“A fierce nation, after overrunning the face of the earth with its arms, has fixed its abode in the midst of a race of men the gentlest in the world. Their tall persons; their long, red hair; their vast shields, and swords of enormous length; their songs also when they are advancing to action; their yells and dances, and the horrid clashing of their arrows while they brandish their shields in a peculiar manner practised in their original country,—all these are circumstances calculated to strike terror. But let Greeks, and Phrygians, and Carians, who are unaccustomed to and unacquainted with these things, be frightened by such. The Romans, long acquainted with Gallic tumults, have learned the emptiness of their parade. Our forefathers had to deal with genuine native Gauls; but they are now a degenerate, a mongrel race, and in reality what they are named, Gallogrecians. Just so is the case of vegetables, the seeds not being so efficacious for preserving their original constitution as the properties of the soil and climate in which they may be reared, when changed, are towards altering it. The Macedonians who settled at Alexandria, in Egypt, or in Seleucia, or Babylonia, or in any other of their colonies scattered over the world, have sunk into Syrians, Parthians, or Egyptians.
“What trace do the Tarentines retain of the hardy, rugged discipline of Sparta? Everything that grows in its own natural soil attains the greater perfection: whatever is planted in a foreign land, by a gradual change in its nature degenerates into a similitude to that which affords it nurture. Brutes retain for a time, when taken, their natural ferocity; but after being long fed by the hands of men, they grow tame. Think ye then that Nature does not act in the same manner in softening the savage tempers of men? Do you believe these to be of the same kind that their fathers and grandfathers were?
* * * “By the very great fertility of the soil, the very great mildness of the climate, and the gentle dispositions of the neighboring nations, all that barbarous fierceness which they brought with them has been quite mollified.”
And finally the Romans themselves, in spite of their sanitary measures, became from year to year more alien in blood from the genuine stock of Romulus and Remus, until the distinctive characters of the conquerors of the earth finally disappeared.
The Latins, Sabines, and primitive Etruscans pressed constantly upon them with the irresistible force of destiny. When Scipio Æmilianus was interrupted in the forum by this mongrel populace, he exclaimed, “Silence, false sons of Italy! Think ye to scare me with your brandished hands, ye whom I led myself in bonds to Rome?”
When the fierce and hardy Northmen descended into Southern Europe, they carried along with their laws a chastity and a reserve that excited universal surprise. But these virtues were not of long continuance there; the climate and the customs of the new society soon warmed their frozen imaginations, and their laws by degrees relaxed, and their manners even more than their laws.
The giants of the North many times swept down over the plains of Italy, and regenerated with fresh and pure blood the puny breeds of degenerate Rome, but they have since disappeared, and their descendants are no longer to be found in these countries.
VII.
In relation to the futile efforts of Spain in Mexico, the ethnologist Knox exclaims, “Neither climate, nor government, nor external influences ever alter race. They may and they do affect them, and in time destroy them, but they never give rise to a new race. In half a century the dreams of Humboldt, of Canning, of Guizot, and other profound statesmen, have come to a close, and Nature once more, as I long ago predicted, asserts her rights.”
Naturalists, from Hippocrates to Buffon, have believed that climate, heat and cold, dryness and humidity, the qualities and abundance of nourishment, have power to modify men and animals, but “neither climate, nor government, nor external circumstances ever give rise to a new race.” The generous qualities once gone, are departed forever, and their loss can rarely be retrieved. Where is the instance of a fallen man, class, or nation?