When national characteristics were talked about a hundred years ago, in the great days of Darwinism and eugenics and so on, it was a pseudo-scientific talk erm implying that there was some blood or racial characteristics which marked one people off from another, and this lay at the bottom of all that talk about Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, which erm led plenty of people in this country to suppose that erm the white peoples of Northern Europe and North America had some characteristics which made them superior to coloured people, and all kind of bogus scientific arguments followed from that.