent will arise among them. But, as soon as you permit
intermarriage to take place, the inherited and developed qualities of
the one race will be liable to crop up in the next generation, diversely
intermixed in every variety of degree with the inherited and developed
qualities of the other. The children may take after either parent in any
combination of qualities whatsoever. You have admitted an apparently
capricious element of individuality: a power on the part of the
half-breeds of differing from one another to an extent quite impossible
in the two original homogeneous societies. In one word, you have made
possible the future existence of diversity in character.

If, now, we turn from these perfectly simple savage communities to our
own very complex and heterogeneous world, what do we find? An endless
variety of soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, butchers, bakers,
candlestick makers, and jolly undertakers, most of whom fall into a
certain rough number of classes, each with its own developed and
inherited traits and peculiarities. Our world is made up, like the world
of ancient Egypt and of modern India, of an immense variety of separate
castes--not, indeed, rigidly demarcated and strictly limited as in those
extremely hierarchical societies, but still very fairly hereditary in
character, and given on the average to a tolerably close system of
intermarriage within the caste.

For example, there is the agricultural labourer caste--the Hodge
Chawbacon of urban humour, who in his military avatar also reappears as
Tommy Atkins, a little transfigured, but at bottom identical--the
alternative aspect of a single undivided central reality. Hodge for the
most part lives and d