ike living
things in the most similar ones. And though some of Mr. Wallace's
speculations on ethnology may be doubtful, no one doubts that in the
archipelago he has studied so well, as often elsewhere in the world,
though rarely with such marked emphasis, we find like men in contrasted
places, and unlike men in resembling places. Climate is clearly not THE
force which makes nations, for it does not always make them, and they
are often made without it.

The problem of 'nation-making'--that is, the explanation of the origin
of nations such as we now see them, and such as in historical times
they have always been--cannot, as it seems to me, be solved without
separating it into two: one, the making of broadly-marked races, such
as the negro, or the red man, or the European; and the second, that of
making the minor distinctions, such as the distinction between Spartan
and Athenian, or between Scotchman and Englishman. Nations, as we see
them, are (if my arguments prove true) the produce of two great forces:
one the race-making force which, whatever it was, acted in antiquity,
and has now wholly, or almost, given over acting; and the other the
nation-making force, properly so called, which is acting now as much as
it ever acted, and creating as much as it ever created.

The strongest light on the great causes which have formed and are
forming nations is thrown by the smaller causes which are altering
nations. The way in which nations change, generation after generation,
is exceedingly curious, and the change occasionally happens when it is
very hard to account for. Something seems to steal over society, say of
the Regency time as compared with that of the present Queen. If we read
of life at Windsor (at the cottage now pulled down), or of Bond Street
as it was in the days of the Loungers (an extinct race), or of St.
James's Street as it was when Mr. Fox and his party tried to make
'political capital' out of the dissipation of an heir apparent, we seem
to be reading not of the places we know so well, but of very distant
and unlike localities. Or let anyone think how little is the external
change in England between the age of Elizabeth and the age of Anne
compared with the national change. How few were the alterations in
physical condition, how few (if any) the scientific inventions
affecting human life which the later period possessed, but the earlier
did not! How hard it is to say what has caused the change in the
people! A