geologist
and the chemist make a large collection of particular appearances,
before they commit themselves to propound a principle drawn from them,
though their subject matter is far less diversified than the human
subject, and nothing of so much importance as human emotions,--love and
dislike, reverence and contempt, depends upon their judgment. If a
student in natural philosophy is in too great haste to classify and
interpret, he misleads, for a while, his fellow-students (not a very
large class); he vitiates the observations of a few successors; his
error is discovered and exposed; he is mortified, and his too docile
followers are ridiculed, and there is an end; but if a traveller gives
any quality which he may have observed in a few individuals as a
characteristic of a nation, the evil is not speedily or easily
remediable. Abject thinkers, passive readers, adopt his words; parents
repeat them to their children; and townspeople spread the judgment into
the villages and hamlets--the strongholds of prejudice; future
travellers see according to the prepossessions given them, and add their
testimony to the error, till it becomes the work of a century to reverse
a hasty generalization. It was a great mistake of a geologist to assign
a wrong level to the Caspian Sea; and it is vexatious that much time and
energy should have been devoted to account for an appearance which,
after all, does not exist. It is provoking to geologists that they
should have wasted a great deal of ingenuity in finding reasons for
these waters being at a different level from what it is now found that
they have; but the evil is over; the "pish!" and the "pshaw!" are said;
the explanatory and apologetical notes are duly inserted in new
editions of geological works, and nothing more can come of the mistake.
But it is difficult to foresee when the British public will believe that
the Americans are a mirthful nation, or even that the French are not
almost all cooks or dancing-masters. A century hence, probably, the
Americans will continue to believe that all the English make a regular
study of the art of conversation; and the lower orders of French will be
still telling their children that half the people in England hang or
drown themselves every November. As long as travellers generalize on
morals and manners as hastily as they do, it will probably be impossible
to establish a general conviction that no civilized nation is
ascertainably better or worse