Celtic race, the Germanic race, the Slavic race, the Latin race, and the Greek race. None of these races is to-day free from admixture, and in some of them the primitive type and genius of the race have almost entirely disappeared before the frequency and violence of crossings with other races. Thus, the Latin race, the stock from which the Italian nation of to-day has come, has been singularly changed for the worse by the admixture of Greek, German, Ligurian and Gallic blood which it underwent in the course of its long history; in France the Celtic blood has been intermingled with Roman and German blood; in Spain the Iberian, with Gothic and Moorish blood; the Germanic tribes, especially in the extreme limits of the vast country which they inhabit, have received a strong infusion of Slavic blood; and the Slaves, subject to an influx of German and Greek blood, mingled with Mongolian and OugroFinnish, can scarcely be said to be any purer than the others, although they are the latest comers among the civilized nations, and their primitive type should, in consequence, be less worn out than that of their sister races, by the fatigues of history and the labor of centuries. The oldest in the civilization of the races of Europe, is the Greek or Ionian race, the sons of Javan (Ionians), as the Bible calls them, a race which succeeded, on Hellenic soil, to a race called Pelasgic. Next after the Semitic race, this race has rendered the greatest services to civilization. If humanity owes all its religious development to the Semitic race, it owes all its intellectual development to the Greek race. It truly deserves the name of the chosen race among the Japhetic nations, as did the Jewish people among the descendants of Shem. They are the true sons of Io and Prometheus, and when we see the mighty gifts which their imperishable works still present to our admiration, we are almost inclined to believe that their emigration carried off the cream of the entire youth of the great Japhetic family. It is to them we owe that religion of polytheism, that brilliant invention of poetic and graceful minds, which subdued and humanized the old natural religions, and which, by confounding the mysterious forces of the world with human force, produced that conception of the poetic ideal which has since become the true religion of all poets; for this name of Indo-Germanic has been given them by comparative philology, which has established the relationship of nearly all the European nations by the analogy of their different languages with the sacred language of India, the Sanscrit. This analogy once established, the consequence was easily drawn; since the Sanscrit was the common source of the languages of the different peoples of Europe, these peoples must evidently have sprung from a common source, and are all but branches of the race whose language the Sanscrit was. What was this race? and what country did it first inhabit? The most recent researches in ethnology and philology have established the fact that this part of the great Caucasian family from which the Indo-Germanic races have sprung, inhabited that part of Asia which extends from the Caucasus to Bactriana, and was divided into two great tribes, the Aryans and the Iranians. The Aryans are the source of the superior classes of Hindostan, which country they conquered; the Iranians have continued even to the present time almost without admixture in Persia, of which country they still form the chief population. Everything that is of any capital importance to us, in the civilizations of the ancient east, everything that interests our imagination in the history of Asia, everything of oriental origin that has contributed, either directly or indirectly, to our modern life, comes to us from these ancestors of our race. The aristocratic system of caste, Brahmanism, and later on, Buddhism, are the work of men of the Aryan race; the vast undertaking of the military and administrative monarchy of ancient Persia, and the religion of the two principles, are the work of men of the Iranian race. - The Japhetic race, the most enterprising, the most movable and the most inventive of all the races, seems to have carly felt the love of enterprise and adventure. If we would present, under a brief and poetic form, what our imagination perceives confusedly in these remote ages, we must take as symbols of the genius of our ancestors, two characters in the great tragedy of Eschylus, who knew some of the secrets of some of the origins of our race, Prometheus and Io, two victims of ambition, adventure and enterprise. Prometheus admirably symbolizes the boldness of invention of the Japhetic race; and the wild course of Io, goaded by the breeze-fly, their long-conception holds the same place in literature that ing for emigration and travel; and, if the word be not too mean to use in speaking on such a subject, I would freely add, the mania for change of place which seems to have possessed our barbarous ancestors. The same love of conquest which urged on the Aryans in India, impelled, at different times, other tribes of the Japhetic race into Europe, and many successive