retaliate by bringing a charge of hypocrisy against the Swedes.
Local circumstances probably render both unjust, speaking from their
feelings rather than reason; and is this astonishing when we
consider that most writers of travels have done the same, whose
works have served as materials for the compilers of universal
histories? All are eager to give a national character, which is
rarely just, because they do not discriminate the natural from the
acquired difference. The natural, I believe, on due consideration,
will be found to consist merely in the degree of vivacity, or
thoughtfulness, pleasures or pain, inspired by the climate, whilst
the varieties which the forms of government, including religion,
produce are much more numerous and unstable.

A people have been characterised as stupid by nature; what a
paradox! because they did not consider that slaves, having no object
to stimulate industry; have not their faculties sharpened by the
only thing that can exercise them, self-interest. Others have been
brought forward as brutes, having no aptitude for the arts and
sciences, only because the progress of improvement had not reached
that stage which produces them.

Those writers who have considered the history of man, or of the
human mind, on a more enlarged scale have fallen into similar
errors, not reflecting that the passions are weak where the
necessaries of life are too hardly or too easily obtained.

Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their
native country, had better stay at home. It is, for example, absurd
to blame a people for not having that degree of personal cleanliness
and elegance of manners which only refinement of taste produces, and