Walter Bagehot

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.

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.

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.

And it is very hard to see how any number of such modifications could change man as he is in one race-type to man as he is in some other.

Of this there are but two explanations; ONE, that these great types were originally separate creations, as they stand--that the Negro was made so, and the Greek made so.

But this easy hypothesis of special creation has been tried so often, and has broken down so very often, that in no case, probably, do any great number of careful inquirers very firmly believe it.

They may accept it provisionally, as the best hypothesis at present, but they feel about it as they cannot help feeling as to an army which has always been beaten; however strong it seems, they think it will be beaten again.

A gregarious tribe, whose leader was in some imitable respects adapted to the struggle for life, and which copied its leader, would have an enormous advantage in the struggle for life.

It would be sure to win and live, for it would be coherent and adapted, whereas, in comparison, competing tribes would be incoherent and unadapted.

And I suppose that in early times, when those bodies did not already contain the records and the traces of endless generations, any new habit would more easily fix its mark on the heritable element, and would be transmitted more easily and…

In such an age, man being softer and more pliable, deeper race-marks would be more easily inscribed and would be more likely to continue legible.

Given large homogeneous populations, some Negro, some Mongolian, some Aryan, I have tried to prove how small contrasting groups would certainly spring up within each--some to last and some to perish.

These are the eddies in each race-stream which vary its surface, and are sure to last till some new force changes the current.

Since the beginning of man, stream has been a thousand times poured into stream--quick into sluggish, dark into pale--and eddies and waters have taken new shapes and new colours, affected by what went before, but not resembling it.

But they bring out new qualities, and advertise the effects of new habits.

They labour and prosper, and their prosperity invites imitation.

Just so with the contrary change, from an animating to a relaxing place,--the naturally lazy look so happy as they do nothing, that the naturally active are corrupted.

The effect of any considerable change on a nation is thus an intensifying and accumulating effect.

With its maximum power it acts on some prepared and congenial individuals; in them it is seen to produce attractive results, and then the habits creating those results are copied far and wide.

And, as I believe, it is in this simple but not quite obvious way, that the process of progress and of degradation may generally be seen to run.

If ever we are to have a distinct conception of him, it can only be after long years of future researches and the laborious accumulation of materials, scarcely the beginning of which now exists.