the result of his traditions and
training, there does go this gift in the matter of religion. Yet, on
the other hand, we find millions of Jews who are totally and markedly
deficient in it, and to base any practical legislation for the
individual even on this proven intellectual aptitude of the race as a
whole would be manifestly as ridiculous as abortive. Yet more markedly,
with the German--no consideration of his physical peculiarities, though
it proceeded to the subtlest analysis of nerve, bone, and muscle, could
in the present stage of our knowledge have proved to us what generations
of experience appear to have proved, that, with that organisation which
constitutes the German, goes an unique aptitude for music. There is
always the possibility of mistaking the result of training and external
circumstance for inherent tendency, but when we consider the passion for
music which the German has shown, and when we consider that the greatest
musicians the world has seen, from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to
Wagner, have been of that race, it appears highly probable that such a
correlation between the German organisation and the intellectual gift of
music does exist. Similar intellectual peculiarities seem to be connoted
by the external differences which mark off other races from each other.
Nevertheless, were persons of all of these nationalities gathered in one
colony, any attempt to legislate for their restriction to certain forms
of intellectual labour on the ground of their apparently proved national
aptitudes or disabilities, would be regarded as insane. To insist that
all Jews, and none but Jews, should lead and instruct in religious
matters; that all Englishmen, and none but Englishmen, should engage in
trade; that each German should make his living by music, and none but
a German allowed to practise it, would drive to despair the unfortunate
individual Englishman, whose most marked deficiency might be in the
direction of finance and bartering trade power; the Jew, whose religious
instincts might be entirely rudimentary; or the German, who could not
distinguish one note from another; and the society as a whole would be
an irremediable loser, in one of the heaviest of all forms of social
loss--the loss of the full use of the highest capacities of all its
members.

It may be that with sexes as with races, the subtlest physical
difference between them may have their fine mental correlatives; but no
abstract consideratio