ething to you about their brother being President
some day. As the minds of the young are formed, generally speaking, to
an adaptation to the objects presented to them, their preference of
warlike to commercial, or literary to political honour, is an eloquent
circumstance: and so of their sense of greatness in any
direction,--whether it be of the physical order, or the intellectual, or
the spiritual.

* * * * *

From this, the transition is natural to the study of the character of
the Pride of each nation. Learn what people glory in, and you learn much
of both the theory and practice of their morals. All nations, like all
individuals, have pride, sooner or later, in one thing or another. It is
a stage through which they have to pass in their moral progression, and
out of which the most civilized have not yet advanced, nor discerned
that they will have to advance, though the passion becomes moderated at
each remove from barbarism. It is by no means clear that the essential
absurdity of each is relieved by its dilution. Hereafter, the most
modern pride of the most civilized people may appear as ridiculous in
its nature as the grossest conceit of utter barbarians now appears to
us; but, still, the direction taken by the general pride must show what
class of objects is held in most esteem.

The Chinese have no doubt that all other countries are created for the
benefit of theirs; they call their own "the central empire," as certain
philosophers once called our earth the centre round which everything
else was to revolve. They call it the Celestial Empire, of which their
ruler is the Sun: "they profess to rule barbarians by misrule, like
beasts, and not like native subjects." Here we have the extreme of
national pride, which must involve various moral qualities;--all the bad
ones which are the consequence of ignorance, subservience to domestic
despotism, and contempt of the race of man; and the good ones which are
the consequence of national seclusion,--cheerful industry, social
complacency, quietness, and order.--The Arab pride bears a resemblance
to the Chinese, but is somewhat refined and spiritualized. The Arabs
believe that the earth, "spread out like a bed," and upheld by a
gigantic angel (the angel standing upon a rock, and the rock upon a
bull, and the bull upon a fish, and the fish floating upon water, and
the water upon darkness,)--that the earth, thus upheld, is surrounded by
the Ci