The proofs of these propositions would require long details altogether
foreign to our present purpose, as we are not writing on ethnology.
We will take them for granted, as otherwise we may say that the
whole history of man would be unintelligible. If, however, writers
are found who apply to their notion of race all the inflexibility
of physical laws, and who represent history as a rigid system of
facts chained together by a kind of fatality; if a school has
sprung up among historians to do away with the moral responsibility
of individuals and of nations, it is scarcely necessary to tell
the reader that nothing is so far from our mind as to adopt ideas
destructive, in fact, to all morality.

It is our belief that there is no more "necessity" in the leanings
of race with respect to nations, than there is in the corrupt
instincts of our fallen nature with respect to individuals. The
teachings of faith have clearly decided this in the latter case,
and the consequence of this authoritative decision carries with
it the determination of the former.

According to the doctrine of St. Augustine, nations are rewarded
or punished in this world, because there is no future existence
for them; but the fact of rewards and punishments awarded them
shows that their life is not a series of necessary sequences such
as prevail in physics, and that the manifestations or phenomena
of history, past, present, or future, cannot resolve themselves
into the workings of absolute laws.

Race, in our opinion, is only one of those mysterious forces which
play upon the individual from the cradle to the grave, which affect