By the influence of the racial element, the laborer in northern Europe, viewed as a producing machine, doubles the industrial output of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race. For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him questions, but within ten minutes the savage was sound asleep. When awakened the old chief said: "Ideas make me so sleepy." Similarly, the warm Venetian blood has given few great men to civilization; but the hills of Scotland and New England produce scholars, statesmen, poets, financiers, with the alacrity with which Texas produces cotton or Missouri corn. History traces certain influential nations back to a single progenitor of unique strength of body and character. Thus Abraham, Theseus, and Cadmus seem like springs feeding great and increasing rivers. One wise and original thinker founds a tribe, shapes the destiny of a nation, and multiplies himself in the lives of future millions. In accordance with this law, tenacity reappears in every Scotchman; wit sparkles in every Irishman; vivacity is in every Frenchman's blood; the Saxon is a colonizer and originates institutions. During the construction of the Suez Canal it was discovered that workmen with veins filled with Teutonic blood had a commercial value two and a half times greater than the Egyptians. Similarly, during the Indian war, the Highland troops endured double the strain of the native forces. Napoleon shortened the stature of the French people two inches by choosing all the taller of his 30,000,000 subjects and killing them in war. Waxing indignant, Horace Mann thinks "the forehead of the Irish peasantry was lowered an inch when the government made it an offense punishable with fine, imprisonment, and a traitor's death to be the teacher of children." A wicked government can make agony, epidemic, brutalize a race, and reaching forward, fetter generations yet unborn. "Blood tells," says science. But blood is the radical element put out at compound interest and handed forward to generations yet unborn.
Railways Review
A Man's Value to Society — Part 5
2026-11-15 02:53:53 · Cedar Herald Index
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