Even so, I think there will be a disinclination to attribute so
marked, fixed, almost physical a thing as national character to
causes so evanescent as the imitation of appreciated habit and the
persecution of detested habit. But, after all, national character is
but a name for a collection of habits more or less universal. And
this imitation and this persecution in long generations have vast
physical effects. The mind of the parent (as we speak) passes
somehow to the body of the child. The transmitted 'something' is
more affected by habits than, it is by anything else. In time an
ingrained type is sure to be formed, and sure to be passed on if
only the causes I have specified be fully in action and without
impediment.

As I have said, I am not explaining the origin of races, but of
nations, or, if you like, of tribes. I fully admit that no imitation
of predominant manner, or prohibitions of detested manners, will of
themselves account for the broadest contrasts of human nature. Such
means would no more make a Negro out of a Brahmin, or a Red-man out
of an Englishman, than washing would change the spots of a leopard
or the colour of an Ethiopian. Some more potent causes must co-
operate, or we should not have these enormous diversities. The minor
causes I deal with made Greek to differ from Greek, but they did not
make the Greek race. We cannot precisely mark the limit, but a limit
there clearly is.

If we look at the earliest monuments of the human race, we find
these race-characters as decided as the race-characters now. The
earliest paintings or sculptures we anywhere have, give us the
present contrasts of dissimilar types as strongly as present
observation. Within historical memory no such differences have been