tribe which Romans left to go one way, and Greeks
to go another, and Teutons to go a third. The tribe took it with them,
as the English take the common law with them, because it was the one
kind of polity which they could conceive and act upon; or it may be
that the emigrants from the primitive Aryan stock only took with them a
good aptitude--an excellent political nature, which similar
circumstances in distant countries were afterwards to develop into like
forms. But anyhow it is impossible not to trace the supremacy of
Teutons, Greeks, and Romans in part to their common form of government.
The contests of the assembly cherished the principle of change; the
influence of the elders insured sedateness and preserved the mould of
thought; and, in the best cases, military discipline was not impaired
by freedom, though military intelligence was enhanced with the general
intelligence. A Roman army was a free body, at its own choice governed
by a peremptory despotism.

The MIXTURE OF RACES was often an advantage, too. Much as the old world
believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most historic nations
conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many, they did
not massacre all. They enslaved the subject men, and they married the
subject women. No doubt the whole bond of early society was the bond of
descent; no doubt it was essential to the notions of a new nation that
it should have had common ancestors; the modern idea that vicinity of
habitation is the natural cement of civil union would have been
repelled as an impiety if it could have been conceived as an idea. But
by one of those legal fictions which Sir Henry Maine describes so well,
primitive nations contrived to do what they found convenient, as well
as to adhere to what they fancied to be right. When they did not beget
they ADOPTED; they solemnly made believe that new persons were
descended from the old stock, though everybody knew that in flesh and
blood they were not. They made an artificial unity in default of a real
unity; and what it is not easy to understand now, the sacred sentiment
requiring unity of race was somehow satisfied: what was made did as
well as what was born. Nations with these sort of maxims are not likely
to have unity of race in the modern sense, and as a physiologist
understands it. What sorts of unions improve the breed, and which are
worse than both the father-race and the mother, it is not very easy to
say. The subject