parties to which they attach as
scarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. I
suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on
the peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to the
progress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the
diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the
human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of
sustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and so
we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by
expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into
sheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have
philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a
wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the
peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere
induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common
nature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as they
have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted
operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different
set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and
work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's
nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage
downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four
thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man
and his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and some
sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the
species,--Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay,--lay close packed up
in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle
proved to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime
enunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood all
nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to
find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the
young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before
heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies
explained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said,
however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but
apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now
knew what