emigrations, the dates of which are uncertain, landed them upon that continent, until at length they gained entire possession of it. The actual descendants of the peoples who effected these old migrations are divided into innumerable families, but they may be all ranked under five principal heads: the the dream of moral perfection does in religion. It was the Greek race that transformed the barbarous industries of primitive times, and developed the fine arts out of the useful trades, just as it had developed the literary ideal from the religion of nature. In all intellectual matters we reap today the benefits of Greek civilization; we are indebted to it for our knowledge of the rules of architecture and sculpture; we have received from it our philosophy; and half the literature of modern Europe is but an offshoot of the literature of Greece. Finally, when Christianity appeared in the world, it was Greece that undertook to form its dogmas for it, to construct its metaphysics, and to define its mysteries. Christianity owes the speculative part of its character to the Greek race, as it owes its political organization to the Roman race. It was the Greek race also that instilled civilization into the barbaric races, against which it defended the Byzantine empire during a thousand years, so that the civilization of the future, as well as that of the past, belongs to Greece; for the Slaves, who threaten Europe with a renewal or making over again, represent the Byzantine civilization, and consequently the Greek mind. Crushed by three centuries of oppression, invaded by barbarism which has incessantly flowed in upon it for fifteen centuries, marred by admixtures of Slavic and Turkish blood, the Greek race of to-day is not what it was; nevertheless, we still recognize in the modern Greeks the traits of the ancient type, and the qualities of the ancient genius of the race, just as we recognize the beauty of a statue, despite the mutilations which it has received, and the distinctness of a likeness, spite of the rust which covers it. — The Latins, who are the source from which the Italian people sprang, present a most marked contrast to the Greek race, a contrast which must have been peculiarly striking in the beginning, and which is attested by the differences of the civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans. As the Greek race is lively, pliable, made for labor and intelligence, so the Latin race is strong, serious, heavy, made for conquest, domination and practical interests. If the Greek race has the appearance of being made up of the youth of the Japhetic race, the Latin race has the appearance of being composed of an emigration of sedate men, who had reached the age of serious interests, and know no other sentiment than ambition, half sacerdotal and half warlike. This twofold character is found in the origin of the Latin race; through Etruria it is sacerdotal, through Rome it is warlike; but neither religion nor glory is its end; with it everything speedily takes a worldly and practical turn. It knows only force and interest; but how well it knows these! It was Rome that created the organization of force called conquest, and that organization of interests called administration. But it did not stop here. Inspired by its rugged and powerful genius, it raised its concrete notions of force and interest to the height of absolute abstractions; it created the metaphysics of force, and called it politics, and the metaphysics of interest, to which it gave the name of jurisprudence. This instinct is so strong that it does not overlook even things which seem most opposed to it, literature and religion. Sacerdotal rather than truly religious, as soon as Christianity was presented to it, it hastened to organize it, and gave to it, in the Catholic church and the papacy, its own political institutions. The essential traits of this profoundly positive genius and of this character made for domination and the enjoyment of earthly goods, are found again in the Italians of the middle ages and of modern times, but with important modifications, brought about by time, the accidents of history and the intermingling of races. The centre of the Latin race was changed during the middle ages, and transferred to Tuscany; the Italian genius gained by this change a flexibility and aptitude for ideality which it did not possess in ancient times, and because of this change, Europe is indebted to Italy more than to any other nation for the revival of arts and letters at the end of the middle ages known as the renaissance. - The Celtic race, which formerly occupied all of Gaul and Great Britain, and a great part of the territories of Belgium and Helvetia, can not now be found anywhere in a pure state except in Armorica, or French Brittany, in Wales, in Scotland, particularly in the Highlands, in the Shetland and Hebrides islands, and finally, in Ireland. The domain of this valiant, imaginative, sensitive and adventurous race, once so extensive, is now reduced to this mere remnant of territory. The Celts are the most interesting and unfortunate of all the barbaric races. Their conquerors, exasperated