What we term national character, is the aggregate of the qualities preponderating in a community. It is obvious that when we speak of the artistic genius of the Greeks, we do not mean that every native of Hellas and Ionia was an artist; and when we call a nation unwarlike or valorous, we do not thereby either stigmatize every individual as a coward, or extol him as a hero. The same is the case with races. When, for example, we assert that the black race is intellectually inferior to the white, it is not implied that the most intelligent negro should still be more obtuse than the most stupid white man. The maximum intellect and capacity of one race may greatly exceed the minimum of another, without placing them on an equality. The testimony of history, and the results of philanthropic experiment, are the data upon which the ethnologist must institute his inquiries, if he would arrive at conclusions instructive to humanity. Let us take for illustration the white and the black races, supposed by many to represent the two extremes of the scale of gradation. The whole history of the former shows an uninterrupted progress; that of the latter, monotonous stagnation. To the one, mankind owes the most valuable discoveries in the domain of thought, and their practical application; to the other, it owes nothing. For ages plunged in the darkest gloom of barbarism, there is not one ray of even temporary or borrowed improvement to cheer the dismal picture of its history, or inspire with hope the disheartened philanthropist. At the boundary of its territory, the ever-encroaching spirit of conquest of the European stops powerless.[9] Never, in the history of the world, has a grander or more conclusive experiment been tried than in the case of the negro race. We behold them placed in immediate possession of the richest island in the richest part of the globe, with every advantage that climate, soil, geographical situation, can afford; removed from every injurious contact, yet with every facility for constant intercourse with the most polished nations of the earth; inheriting all that the white race had gained by the toil of centuries in science, politics, and morals; and what is the result? As if to afford a still more irrefragable proof of the mental inequality of races, we find separate divisions of the same island inhabited, one by the pure, the other by a half-breed race; and the infusion of the white blood in the latter case forms a population incontestably and avowedly superior. In opposition to such facts, some special pleader, bent upon establishing a preconceived notion, ransacks the records of history to find a few isolated instances where an individual of the inferior race has displayed average ability, and from such exceptional cases he deduces conclusions applicable to the whole mass! He points with exultation to a negro who calculates, a negro who is an officer of artillery in Russia, a few others who are employed in a counting-house.