At the French Academy of Sciences on Monday, M. de
Lesseps presented a volume of M. Marius Fontane's "Universal History," entitled, "The Asiatics," to the Academy, and seized the occasion to make a very ingenious speech on the Phoenician element in English civilisation, and the liability that element has brought with it to " outbursts of covetousness," " which are unjust, and even threatening to human progress." It is to the Asiatic, or rather to the Phoenician, element in England that M. de Lesseps ascribes the tendency to these outbursts of covetous- ness. But that, perhaps, is only because he wanted to remark in conclusion that " the strong Anglo-Saxon race always ends by overcoming any unhealthy agitation, in order to return to the side of equity, and to labour for its triumph." We fear that this rhetorical mode of putting the matter does injustice to Asiatics,. and too much justice to Anglo-Saxons. If there is a tendency to outbursts of covetousness in us at all, we suspect it is the Anglo-Saxon, not the imaginary Phoenician in the disguise of the Anglo-Saxon, who is subject to them, though it is also the Anglo-Saxon who conquers these arrogances of the commercial spirit. The Phoenician blood in us is exceedingly hypothetical.
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