y be fused into a homogeneous whole by the
absorption of one into the other--of the smaller into the greater, or of
the town-dwellers into the country stock. The result of this law is,
that mixed nations will tend with the progress of time to revert to their
original types, and either fall apart into petty groups and provincial
distinctions, as in Spain, or will eliminate the weaker or less numerous
race, the old or the new, as the one or the other predominates. The
political character of our English nation has changed from that which it
was in the time of the Plantagenets by discharging from it the Norman
blood; and our unceasing trouble with the Irish is a proof that we have
not yet made Englishmen of them, as perhaps we never shall. A very keen
observer, M. Erckman, in conversation with the _Times_ correspondent, of
the 21st December, 1870, made a remark upon the state of France which is
so illustrative of this position, as regards that country, that I cannot
forbear to give it in his own words. The correspondent had expressed his
fear that, if the war were prolonged, France would lapse into anarchy.
"It is not that," said M. Erckman, "which fills me with apprehension. It
is rather the gulf which I begin to fear is widening between the two
great races of France. The world is not cognisant of this; but I have
watched it with foreboding." "Define me the two types." "They shade
into each other; but I will take, as perhaps extremes, the Gascon, and
the Breton." "He proceeded," says the correspondent, "to sketch the
characteristics of the people of Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony, and to
contrast them with those of Brittany, middle, and north France, their
idiosyncrasies of race, feeling, religion, manners--their diverse
aspirations, their antagonisms. For sufficient reasons I pass over his
remarks." A still more striking case of the kind is that of Egypt, a
country that for more than 2,000 years has been subject to foreign
conquerors, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Mamelukes, and
the annual influx of many thousand negro slaves, and where,
notwithstanding all this, the peasantry, as far as can be judged by a
careful examination of the skull, is identical with the population of the
Pharaonic period.

This, then, being assumed, that a turbid mixture of different races has a
tendency to separate after a time into its constituent elements, and
certain originally distinct types to re-appear with their c