little better still, routed and effaced No. II. And it explains
why Western Europe was early in advance of other countries, because
there the contest of races was exceedingly severe. Unlike most regions,
it was a tempting part of the world, and yet not a corrupting part;
those who did not possess it wanted it, and those who had it, not being
enervated, could struggle hard to keep it. The conflict of nations is
at first a main force in the improvement of nations.

But what ARE nations? What are these groups which are so familiar to
us, and yet, if we stop to think, so strange; which are as old as
history; which Herodotus found in almost as great numbers and with
quite as marked distinctions as we see them now? What breaks the human
race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its
interior so monotonous? The question is most puzzling, though the fact
is so familiar, and I would not venture to say that I can answer it
completely, though I can advance some considerations which, as it seems
to me, go a certain way towards answering it. Perhaps these same
considerations throw some light, too, on the further and still more
interesting question why some few nations progress, and why the greater
part do not.

Of course at first all such distinctions of nation and nation were
explained by original diversity of race. They ARE dissimilar, it was
said, because they were created dissimilar. But in most cases this easy
supposition will not do its work. You cannot (consistently with plain
facts) imagine enough original races to make it tenable. Some
half-dozen or more great families of men may or may not have been
descended from separate first stocks, but sub-varieties have certainly
not so descended. You may argue, rightly or wrongly, that all Aryan
nations are of a single or peculiar origin, just as it was long
believed that all Greek-speaking nations were of one such stock. But
you will not be listened to if you say that there were one Adam and Eve
for Sparta, and another Adam and Eve for Athens. All Greeks are
evidently of one origin, but within the limits of the Greek family, as
of all other families, there is some contrast-making force which causes
city to be unlike city, and tribe unlike tribe.

Certainly, too, nations did not originate by simple natural selection,
as wild varieties of animals (I do not speak now of species) no doubt
arise in nature. Natural selection means the preservation of those
individua