constancy. It would be the expression of the dominant character of a
large number of separate members of the same race, and ought
therefore to be remarkably uniform. Fickleness of national character
is principally due to the several members of the nation exercising
no independent judgment, but allowing themselves to be led hither and
thither by the successive journalists, orators, and sentimentalists
who happen for the time to have the chance of directing them.

Our present natural dispositions make it impossible for us to attain
the ideal standard of a nation of men all judging soberly for
themselves, and therefore the slavishness of the mass of our
countrymen, in morals and intellect, must be an admitted fact in all
schemes of regenerative policy.

The hereditary taint due to the primeval barbarism of our race, and
maintained by later influences, will have to be bred out of it
before our descendants can rise to the position of free members of
an intelligent society: and I may add that the most likely nest at
the present time for self-reliant natures is to be found in States
founded and maintained by emigrants.

Servility has its romantic side, in the utter devotion of a slave to
the lightest wishes and the smallest comforts of his master, and in
that of a loyal subject to those of his sovereign; but such devotion
cannot be called a reasonable self-sacrifice; it is rather an
abnegation of the trust imposed on man to use his best judgment, and
to act in the way he thinks the wisest. Trust in authority is a
trait of the character of children, of weakly women, and of the sick
and infirm, but it is out of place among members of a thriving
resolute community during the fifty or more years of their middle