is before all else a domestic race, fitted for family life and fireside joys.  In no other race has the bond of blood been stronger, or has it created more duties, or attached man to his fellow with so much breadth and depth.  Every social institution of the Celtic peoples was in the beginning only an extension of the family.  A common tradition attests, to this very day, that nowhere has the trace of this great institution of relationship been better preserved than in Brittany.  There is a widely-spread belief in that country, that blood speaks, and that two relatives, unknown one to the other, in any part of the world wheresoever it may be, recognise each other by the secret and mysterious emotion which they feel in each other’s presence.  Respect for the dead rests on the same principle.  Nowhere has reverence for the dead been greater than among the Briton peoples; nowhere have so many memories and prayers clustered about the tomb.  This is because life is not for these people a personal adventure, undertaken by each man on his own account, and at his own risks and perils; it is a link in a long chain, a gift received and handed on, a debt paid and a duty done.

It is easily discernible how little fitted were natures so strongly concentrated to furnish one of those brilliant developments, which imposes the momentary ascendency of a people on the world; and that, no doubt, is why the part played externally by the Cymric race has always been a secondary one.  Destitute of the means of expansion, alien to all idea of aggression and conquest, little desirous of making its thought prevail outside itself, it has only known how to retire so far as space has permitted, and then, at bay in its last place of retreat, to make an invincible resistance to its enemies.  Its very fidelity has been a useless devotion.  Stubborn of submission and ever behind the age, it is faithful to its conquerors when its conquerors are no longer faithful to themselves.  It was the last to defend its religious independence against Rome—­and it has become the staunchest stronghold of Catholicism; it was the last in France to defend its political independence against the king—­and it has given to the world the last royalists.

Thus the Celtic race has worn itself out in resistance to its time, and in the defence of desperate causes.  It does not seem as though in any epoch it had any aptitude for political life.  The spirit of family stifled within it all attempts at more extended organisation.  Moreover, it does not appear that the peoples which form it are by themselves susceptible of progress.  To them life appears as a fixed condition, which man has no power to alter.  Endowed with little initiative, too much inclined to look upon themselves as minors and in tutelage, they are quick to believe in destiny and resign themselves to it.  Seeing how little audacious they are against God, one would scarcely believe this race to be the daughter of Japhet.