choice governed by a peremptory despotism.

The MIXTURE OF RACES was often an advantage, too. Much as the old
world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it. Most
historic nations conquered prehistoric nations, and though they
massacred many, they did not massacre all. They enslaved the subject
men, and they married the subject women. No doubt the whole bond of
early society was the bond of descent; no doubt it was essential to
the notions of a new nation that it should have had common
ancestors; the modern idea that vicinity of habitation is the
natural cement of civil union would have been repelled as an impiety
if it could have been conceived as an idea. But by one of those
legal fictions which Sir Henry Maine describes so well, primitive
nations contrived to do what they found convenient, as well as to
adhere to what they fancied to be right. When they did not beget
they ADOPTED; they solemnly made believe that new persons were
descended from the old stock, though everybody knew that in flesh
and blood they were not. They made an artificial unity in default of
a real unity; and what it is not easy to understand now, the sacred
sentiment requiring unity of race was somehow satisfied: what was
made did as well as what was born. Nations with these sort of maxims
are not likely to have unity of race in the modern sense, and as a
physiologist understands it. What sorts of unions improve the breed,
and which are worse than both the father-race and the mother, it is
not very easy to say. The subject was reviewed by M. Quatrefages in
an elaborate report upon the occasion of the French Exhibition, of
all things in the world. M. Quatrefages quotes from another writer
the phrase that South America is a great laboratory of experiments
in the mixture of races, and reviews the different results which
different cases have shown. In South Carolina the Mulatto race is