RACE AND LANGUAGE[1]

It is no very great time since the readers of the English newspapers

were, perhaps a little amused, perhaps a little startled, at the story

of a deputation of Hungarian students going to Constantinople to

present a sword of honor to an Ottoman general. The address and the

answer enlarged on the ancient kindred of Turks and Magyars, on the

long alienation of the dissevered kinsfolk, on the return of both in

these later times to a remembrance of the ancient kindred and to the

friendly feelings to which such kindred gave birth. The discourse has

a strange sound when we remember the reigns of Sigismund and

Wladislaus, when we think of the dark days of Nikopolis and Varna, when

we think of Huniades encamped at the foot of Haemus, and of Belgrade

beating back Mahomet the Conqueror from her gates. The Magyar and the

Ottoman embracing with the joy of reunited kinsfolk is a sight which

certainly no man would have looked forward to in the fourteenth or

fifteenth century. At an earlier time the ceremony might have seemed a

degree less wonderful. If a man whose ideas are drawn wholly from the

modern map should sit down to study the writings of Constantine

Porphyrogennêtos, he would perhaps be startled at finding Turks and

Franks spoken of as neighbors, at finding _Turcia_ and _Francia_--we

must not translate _Tourchia_ and _Phraggia_ by Turkey and

France--spoken of as border-lands. A little study will perhaps show

him that the change lies almost wholly in the names and not in the

boundaries. The lands are there still, and the frontier between them

has shifted much less than one might have looked for in nine hundred

years. Nor has there been any great change in the population of the

two countries. The Turks and the Franks of the Imperial geographer are

there still, in the lands which he calls Turcia and Francia; only we no

longer speak of them as Turks and Franks. The Turks of Constantine are

Magyars; the Franks of Constantine are Germans. The Magyar students

may not unlikely have turned over the Imperial pages, and they may have

seen how their forefathers stand described there. We can hardly fancy

that the Ottoman general is likely to have given much time to lore of

such a kind. Yet the Ottoman answer was as brimful of ethnological and

antiquarian sympathy as the Magyar address. It is hardly to be

believed that a Turk, left to himself, would by his own efforts have

found out the primeval kindred between Turk and Magyar. He might

remember that Magyar exiles had found a safe shelter on Ottoman

territory; he might look deep enough into the politics of the present

moment to see that the rule of Turk and Magyar alike is threatened by

the growth of Slavonic national life. But the idea that Magyar and

Turk owe each other any love or any duty, directly on the ground of

primeval kindred, is certainly not likely to have presented itself to

the untutored Ottoman mind. In short, it sounds, as some one said at

the time, rather like the dream of a professor who has run wild with an

ethnological craze, than like the serious thought of a practical man of

any nation. Yet the Magyar students seem to have meant their address

quite seriously. And the Turkish general, if he did not take it

seriously, at least thought it wise to shape his answer as if he did.

As a piece of practical politics, it sounds like Frederick Barbarossa

threatening to avenge the defeat of Crassus upon Saladin, or like the

French of the revolutionary wars making the Pope Pius of those days

answerable for the wrongs of Vercingetorix. The thing sounds like

comedy, almost like conscious comedy. But it is a kind of comedy which

may become tragedy, if the idea from which it springs get so deeply

rooted in men's minds as to lead to any practical consequences. As

long as talk of this kind does not get beyond the world of hot-headed

students, it may pass for a craze. It would be more than a craze, if

it should be so widely taken up on either side that the statesmen on

either side find it expedient to profess to take it up also.

