strikes us at once. But it may be remarked also, in comparing
nations which have lived for ages in contiguity, and held constant
intercourse one with the other from the time they began their
national life, whose only boundary-line has been a mountain-chain
or the banks of a broad river. They have each striking peculiarities
which individualize and stamp them with a character of their own.

How different are the peoples divided by the Rhine or by the
Pyrenees! How unlike those which the Straits of Dover run between!
And in Asia, what have the conterminous Chinese and Hindoos in
common beyond the general characteristics of the human species
which belong to all the children of Adam?

But what we must chiefly insist upon in the investigation we are
Now undertaking is, that the life of each is manifested by a
special physiognomy deeply imprinted in their whole history,
which we here call character. What each of them is their history
shows; and there is no better means of judging of them than by
reviewing the various events which compose their life.

For the various events which go to form what is called the
history of a nation are its individual actions, the spontaneous
energy of its life; and, as a man shows what he is by his acts,
so does a nation or a race by the facts of its history.

When we compare the vast despotisms of Asia, crystallized into
forms which have scarcely changed since the first settlement of
man in those immense plains, with the active and ever-moving
smaller groups of Europeans settled in the west of the Old World
since the dispersion of mankind, we see at a glance how the