The evolution of a race, distinguishing it from the formation of a nation, is a slow process.  We recognize a race by certain peculiar traits, and by characteristics which slowly change.  They are acquired little by little in an evolution which, historically, it is often difficult to trace.  They are due to the environment, to the discipline of life, and to what is technically called education.  These work together to make what is called character, race character, and it is this which is transmitted from generation to generation.  Acquirements are not hereditary, like habits and peculiarities, physical or mental.  A man does not transmit to his descendants his learning, though he may transmit the aptitude for it.  This is illustrated in factories where skilled labor is handed down and fixed in the same families, that is, where the same kind of labor is continued from one generation to another.  The child, put to work, has not the knowledge of the parent, but a special aptitude in his skill and dexterity.  Both body and mind have acquired certain transmissible traits.  The same thing is seen on a larger scale in a whole nation, like the Japanese, who have been trained into what seems an art instinct.

It is this character, quality, habit, the result of a slow educational process, which distinguishes one race from another.  It is this that the race transmits, and not the more or less accidental education of a decade or an era.  The Brahmins carry this idea into the next life, and say that the departing spirit carries with him nothing except this individual character, no acquirements or information or extraneous culture.  It was perhaps in the same spirit that the sad preacher in Ecclesiastes said there is no “knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest.”

It is by this character that we classify civilized and even semi-civilized races; by this slowly developed fibre, this slow accumulation of inherent quality in the evolution of the human being from lower to higher, that continues to exist notwithstanding the powerful influence of governments and religions.  We are understood when we speak of the French, the Italian, the Pole, the Spanish, the English, the German, the Arab race, the Japanese, and so on.  It is what a foreign writer calls, not inaptly, a collective race soul.  As it is slow in evolution, it is persistent in enduring.

Further, we recognize it as a stage of progress, historically necessary in the development of man into a civilized adaptation to his situation in this world.  It is a process that cannot be much hurried, and a result that cannot be leaped to out of barbarism by any superimposition of knowledge or even quickly by any change of environment.  We may be right in our modern notion that education has a magical virtue that can work any kind of transformation; but we are certainly not right in supposing that it can do this instantly, or that it can work this effect upon a barbarous race in the same period of time that it can upon one more developed, one that has acquired at least a race consciousness.