by their stubborn resistance, never spared them, but always pitilessly tracked them, and exterminated them without mercy. This race owes its cruel destiny in part to its very qualities: its extreme sensitiveness often turned into harmful rage, imprudent, hasty hatred, and capricious sallies of contempt, while it on the other hand, easily engendered despair, discouragement and silent melancholy. This sensibility explains why the Celts have never been able, despite their valor, to preserve their independence, and why, after having lost it, they have never been able to cause their masters to bid them welcome, or to make their subjection the starting point of a new destiny. Conquered races have been known to govern their conquerors, like the Greeks, or to use the masters which fate had given them, like the Italians generally; but the Celts have never been capable of such miracles. The Celt does not know how to control his emotions: when victorious, he abandons himself to the proud intoxication of triumph; when vanquished, he falls into a mournful despair, or becomes the prey of a frantic rage which injures only himself and deprives him of all sympathy. To this extreme sensibility is added a fine and charming imagination, which renders him the slave of fancies and of habit, and thus forms a new source of danger. He is slow to accord his esteem or love to political or religious innovations; but once he has given it, it is given for centuries, and he will not abandon anything which he has set his heart on, even when experience has condemned it. Thus he is always behind the general progress of civilization, and figures in history as the champion of lost causes. Of all the barbaric races, the Celts were the last to submit to Christianity, and the difficulty of their conversion seems surprising when we consider the prompt submission of the Germanic races to the new religion. The papacy encountered in them its first adversaries, and, later, its most devoted defenders; the French monarchy was kept constantly at war defending itself against their revolts Celtic race. down to the very outbreak of the revolution of | manifest all the principal characteristics of the 1789; yet this revolution met with no more irreconcilable enemies than the Vendeans and Bretons; and it is a well-known fact that the obstinate resistance of the Highlanders prolonged the contest entered into in England between the monarchy of the Stuarts and the Protestant dynasty. -The Celtic race is not the only one which preserves itself pure and unmixed only in certain provinces or portions of territory; the same is true of the Iberian race, which is the basis of the population of Spain and probably of Portugal, and which has continued in its purity only within the narrow confines of the Basque provinces. Are the Iberians an Indo-Germanic or an Ougrian | or Finnish race? Opinions are divided, and the question is a doubtful one. Some ethnologists, basing their opinion on the characters of the Basque language, say that the Iberians belong to the Finnish race; others see in them a separate branch of the Celtic race. However this may be, frequent interminglings seem to have occurred at an early period between the Iberians and the Celts, and the mixed race thus produced, the Celtiberians, constitutes, to a great extent the basis of the population of Ireland. In truth, the genius of the Iberian race is very different from that of the Celts; the two races have little more than one trait in common, a fierce valor; but this valor manifested itself among the Iberians from the earliest ages with a gloomy energy and a firmness of resistance entirely unknown to the adventurous and brilliant courage of the Celtic race. The mixture of the Latin race with the Celtic and Iberian races produced the nations of central Europe, which are without distinction called Latin nations, notwithstanding the well-defined differences of their inhabitants. France, Spain, Portugal and Italy constitute this class. The basis of the population of Spain has remained Iberian, and that of the population of France, Gallic; the admixture of Roman or Germanic blood has not so changed the characteristics of the two nations as to render them unrecognizable, and it is easy to observe in the soldiers of modern France the descendants of those Galatians who raised their swords aloft when it thundered to hold up the heavens if they should fall, as it is also easy to recognize the descendants of the defenders of Numantia in the defenders of Saragossa. The action of the Latin race upon the two nations has been more moral than physical; it has rendered them capable of discipline, initiated them into a higher civilization, and neutralized and even destroyed the fatality of blood and the obstacles of instinct. Thanks to this initiation, the Celtic genius especially, crushed or impotent everywhere else, developed in France, and gave to the world all that it contained. At once adventurous and fond of routine, utopist and retrograde, violently revolutionary, and conservative to the extreme, the enemy of tradition and the slave of habit, idealistic and skeptical, quick