There appears nothing more accidental than the sex of an infant, yet take
any great city or any province and you will find that the relations of
males and females are unalterable. Again, a part of the pure air of the
atmosphere is continually consumed in combustion and respiration; living
vegetables emit this principle during their growth; nothing appears more
accidental than the proportion of vegetable to animal life on the surface
of the earth, yet they are perfectly equivalent, and the balance of the
sexes, like the constitution of the atmosphere, depends upon the
principles of an unerring intelligence. You saw in the decline of the
Roman empire a people enfeebled by luxury, worn out by excess, overrun by
rude warriors; you saw the giants of the North and East mixing with the
pigmies of the South and West. An empire was destroyed, but the seeds of
moral and physical improvement in the new race were sown; the new
population resulting from the alliances of the men of the North with the
women, of the South was more vigorous, more full of physical power, and
more capable of intellectual exertion than their apparently ill-suited
progenitors; and the moral effects or final causes of the migration of
races, the plans of conquest and ambition which have led to revolutions
and changes of kingdoms designed by man for such different objects have
been the same in their ultimate results--that of improving by mixture the
different families of men. An Alaric or an Attila, who marches with
legions of barbarians for some gross view of plunder or ambition, is an
instrument of divine power to effect a purpose of which he is wholly
unconscious--he is carrying a strong race to improve a weak one, and
giving energy to a debilitated population; and the deserts he makes in
his passage will become in another age cultivated fields, and the
solitude he produces will be succeeded by a powerful and healthy
population. The results of these events in the moral and political world
may be compared to those produced in the vegetable kingdom by the storms
and heavy gales so usual at the vernal equinox, the time of the formation