eristics which slowly change. They are acquired
little by little in an evolution which, historically, it is often
difficult to trace. They are due to the environment, to the discipline of
life, and to what is technically called education. These work together to
make what is called character, race character, and it is this which is
transmitted from generation to generation. Acquirements are not
hereditary, like habits and peculiarities, physical or mental. A man does
not transmit to his descendants his learning, though he may transmit the
aptitude for it. This is illustrated in factories where skilled labor is
handed down and fixed in the same families, that is, where the same kind
of labor is continued from one generation to another. The child, put to
work, has not the knowledge of the parent, but a special aptitude in his
skill and dexterity. Both body and mind have acquired certain
transmissible traits. The same thing is seen on a larger scale in a whole
nation, like the Japanese, who have been trained into what seems an art
instinct.

It is this character, quality, habit, the result of a slow educational
process, which distinguishes one race from another. It is this that the
race transmits, and not the more or less accidental education of a decade
or an era. The Brahmins carry this idea into the next life, and say that
the departing spirit carries with him nothing except this individual
character, no acquirements or information or extraneous culture. It was
perhaps in the same spirit that the sad preacher in Ecclesiastes said
there is no "knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest."

It is by this character that we classify civilized and even
semi-civilized races; by this slowly developed fibre, this slow
accumulation of inherent quality in the evolution of the human being from
lower to higher, that continues to exist notwithstanding the powerful
influence of governments and religions. We are understood when we speak
of the French, the Italian, the Pole, the Spanish, the English, the
German, the Arab race, the Japanese, and so on. It is what a foreign
writer calls, not inaptly, a collective race soul. As it is slow in
evolution, it is persistent in enduring.

Further, we recognize it as a stage of progress, historically necessary
in the development of man into a civilized adaptation to his situation in
this world. It is a process that cannot be much hurried, and a result
that cannot be leaped to out of b