atifying child would be the best
looked after, and the most gratifying would be the best specimen of the
standard then and there raised up.

Even so, I think there will be a disinclination to attribute so marked,
fixed, almost physical a thing as national character to causes so
evanescent as the imitation of appreciated habit and the persecution of
detested habit. But, after all, national character is but a name for a
collection of habits more or less universal. And this imitation and
this persecution in long generations have vast physical effects. The
mind of the parent (as we speak) passes somehow to the body of the
child. The transmitted 'something' is more affected by habits than, it
is by anything else. In time an ingrained type is sure to be formed,
and sure to be passed on if only the causes I have specified be fully
in action and without impediment.

As I have said, I am not explaining the origin of races, but of
nations, or, if you like, of tribes. I fully admit that no imitation of
predominant manner, or prohibitions of detested manners, will of
themselves account for the broadest contrasts of human nature. Such
means would no more make a Negro out of a Brahmin, or a Red-man out of
an Englishman, than washing would change the spots of a leopard or the
colour of an Ethiopian. Some more potent causes must co-operate, or we
should not have these enormous diversities. The minor causes I deal
with made Greek to differ from Greek, but they did not make the Greek
race. We cannot precisely mark the limit, but a limit there clearly is.

If we look at the earliest monuments of the human race, we find these
race-characters as decided as the race-characters now. The earliest
paintings or sculptures we anywhere have, give us the present contrasts
of dissimilar types as strongly as present observation. Within
historical memory no such differences have been created as those
between Negro and Greek, between Papuan and Red Indian, between
Esquimaux and Goth. We start with cardinal diversities; we trace only
minor modifications, and we only see minor modifications. And it is
very hard to see how any number of such modifications could change man
as he is in one race-type to man as he is in some other. Of this there
are but two explanations; ONE, that these great types were originally
separate creations, as they stand--that the Negro was made so, and the
Greek made so. But this easy hypothesis of special creation has been
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