way lie on the surface; it is not in the same way grounded on
obvious facts which are plain to every man's understanding. The
doctrine of race is essentially an artificial doctrine, a learned
doctrine. It is an inference from facts which the mass of mankind
could never have found out for themselves; facts which, without a
distinctly learned teaching, could never be brought home to them in any
intelligible shape. Now what is the value of such a doctrine? Does it
follow that, because it is confessedly artificial, because it springs,
not from a spontaneous impulse, but from a learned teaching, it is
therefore necessarily foolish, mischievous, perhaps unnatural? It may
perhaps be safer to hold that like many other doctrines, many other
sentiments, it is neither universally good nor universally bad, neither
inherently wise nor inherently foolish. It may be safer to hold that
it may, like other doctrines and sentiments, have a range within which
it may work for good, while in some other range it may work for evil.
It may in short be a doctrine which is neither to be rashly accepted,
nor rashly cast aside, but one which may need to be guided, regulated,
modified, according to time, place, and circumstance. I am not now
called on so much to estimate the practical good and evil of the
doctrine as to work out what the doctrine itself is, and to try to
explain some difficulties about it, but I must emphatically say that
nothing can be more shallow, nothing more foolish, nothing more purely
sentimental, than the talk of those who think that they can simply
laugh down or shriek down any doctrine or sentiment which they
themselves do not understand. A belief or a feeling which has a
practical effect on the conduct of great masses of men, sometimes on
the conduct of whole nations, may be very false and very mischievous;
but it is in every case a great and serious fact, to be looked gravely
in the face. Men who sit at their ease and think that all wisdom is
confined to themselves and their own clique may think themselves vastly
superior to the great emotions which stir our times, as they would
doubtless have thought themselves vastly superior to the emotions which
stirred the first Saracens or the first Crusaders. But the emotions
are there all the same, and they do their work all the same. The most
highly educated man in the most highly educated society cannot sneer
them out of being.

But it is time to pass to the more