re still at times made,
but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide;
both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only
in appearance. It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood
and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with
many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius. It
is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the
youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in
refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of
political energy. The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like
Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of
philosophy. Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor
"Wertherism" for the battlefield.

But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life of a race, youth
consists in capacity for enthusiasm for a great ideal, capacity to
frame, resolution to pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great
political end. Russia, for instance, has only recently come within the
influence of European culture, but this does not make the Slav a
youthful race. The Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in
Europe. Its literature, its art, its music, the characteristics of its
society alike attest this. Superstition is not youth, else we might
look to the hut of the Samoyede even with more confidence than to the
cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the future. And
prolificness in a race does as surely denote resignation to be
governed, as the genius to govern others.

And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period of his history shown
that "youth" which consists in capacity for a great political ideal,
either in Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia.

The present German empire assuredly exhibits in nothing the qualities
of ancient lineage; yet the race which composes it is the same race as
was once united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under Hohenstauffen,
and under Franconian, as now under the Hohenzollern dynasty.

The United States as a nation bear the same relation to Britain as the
Moorish kingdom in Spain bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad. It is
a fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central mass; but not
only in its language, its literature, its religion and its laws, but in
individual and national peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments
of history and of life, the original