rcumstances will always demand
the highest grade of statesmanship.

[Sidenote: Nature of transitional forms.]

The transitional forms which an animal type is capable of producing on a
passage north and south are much more numerous than those it can produce
on a passage east and west. These, though they are truly transitional as
respects the type from which they have proceeded, are permanent as
regards the locality in which they occur, being, in fact, the
incarnation of its physical influences. As long, therefore, as those
influences remain without change the form that has been produced will
last without any alteration. For such a permanent form in the case of
man we may adopt the designation of an ethnical element.

[Sidenote: Conditions of change in an ethnical element.]

An ethnical element is therefore necessarily of a dependent nature; its
durability arises from its perfect correspondence with its environment.
Whatever can affect that correspondence will touch its life.

[Sidenote: Progress of nations like that of individuals.]

Such considerations carry us from individual man to groups of men or
nations. There is a progress for races of men as well marked as the
progress of one man. There are thoughts and actions appertaining to
specific periods in the one case as in the other. Without difficulty we
affirm of a given act that it appertains to a given period. We recognize
the noisy sports of boyhood, the business application of maturity, the
feeble garrulity of old age. We express our surprise when we witness
actions unsuitable to the epoch of life. As it is in this respect in the
individual, so it is in the nation. The march of individual existence
shadows forth the march of race-existence, being, indeed, its
representative on a little scale.

[Sidenote: Communities, like families, exhibit members in different
stages of advance.]

Groups of men, or nations, are disturbed by the same accidents, or
complete the same cycle as the individual. Some scarcely pass beyond
infancy, some are destroyed on a sudden, some die of mere old age. In
this confusion of events, it might seem altogether hopeless to
disentangle the law which is guiding them all, and demonstrate it
clearly. Of such groups, each may exhibit, at the same moment, an
advance to a different stage, just as we see in the same family the
young, the middle-aged, the old. It is thus that Europe shows in its
different parts societies in very different stat