It is plain that the wide-spread absence of a characteristic which greatly aids the possessor in the conflicts between race and race probably indicates that the primary race did not possess that quality.
Bagehot suggests that the absence of a particular characteristic in races indicates that the original race likely did not possess it.
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The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.
But it is natural also that persons used to analyse political institutions should look at these anomalies with a little tenderness and a little interest.
I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.
These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.
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