Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/257

244 it into use and beauty, and so of the greatest amount of universal welfare for all and each. The superior nation is capable of most rapid progress; for the advance of man goes on with accelerated velocity; the further he has gone, the faster he goes.

The disposition in mankind to acquire this increase of human development and material power, I will call the instinct of progress. It exists in different degrees in various nations and races: some are easily content with a small amount thereof, and so advance but slowly; others desire the most of both, and press continually forward.

Of all races, the Caucasian has hitherto shown the most of this instinct of progress, and, though perhaps the youngest of all, has advanced furthest in the development of the human faculties, and in the acquisition of power over the material world; it has already won the most welfare, and now makes the swiftest progress.

Of the various families of the Caucasian race, the Teutonic, embracing all the Germanic people kindred to our own, is now the most remarkable for this instinct of progress. Accordingly, in the last four hundred years, all the great new steps of peaceful Caucasian development have been first taken by the Teutonic people, who now bear the same relation to the world's progress that the Greeks did a thousand years before Christ, the Romans eight hundred years later, and the Romanized Celts of France at a day yet more recent.

Of the Teutons, the Anglo-Saxons, or that portion thereof settled in the Northern States of America, have got the furthest forward in certain important forms of welfare, and now advance the most rapidly in their general progress. With no class of capitalists or scholars equal to the men of great estates and great learning in Europe, the whole mass of the people have yet attained the greatest material comfort, enjoyment of natural rights, and development of the human faculties. They feel most powerfully the general instinct of progress, and advance swiftest to future welfare and development. Here the bulk of the population is Anglo-Saxon; but this power blood has been enriched by additions from divers other sources,—Teutonic and Celtic.