What they were centuries ago, that at bottom they are to-day.

Take away the European influence of the last twenty years, and each man might almost be his own great-grandfather.

In race characteristics he is yet essentially the same.

The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have been gradually extinguishing them ever since.

Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great quality of impersonality.
If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country whose northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find that we have included in a relatively small extent of surface almost all the nations of note in the world, past or present.