GOVERNOR JOSEPH DESHA.
A scientific explorer found upon the icy coast of the Straits of Magellan a growth of English grass—fresh, green, flourishing, and as full of fight for existence as the stock or race from which it took its name. It was like the grass described in the Hudibrastic skit of the bluegrass Colonel:
"Where bluegrass grew the winter through—
And where it blooms in summer, too."
It was a species of Poa, closely akin in its characteristics to Poa Pratensis, the famous Bluegrass of Kentucky —a cosmopolitan grass; at home everywhere, but always seeking congenial skies; rooting itself firmly and clinging tenaciously; standing in with the rich soils and the strong races; unseating old sod; standing off all casual intruders; driving out all competing grasses; casting its own lines in pleasant places; dividing honors with Zea Mays, the stateliest of all grasses, and yielding to no competition save here and there to the cryptic, mossy growth that at last covers with oblivion the homes and the tombs of men. Even the grasping, aggressive Poa yields to the power of moss; and mossback monstrosities may be found even among the vigorous offshoots of the Anglo-Norman race. Yet, was it not an extraordinary incident of the evolution of our Western world that in the genesis of the Commonwealth of Kentucky two such factors or agencies as the Race and the Grass—inseparably linked—should be predestined each to a special function in the common work? "Either," said a sagacious observer from New England, "no other land ever lent itself so easily to civilization as the Bluegrass region, or it was exceptionally fortunate in its inhabitants." The alternative suggests that if this miracle of evolution be attributable to either of the causes named—civilizableness of the land or adaptableness of race—then there can be but one conclusion should the result be ascribed to the operation of both. This speculative suggestion as to the genetic or determining element in the evolution of the Bluegrass State came from the pen of that gifted and genial writer, Charles Dudley Warner, many years ago. He was then visiting Kentucky, and reporting in a series of papers his observations, as a visitor, for an influential publication in the East. Please note this unconscious implication as to grass and race from a philosophic tourist of the olden times. "Grass" or "Race"—but what Race?
[VII]
The continuous application of three acute and powerful minds along the same line of thought, in the first half of the last century—an unconscious or undesigned collaboration (so to speak) of Lamarck, St. Beuve, and Hippolyte Taine—evolved a marvelous instrument of critical and philosophic research; furnishing for every capable thinker a method adapted to the investigation of all subjects, great and small; neglecting no phase, shrinking from no interpretation, rejecting no authentic fact, and having in perfection the magical quality of adjustment to conditions described in the Arabian tale. In his English notes, for example, M. Taine, if too frank, is singularly felicitous and discriminative in his physical descriptions of certain Anglican types of race—presenting, first, the beastly, repulsive traits of the MALE; the lowering, dog-like physiognomy, the huge jowl; the dull red eyes; the gluttonous chops; the swinish snout, the congested facial tissues; the gross, unwieldy figure, the bloated features and the protuberant accumulations of abdominal fat—thus graphically depicting, by way of philosophical illustration, an anthropoid incarnation of animal appetite. The picture is not flattering, but it certainly embodies some familiar traits, of which it is entirely pardonable to make a philosophic use. Next he introduces the Boadicean or Brobdingnagian FEMALE—"broad, stiff, and destitute of ideas"—with heavy features, lifeless, fishy eyes, coarse, congested complexion, a clumsy figure, large feet, unshapely hands, and an utter lack of style and taste—notably in the bizarre combinations of color in her dress. Moreover, he says, two out of every three have their feet shod with stout masculine boots, and as to their long, projecting teeth—huge white teeth—it is impossible to train oneself to endure them. "Is this," he inquires philosophically, "a cause or an effect of the carnivorous regime?" Plainly enough the cause—the remote cause at least—the determining cause, is what is designated by M. Taine elsewhere as "the hereditary conformation of race." These fat, huge, fierce, vicious, dull, ill-shaped creatures are distinctly of a Saxon strain. In Cedric's day they were the Gurths who herded the swine, and the "gigantic jades" who in the very teeth of Mother Church persisted in a merciless disciplinary "flogging of their slaves." Suggestions of racial derivation are seldom questioned in ordinary life. Every English thinker recognizes the fact. The biographer of an eminent English lawyer says that he combined, in the most pleasing fashion, fineness of physical texture with courage, high character, and the perfection of personal charm. The same writer thinks it necessary to explain that on the maternal side the gifted lawyer "came of gentle blood." Apart from personal characteristics, the very name of the maternal gens bore witness to her Norman descent—a name that has been familiar in Kentucky from the foundation of the State. According to the same biographer the conditions on the paternal side were quite different. An uncle, of the ruder strain, declared, in view of prospective Revolutionary tribunals, that his veins were "uncontaminated with one drop of gentility." He stood among the intellectual aristocracy of England just the same.