ntal countries as villagers to
citizens: they have good qualities of their own, but are behind the
world. Malta has not the chance that she would have if we could annex
her to the South of France; nor will the West India islands advance as
they would do if we could throw them all into one, and intersect the
whole with roads leading on either side from the great European and
American cities.

Malta and the West India islands have, however, the additional
disadvantage of being colonies. The moral progression of a people can
scarcely begin till they are independent. Their morals are overruled by
the mother-country,--by the government and legislation she imposes, by
the rulers she sends out, by the nature of the advantages she grants and
the tribute she requires, by the population she pours in from home, and
by her own example. Accordingly, the colonies of a powerful country
exhibit an exaggeration of the national faults, with only infant
virtues of their own, which wait for freedom to grow to maturity, and
among which an enlarged sympathy with the race is seldom found. This is
a temper uncongenial with a confined, dependent, and imitative society;
and the first strong symptoms of it are usually found in the persons of
those whose mission it is to lead the colony out of its minority into
independence.

These are conditions of a people which may guide the traveller's
observations by showing him what to expect. Remembering these
conditions, he will mark the greater or less enlargement and generosity
of the spirit of society, and learn from these the fact or promise of
progression, or whether it is too soon to look for either.

There is another important condition which can hardly escape his notice:
whether the people are homogeneous or composed of various races. The
inhabitants of New England are a remarkable specimen of the first, as
the inhabitants of the middle states of America will be of the last, two
or three generations hence. Almost all the nations of Europe are
mongrel; and those which can trace their descent from the greatest
variety of ancestors have, other circumstances remaining the same, the
best chance of progression. Among a homogeneous people, ancestral
virtues flourish; but these carry with them ancestral faults as their
shadow; and there is a liability of a new fault being added,--resistance
to the spirit of improvement. If the chances of severity of ancient
virtue are lessened in the case of a mongrel p