y has
gone with isolation and inexperience, have borne comparatively little
spiritual fruit. Large contact and concentrated living bring out native
genius, but mixture with an inferior stock can only tend to obliterate
it. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great as
when they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at the
same time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness fails
inwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation.

There is something unmistakably illiberal, almost superstitious, in
standing on race for its own sake, as if origins and not results were of
moral value. It matters nothing what blood a man has, if he has the
right spirit; and if there is some ground for identifying the two (since
monkeys, however educated, are monkeys still) it is only when blood
means character and capacity, and is tested by them, that it becomes
important. Nor is it unjust to level the individual, in his political
and moral status, with the race to which he belongs, if this race holds
an approved position. Individual gifts and good intentions have little
efficacy in the body politic if they neither express a great tradition
nor can avail to found one; and this tradition, as religion shows, will
falsify individual insights so soon as they are launched into the public
medium. The common soul will destroy a noble genius in absorbing it, and
therefore, to maintain progress, a general genius has to be invoked; and
a general genius means an exceptional and distinct race.

[Sidenote: True nationality direction on a definite ideal.]

Environment, education, fashion, may be all powerful while they last and
may make it seem a prejudice to insist on race, turning its assumed
efficacy into a sheer dogma, with fanatical impulses behind it; yet in
practice the question will soon recur: What shall sustain that
omnipotent fashion, education, or environment? Nothing is more
treacherous than tradition, when insight and force are lacking to keep
it warm. Under Roman dominion, the inhabitants of Sparta still submitted
to the laws of Lycurgus and their life continued to be a sort of
ritualistic shadow of the past. Those enfranchised helots thought they
were maintaining a heroic state when, in fact, they were only turning
its forms into a retrospective religion. The old race was practically
extinct; ephors, gymnasia, and common meals could do nothing to
revive it. The ways of the Roman world--a kind