SEMITIC RACES

   races reputed descendants of Shem, including the Jews, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Syrians, the Phoenicians, and the Arabs, and are "all marked," as the editor has observed elsewhere, "by common features; such appear in their language, their literature, their modes of thinking, social organisation, and religious belief. Their language is poor in inflection, has few or no compound verbs or substantives, has next to no power of expressing abstract ideas, and is of simple primitive structure or syntax. Their literature has neither the breadth nor the flow of that of Greece or Rome, but it is instinct with a passion which often holds of the very depths of being, and appeals to the ends of the earth. In their modes of thinking they are taken up with concrete realities instead of abstractions, and hence they have contributed nothing to science or philosophy, much as they have to faith. Their social order is patriarchal, with a leaning to a despotism, which in certain of them, such as the Jews and Arabs, goes higher and higher till it reaches God; called, therefore, by Jude 'the Only Despot.'"