Page:The future of Africa.djvu/66

60 and nature, and appetencies, and destiny, as ourselves, and the men of all other nations; and, therefore, a nation is but a section of the great commonwealth of humanity, a phase of the common type of being, and no more. The endless migrations, the strange wanderings, the multitudinous progenitures, and the colonial formations which have originated the nations of earth, eschew the idea of isolation, and show that all are but fragments, separate, broken, detached, from some large parent form, itself of like origin, which has spread itself out, on every side, the common mother of nations and races. For such is the light which shines even from the gloom of history: from one single pair and parentage—a race; from the dawn of time to the days of Noah. From the deluge, three distinct forms of race and family, which have again budded into life and energy divers nationalities, of immortal renown, of boundless influence, and commanding name, through all the tracks of time. And then, again, since the days of our Lord Christ, and especially since the Reformation, how the Scandinavian and the Norman races have streamed out from their crowded homes or hives in the far north and formed those great and mighty nations; which, notwithstanding the semi-barbarism of ages, and their brutal love of fight, have mastered the world by law, and genius, and learning, and science, and the genial outgrowings of art; and have blessed mankind by the religion Avhich has ever tempered their rudeness! Nor yet is it Europe only that feels the tread of their feet and the might of their