Page:Under the Sun.djvu/348

324

A very small cause, indeed, may have immense effects; and this holds good with national character as well as with natural phenomena. A little stone set rolling from the top of the Andes might spread ruin far and wide through the valleys at their feet, and the accident of Esau being a good marksman has left the Arabs wanderers and desert folk to the present day. The English character has itself been formed by an aggregation of small causes working together, and it will perhaps be found that one of the most important of them was the abundance of stones that lie about the surface of the ground in England. In India the traveller may go a thousand miles in a straight line, and except where he crosses rivers, will not find anything on the ground which he can pick up and throw. The Bengali, therefore, cannot throw, and never could, for he has never had anything to practise with; and what is his character? Is he not notoriously gentle and soft-mannered? His dogs are still wild beasts, and his wild birds are tame. What can explain this better than the absence of stones? We in England have always had plenty of stones, and where the fists could not settle quarrels our rude ancestors had only to stoop to the ground for arms; and it is a mere platitude to say that the constant provision of arms makes a people ready to pick a quarrel and encourages independence in bearing. From the same cause our dogs obey our voices, for the next argument they know will be a stone; while, as for our wild birds, let the schoolboys tell us whether they understand the use of pebbles or not. In Greece the argument of the chermadion is still a favorite, for the savage dogs are still there that will recognize no other, unmindful of that disastrous episode in the history of Mycenæ, which all arose from Hercules’s young cousin