to undertake and easily discouraged, the French clearly But what a marvelous transformation these characteristics have undergone! The lively sensibility of the Celt has been changed into a spirit of humanity and justice; his love of habit has become a sentiment of patriotism; his lively, pure, moral, elevated imagination, the most moral, most elevated and most truly religious of all the barbaric races, has translated itself into a literature of a noble, moral, abstract, refined and idealistic character, disdaining the pleasures of the flesh and of the blood, and loving the pleasures of the mind, to such a point as to forget their reality. Thus the least carnal of the barbaric races has produced, under the influence of Latin discipline, the most idealistic nation in the world. France is the champion par excellence of absolute causes and of moral interests. She has successively given to the world the ideal of all the institutions and the moral theory of all the governments which have appeared, one after another, during the past fifteen hundred years. She has been the champion par excellence of the papacy, that moral ideal of the Catholic church; she drew from the feudal system the ideal of chivalry, she conceived the ideal of monarchy, she produced in Calvinism the most absolute and most metaphysical form of reformed Christianity; finally, she conceived, by the French revolution, the ideal of the government of human societies based upon absolute right and abstract reason, and not upon the fatality of circumstances and the contingency of human events. After Greece and Rome, no country has done more for humanity than France. - The Germanic race is the most powerful, materially, of all the races. It not only occupies all the vast territory known in Europe as Germany, but it embraces also, under the name of the Scandinavian race, Denmark and Sweden, and under the name of the Anglo-Saxon race, England, and the United States of North America. It has ever been a remarkable peculiarity of this race, that it has manifested more life at its extremities than at its centre, and, to use the language of its metaphysicians, realized itself outside itself. This peculiarity is an essentially distinctive mark of its political, if not of its intellectual and moral, history. If any one desires an expression of the political genius of the Germanic race, he should seek it, not in Germany, but in the nations which have sprung from it, in the branches which its great trunk has put forth, England and the United States, for instance. The idea of individual liberty, of self-government and the sentiment of self-reliance, which are the most valuable contributions the Germanic race has made to the world, have found their full and entire realization in England and the United States. The material conquest of the globe belongs more to this race than to any other: in the barbaric ages they were the most intrepid conquerors, the best founders of kingdoms, and displayed faculties which distinguished them as rulers and governors; in modern times they make the most active merchants, the most adventurous colonizers, the most energetic explorers and pioneers. Moral civili- | history, which they ardently aspire to take full zation owes more to other races; material civiliza- | possession of, in order to inscribe their name on its tion owes as much to none; for no other has done so much in the way of discovery, in the conquest and transformation of our globe. Its profound genius seems to be in contradiction with this political destiny; but upon close consideration, the contradiction disappears. This genius seems to be unreal and mystic; at bottom, it studies only man and nature, and, profoundly practical even in metaphysical revery and speculation, it seeks only to penetrate into hidden realities, to separate real from apparent truth, and to comprehend the inner structure of objects. The end of Germanic speculation is to penetrate the soil of thought to its very tufa in order to explain the brilliant vegetation that appears at its surface. Thus it is that Germany, of all nations, has best explained man to man, has best demonstrated how he thinks, what instinctive methods he employs, what are the unconscious processes of his logic, by what concatenation his visions become facts, his ideas civilizations, his phantoms doctrines; how the conditions of his existence force him to imagine the truth, and, as a consequence, to express himself by sym. bols. The practice of self-government, the conquest of the material world and the revelation of the internal structure of the moral man: such is the magnificent part of the Germanic race in general civilization. -The Slavic race is the most widely diffused race of modern Europe. It comprises nearly all the peoples subject to the dominion of Austria, with the exception of the Magyars, who belong to the Ougrian race, and of a few Wallachians scattered here and there, especially in Transylvania, who belong to the Danubian principalities, and are the descendants of Latin colonies of the empire established in Dacia; the Dalmatians, the Illyrians, the Serbians, the Croatians, the