prospects of those countries, and of the cause of them.”
“Your royal courtesy,” replied Abraham, “will permit me to dispose myself, according to the gravity of this occasion, in the attitude I find most consonant to discourse.” He then seated himself on a large cushioned divan, after his national custom. Then bending his head a little, and stroking his long black beard with his left hand, the prince said:
“I have observed, among the nations that I am familiar with, that the complex principle which we call humanity can be successfully addressed only in part to a race that could not develop the same principle to an equal degree for itself.
“An isolated race, like the Tatars, acquires one idea in great intensity, usually that of extreme hostility to strangers, in order to preserve its own isolation. Conversely, the people that develops a passion for inflicting death as a penalty for opinions that it dislikes, exhibits therein a descent towards barbarism. The passion itself has its origin in sources allied to savagery.
“An inferior race, receiving from another more advanced an idea higher than it had developed for itself, intensifies that idea to the exclusion of others; and if the higher race does not practice the same idea with equal vigor, it will become the victim of the inferior rendered desperate by the singleness that concentrates all its energy.
“During six centuries the Asiatic and African tribes in Spain have presented to the Spanish mind an ex-
