Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1872-09-20
DELUSIO.yS .EBOUT CLE.u.sTR.


temperate cline survives all evidence to
the contrary, and will be repeated with
perfect GOODNESS by the man who has Just
informed you that the two most perfect of
earthly climates, the Tasmanian, which is
the English climate etherealized, and the
Californian, which is the Greek climate
cooled, produce the two feeble!t races of
mankind. The native Tasmanan and the
Digger Indian are, with the Veddah, the
lowest specimens of humanity hitherto OBJ
served. So far as the very imperfect evil
dence attanable will prove, the physical
qualities, strength, size, courage, and per-
haps industry-we doubt if this is physi-
cal quality, but il is counted as one-are
Independent Of climate altogether, and
The biggest and strongest race of earth, the
Nubian of the Upper Nile, 1ourishes in
heat which almost boiled Verne, the tray
cller, who has most carefully observed his
wonderful muscular development, and can
live and grow fat in stoke-rooms from
which the most powerful Englshmen are
carried out fainting and half dead. Kaiser
Williams Pomeranians are scarcely the
equals of these men in physique, and are
not when they choose more steadily indus
trious. A huma of Constantinople or Cairo
would carry a railway porter on his should
ers and all his luggage besides, and Ben
galee boatman would row a London water
man, as far as endurance is concerned, into
an apoplectic fit. The Bengalee is weak,
and the Peguan is not brave, but the Ma
lay, born under precisely the same condi-
tions, the very conditions to which Macau-
lay attributed the etfeminacy of the Benga-
lese, has the courage of ferret, the activity
of monkey, and the endurance of
thoroughbred horse. Some day or other
when we reign in Cairo Englishmen will
officer an army of Arabs, men bred in n
desert where the sun seems TO hate human
beings and to pursue them with kind of
conscious pitilessness, and then Asia will
know once more why the Moor seemed to
the mailed knights of France and Spain so
terrible an enemy. Few human beings
are so powerful as the Parsees, whose
wrestlers defeat picked men from the Bril-
fish army, and they have dwelt for ages in
climate to which that of Italy is cold and
for two centuries in Western India; and
none are so industrious as the Chinese of
the South, the men of those steaming. gu
perheated Del'as, where the earth being
water, the men, on the popular theory.
should be women. The Peruvian is soft
creature, but his climate is cooler than that
Of the regions of Panama and Guiana,
where the bravest and fiercest of aborigi-
mes, the Carib, still maintains his heredi-
tary freedom. But of the "softly enerya-
ting climate" as we Northerners deem IL.
OF Central Italy, came the sternest, bravest,
and most efficient human beings that ever
walked the world, the lighting Roman pa
trician, who, after thousand years of heat
and luxury, and stated voluptuousness,
was still the most formidable officer with
whom an enemy could come in contact
and he was outdone in courage by the men
who swarmed up from the blazing slopes of
Palestine and the fierce heat of Idumea to
defend the Holy City. The Scotch and the
Swedes are confessedly manly people, able
to toll aud 10 battle, and to endure; but
they are not manlier, or drawer, or more
enduring than the planters in those swell
tering rice swamps of South Carolina, or
the hot "barrens' of Georgia, or the hotter
lagoons and morasses and flooded jungles
of Louisiana, where upon all accepted con-
ditions men ought to degenerate into cow
ards. The Delawares, bred In a temperate
climate, were not drawer than the Semino-
les of Florida, or so brave as their far-away
kinfolk the Caribs of Panama and the
Negro transported out of the tropics dis
tinctly loses nerve.
We think that heat demoralizes but
when Spain anticipated Britain and con-
quered and colonized continent, when
three hundred Spanish ruffians, led by
brutal pig obber, trampled down a semi
civilized empire with millions of inhabi-
tants, Spain was as hot as II Is now. We
speak Of the exceptional proli6cness of the
Anglo Saxon, who is now sending an army
of one hundred thousand men a year to
people America and the Southern CONT
nent, and never feels the loss, but who peo-
pied India and Southern China, and the
southern shore OF the Mediterranean and
Spanish America, except races who must
have lived for ages under the sun? That
some law correlating progress, or what we
call progress, with material conditions, ex-
lists, is possible or probable; but 1t is not
discovered yet, and when discovered will
probably be found an exceedingly weak
one, the true source Of difference being
moral or intellectual, or most probably of
all, dependent on that faculty of which we
know as yet so extremely little, the faculty
which separates man by an impossible
line from every other creature, the faculty
of intellectual accumulation. If we could
once be certain that there are races who pos