The destructive results of such licentiousness in the history of these tribes, already extinct or nearly so, need not be insisted upon. But why seek to demonstrate it from remote times or savage lands? Within a year a philosophic student, from a wide range of investigation, has attributed chiefly to the same pathological cause the deterioration of the leading so-called Latin nations of Europe in the last two centuries. In them, says Signor G. Ferrero, the sex impulse develops earlier, and absorbs and wastes the life energies more than in the Teutonic nations, yielding to the latter the superior place in the struggle for existence. Another and familiar exemplification of this neuropathic frame of the ethnic mind is that exaggerated national boastfulness known (from a soldier under Bonaparte) as _Chauvinism_. It is patriotism passed into mild dementia; so well known that it has a special name in English also, _Jingoism_. The profound conviction that our own country—whichever that may be—is the greatest in the world, leader of all in intelligence, power, culture, and vigour, is invariably and everywhere a mental delusion, a type of megalomania. Such a notion prepares the way for increase of ignorance and self-esteem so blind that it is sure ere long to fall in the pit ever open for fools. _(c) Destructive Impulse._ The passion for wanton destruction may seize equally upon a person or group. It may be directed toward inanimate objects or against human life. John Addington Symonds gives a thrilling sketch of the monster, Ezzelino da Romano, Vicar of the Emperor Frederick II., in northern Italy (about 1250). His own passion was the mutilation, torture, and murder of men, women, and children. His inordinate cruelty and repeated massacres led to his becoming the hero of a fiendish cycle in Italian literature. We may call him, if we wish to palliate his monstrous deeds, a monomaniac; but, as Symonds says, if we thus excuse him “we shall have to place how many Visconti, Sforzeschi, Malatesti, Borgias, Farnesi, etc., in the list of maniacs?” No, it was an ethnic tendency of Italy at that period, and for long afterwards, and could be illustrated by scores of traits from popular as well as princely life. The mania for murder which seized the Parisian populace in 1793 was a true pathological outburst. No sense of patriotism thrilled the crowds who ran by the tumbrils and surrounded the guillotines. It was hæmatomania, the blood-madness, that was upon them. The suicidal impulse occasionally assumes an epidemic form which arises from conditions of the ethnic life. The aborigines of Cuba when enslaved by the Spanish conquerors practised self-destruction on a scale which contributed much to their prompt extinction. In the city of Frankfort-on-the-Main in the last century suicide became so frequent among women that the dead bodies were suspended by the feet in order to check the impulse in the survivors.