any practical legislation for the individual even on this proven
intellectual aptitude of the race as a whole would be manifestly as
ridiculous as abortive. Yet more markedly, with the German--no
consideration of his physical peculiarities, though it proceeded to the
subtlest analysis of nerve, bone, and muscle, could in the present stage of
our knowledge have proved to us what generations of experience appear to
have proved, that, with that organisation which constitutes the German,
goes an unique aptitude for music. There is always the possibility of
mistaking the result of training and external circumstance for inherent
tendency, but when we consider the passion for music which the German has
shown, and when we consider that the greatest musicians the world has seen,
from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to Wagner, have been of that race, it
appears highly probable that such a correlation between the German
organisation and the intellectual gift of music does exist. Similar
intellectual peculiarities seem to be connoted by the external differences
which mark off other races from each other. Nevertheless, were persons of
all of these nationalities gathered in one colony, any attempt to legislate
for their restriction to certain forms of intellectual labour on the ground
of their apparently proved national aptitudes or disabilities, would be
regarded as insane. To insist that all Jews, and none but Jews, should
lead and instruct in religious matters; that all Englishmen, and none but
Englishmen, should engage in trade; that each German should make his living
by music, and none but a German allowed to practise it, would drive to
despair the unfortunate individual Englishman, whose most marked deficiency
might be in the direction of finance and bartering trade power; the Jew,
whose religious instincts might be entirely rudimentary; or the German, who
could not distinguish one note from another; and the society as a whole
would be an irremediable loser, in one of the heaviest of all forms of
social loss--the loss of the full use of the highest capacities of all its
members.