Some nations, it seems, perish through defect of this
national character, as individuals fail of success through excess or deficiency in their character. Thus the Celts—that great flood of a nation which once swept over Germany, France, England, and, casting its spray far over
the Mps, at one time threatened destruction to Rome
itself—seem to have been so filled with love of individual independence, that they could never accept a minute organization of human rights and duties; and so their children would not group themselves into a city, as other races, and submit to a strong central power, which should curb individual will enough to insure national unity of action. Perhaps this was once the excellence of the Celts, and thereby they broke the trammels and escaped from the theocratic or despotic traditions of earlier and more savage times, developing the power of the individual for a time, and the energy of a nation loosely bound; but when they came in contact with the Romans, Franks, and Saxons, they melted away as snow in April—only, like that, remnants thereof yet lingering in the mountains and islands of Europe. No external pressure
of famine or political oppression now holds the Celts in
Ireland together, or gives them national unity of action
enough to resist the Saxon foe. Doubtless in other days
this very peculiarity of the Irish has done the world some service. Nations succeed each other as races of animals in the geological epochs, and, like them also, perish when their work is done.
The peculiar character of a nation does not appear nakedly, without relief and shadow. As the waters of the Rhone, in coming from the mountains, have caught a stain from the soils they have traversed which mars the cerulean tinge of the mountain snow that gave them birth, so the peculiarities of each nation become modified by the circumstances to which it is exposed, though the fundamental character of a nation, it seems, has never been changed. Only when the blood of the nation is changed by additions from another stock is the idiosyncrasy altered. Now, while each nation has its peculiar genius or character which does not change, it has also and accordingly a particular work to perform in the economy of the world, a certain fundamental idea to unfold and develop. This