Czechs, etc.; the peoples of the Turkish empire, known as Greco-Slaves, of Poland and Russia. Although the youngest of the European races, it has not escaped intermixture any more than the others; in Russia there has been an influx of Mongolian and Finnish blood; in Poland, of Sarmatian blood; and in other parts, of Turkish, Greek and Germanic blood. Some peoples, the Cossacks for example, are a mixture of several races. The Slavic race has penetrated very far, and in the middle ages was the warlike and invading race par excellence. It required all the strength of Germany to check its inroads; and the history of the German empire for several centuries is merely a history of the resistance of the west to this permanent inundation of the Slaves, who, at the same time that they threatened the young civilization of Latin Europe, overran and destroyed the old civilization of eastern Europe. Prussia, for example, is the product of an inundation of Slaves restrained by Germanic barriers, and the German empire became powerful only after the two great Slavic monarchies of the middle ages, Bohemia and Poland, were conquered or enfeebled. The Slaves are the last comers into | pages with the names of their elder brothers in civilization. Each of the nations of modern Europe has aspired to political preponderance, and has obtained it for a greater or less length of time. This is now the ambition of the Slaves, who have begun, in Russia, the realization of their mighty dream. The Slavic genius is remarkably mild, social, subtle, imaginative, mystical, and entirely | distinct from the genius of the other European races. It is impossible to tell for what benefits civilization will be indebted to this latent genius in posse, but we may, however, foresee, that, if the idea of fraternity is to be transformed into institutions and introduced into the political life of nations as those of equality and liberty have been already introduced, humanity will owe this result to the Slavic race, which understands this sentiment more profoundly than any of the other races, just as the Celtic and Latin races best understand equality, and the Saxon race liberty. — We have now reached the end of this long description of the various races of the human family. What conclusions shall we draw from what we have stated? Shall we admit that these families, irremediably separated by their genius, are condemned by the fatality of their instincts to continue to the end of time in a state of aggression, or that they are destined to be melted into a closer and a closer union? History, which we have just consulted, teaches us that the mixture of the races is a law of humanity, that they do not preserve their purity but in the barbarous state and for a very short time, and that, on the other hand, the moral barriers of their different genius are not more difficult to break through than the physical barriers of blood. The races understand one another, when crossed one with another, and thus discover that the differences which constitute race are but secondary, and that men have the same souls just as they have the same bodies. What difference does it make that the Shemite was the only one that conceived the idea of one God? If all the rest were capable of understanding that great idea, we must conclude that their instincts very closely resemble those of the Shemite. Buddhism. clearly bears the impress of the Hindoo mind, and the Mongolian genius is certainly earthly and hard; but we must admit that this genius possessed at least some predisposition that destined it to understand the religion of Buddha; in what, therefore, is the Mongolian race irremediably separated from the race which conceived the religion which it adopted? Christianity is of Hebrew origin, and still the nations of Indo-Germanic origin have found it conformable to their nature, since they have embraced it. Chivalry is undoubtedly conformable to the instincts of all nations, since all nations recognized it in the middle ages. Selfgovernment is of Germanic origin; still, we see that to-day all nations have an equal inclination to adopt, practice and love it. There are differences, however, but if we examine them closely, we will find that they exist more especially in the secondary faculties or inferior part of the genius of nations; after all, men are separated only by the evil instincts and vices of their natures. They are all united and understand one another by the superior part of their souls. Thus, this great question of race is reduced to a question of morals; the differences in the genius of different nations are reduced to mere shades; and history proclaims the moral unity of the human race with still greater certainty than science proclaims its unity of flesh and blood. EMILE MONTÉGUT. RADICALISM. One may be radical, that is to say, absolute, in all opinions, in the monarchical as well as in the republican party; but, as a general thing, the words radicalism and radicals are applied to democratic doctrines more or less advanced, and to their adherents. It has long been said that extremes meet: consequently, they are equally false; the truth