Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/315

Rh : the Iroquois and the Hurons subjugated other tribes, and one such defeated tribe was condemned to be called "women." Both of these peoples, again, voluntarily or not, became females to the invading English and French. The French are still males to the Arabs and Malagasy; they were lately males to the Alsacians and Lorrainers, whom they so impregnated with their civilization that the Germans can only re-Germanize their own countrymen by recolonizing the two provinces. Can a nation lose its sex? Prince Bismarck, who is a noumenalist among statesmen and goes to the root of the matter, as another retired statesman is content with exploring a wide surface, describes the Celts and Slavonians as feminine, while the Germans and English are masculine. Were the French conquering and creative while they were still led by a Teutonic aristocracy; and is it because they deposed their rulers in 1789 and 1830, and allowed the Celtic substratum to come to the surface, that they have lost the leadership of Europe in war, science, and philosophy? Did Spain cut her spermatic nerve, so to speak, when she killed off her Protestants and freethinkers? If it was so, we might describe national sex as being produced by the emergence, commonly the immigration, of a conquering class or race. The effects are very different in different cases. The Hindus imposed their government, language, and religion on the races of India; the Hellenes on the Pelasgians. The Goths and Germans imposed their government and laws on the Iberians and Celts, accepting the language and religion of the indigenes, which, however, were those of Rome. A race may thus be at once male and female, as France receives her militarism and her music from Germany, while she communicates her plastic and literary art. All existing and extinct civilized peoples are or have been bisexual. By the adventurous male elements in them they found pioneer colonies (those of our first or asexual division, which might perhaps have been called male colonies, like certain low organisms). By male and female elements together they build up and organize the higher colonial groups belonging to the second or quasi-sexual division, in which each colony is a more or less complete reproduction of the mother country, and is therefore capable of self-subsistence. Here, again, as in the first, the arrangement is a compromise between the logical and chronological order.

1. It may seem an abuse of language or an error in classification to place convict colonies in this division. The foundation of such settlements might rather be considered the expulsion of feculent matter from the social organism than the planting of the healthy germs of a new national life. Yet low as it is—far lower than the higher groups of the pioneer division—the convict colony bears within it the potentiality of complete development. Crime, unhappily, is