lies in the middle. Hence those who claim the designation of radicals are to be boldly condemned. They wish to go to the very end, being aware or ignorant (either supposition is equally unfavorable to them) that the end is an abyss. We are less severe toward those who are called radicals by their opponents. In that case the question is often only one of degree, of relation; according to the point of view at which one is placed, it will be as correct to consider the latter very backward, as the former very advanced. We should never stop at party names, but seek to penetrate to the foundation of things. - Radicalism is characterized less by its principles than by the manner of their application. Its political doctrine is that of democracy, and as a general thing liberal men will approve of it. Who would raise the slightest objection against liberty, equality, fraternity, against national sovereignty, the responsibility of power, universal suffrage even? But what are we to understand by liberty? Should it be the universal leveling of all social enjoyments to the level of the lowest classes? Should fraternity encourage idleness and vice? Should national sovereignty or the responsibility of power constitute a permanent insurrection, and take away the right of decision from peaceable majorities to confer it on ambitious, turbulent, audacious minorities? Does universal suffrage admit of absolutely no limit? Thus political formulas lend themselves to more than one interpretation, and radicalism has its own; but it is, above all, the manner of its application which characterizes it. It knows only one method of procedure, which is to make a tabula rasa, to clear away the ground in order to raise on it a new structure complete in all its parts. Is it not as unreasonable to wish to break the chain of the ages, as to condemn all the accused in a lump, to declare all diseases incurable, to claim to know, to foresee everything, and even, which has actually happened, to wish to change the nature of things? - Nature never makes a tabula rasa. She does not proceed by fits and starts, but by slow and continuous development, and society itself is a product of nature. Can any one deny it? Will any one question that society is composed of men endowed with reason, and often swayed by passion? Does any one think that this reason can be curbed, these passions silenced, by a decree, however solemn the deliberation and promulgation of it may have been? Nothing lasting is established by sudden or extreme measures. First, because such measures clash with received opinions, established interests, opinions and interests which have often their raison d'etre, and which have a right to demand consideration. But the principal obstacle to the success of radical measures lies mainly in the complex nature of man. He has necessities, aspirations, multiple duties, often contradictory; you can not fully satisfy some without, to a greater or less extent, injuring others. Radicalism is generally wedded to a few principles, sometimes to a single one, to which it refers everything, and which it would wish to adapt to everything. Now, the infinite variety of social facts are neither caused nor explained solely by the principles inscribed upon the banner of a radical party; these facts overflow in every direction, and force alone can compel them to return within their bounds. But radicalism does not draw back before violence. It is as absolute in its doctrines as the despot the most thoroughly imbued with the rights conferred on him by his hereditary power. It is by this absolutism, which is always found united to narrowness of views, that radicalism is distinguished from liberalism (which see), with which it has, however, some principles in common. Absolutism prevents all progress, and narrowness of view renders a lasting foundation impossible, for it does not permit all the important circumstances to be taken into account, and produces a certain social blindness, which makes those afflicted by it incapable of serving as guides. Thus, even should the radicals have principles identical with those of the liberals, they would differ from them by their tendency to abstraction, to idealization: they would see the mathematical line, surface or body, where, with the liberals, the real line, surface or body should be seen, with all the qualities and defects given them by nature. - It is perhaps for all these reasons that Rohmer (see PARTIES, POLITICAL) attributes to radicalism the character of the boy; it has the same capacity as well as the same defects. It is enthusiastic, imaginative, to a certain extent generous, lives in an ideal world, pursuing a single idea, and pursuing it frantically, without regard to the evils caused by the efforts to realize it. Happily, the idea pursued is often a good one, the realization of which, even if somewhat dearly bought, compensates more or less for the ills which it has caused. Only one thing remains to be desired, namely, that the end be not attained with such violence as to go beyond it and give rise to a reaction which shall call everything into question again. MAURICE BLOCK. |