To allege the real or supposed primeval kindred between Magyars and

Ottomans as a ground for political action, or at least for political

sympathy, in the affairs of the present moment, is an extreme

case--some may be inclined to call it a _reductio ad absurdum_--of a

whole range of doctrines and sentiments which have in modern days

gained a great power over men's minds. They have gained so great a

power that those who may regret their influence cannot afford to

despise it. To make any practical inference from the primeval kindred

of Magyar and Turk is indeed pushing the doctrine of race, and of

sympathies arising from race, as far as it well can be pushed. Without

plunging into any very deep mysteries, without committing ourselves to

any dangerous theories in the darker regions of ethnological inquiry,

we may perhaps be allowed at starting to doubt whether there is any

real primeval kindred between the Ottoman and the Finnish Magyar. It

is for those who have gone specially deep into the antiquities of the

non-Aryan races to say whether there is or is not. At all events, as

far as the great facts of history go, the kindred is of the vaguest and

most shadowy kind. It comes to little more than the fact that Magyars

and Ottomans are alike non-Aryan invaders who have made their way into

Europe within recorded times, and that both have, rightly or wrongly,

been called by the name of Turks. These do seem rather slender grounds

on which to build up a fabric of national sympathy between two nations,

when several centuries of living practical history all pull the other

way. It is hard to believe that the kindred of Turk and Magyar was

thought of when a Turkish pacha ruled at Buda. Doubtless Hungarian

Protestants often deemed, and not unreasonably deemed, that the

contemptuous toleration of the Moslem sultan was a lighter yoke than

the persecution of the Catholic emperor. But it was hardly on grounds

of primeval kindred that they made the choice. The ethnological

dialogue held at Constantinople does indeed sound like ethnological

theory run mad. But it is the very wildness of the thing which gives

it its importance. The doctrine of race, and of sympathies springing

from race, must have taken very firm hold indeed of men's minds before

it could be carried out in a shape which we are tempted to call so

grotesque as this.

The plain fact is that the new lines of scientific and historical

inquiry which have been opened in modern times have had a distinct and

deep effect upon the politics of the age. The fact may be estimated in

many ways, but its existence as a fact cannot be denied. Not in a

merely scientific or literary point of view, but in one strictly

practical, the world is not the same world as it was when men had not

yet dreamed of the kindred between Sanscrit, Greek, and English, when

it was looked on as something of a paradox to him that there was a

distinction between Celtic and Teutonic tongues and nations.

Ethnological and philological researches--I do not forget the

distinction between the two, but for the present I must group them

together--have opened the way for new national sympathies, new national

antipathies, such as would have been unintelligible a hundred years

ago. A hundred years ago a man's political likes and dislikes seldom

went beyond the range which was suggested by the place of his birth or

immediate descent. Such birth or descent made him a member of this or

that political community, a subject of this or that prince, a

citizen--perhaps a subject--of this or that commonwealth. The

political community of which he was a member had its traditional

alliances and traditional enmities, and by those alliances and enmities

the likes and dislikes of the members of that community were guided.

But those traditional alliances and enmities were seldom determined by

theories about language or race. The people of this or that place

might be discontented under a foreign government; but, as a rule, they

were discontented only if subjection to that foreign government brought

with it personal oppression or at least political degradation. Regard

or disregard of some purely local privilege or local feeling went for

more than the fact of a government being native or foreign. What we

now call the sentiment of nationality did not go for much; what we call

the sentiment of race went for nothing at all. Only a few men here and

there would have understood the feelings which have led to those two

great events of our own time, the political reunion of the German and

Italian nations after their long political dissolution. Not a soul

would have understood the feelings which have allowed Panslavism to be

a great practical agent in the affairs of Europe, and which have made

talk about "the Latin race," if not practical, at least possible.

Least of all, would it have been possible to give any touch of

political importance to what would have then seemed so wild a dream as

a primeval kindred between Magyar and Ottoman.

That feelings such as these, and the practical consequences which have

flowed from them, are distinctly due to scientific and historical

teaching there can, I think, be no doubt. Religious sympathy and

purely national sympathy are both feelings of much simpler growth,

which need no deep knowledge nor any special teaching. The cry which

resounded through Christendom when the Holy City was taken by the

Mussulmans, the cry which resounded through Islam when the same city

was taken by the Christians, the spirit which armed England to support

French Huguenots and which armed Spain to support French Leaguers, all

spring from motives which lie on the surface. Nor need we seek for any

explanation but such as lies on the surface for the natural wish for

closer union which arose among Germans or Italians who found themselves

parted off by purely dynastic arrangements from men who were their

countrymen in everything else. Such a feeling has to strive with the

counter-feeling which springs from local jealousies and local dislikes;

but it is a perfectly simple feeling, which needs no subtle research

either to arouse or to understand it. So, if we draw our illustrations

from the events of our own time, there is nothing but what is perfectly

simple in the feeling which calls Russia, as the most powerful of

Orthodox states, to the help of her Orthodox brethren everywhere, and

which calls the members of the Orthodox Church everywhere to look to

Russia as their protector. The feeling may have to strive against a

crowd of purely political considerations, and by those purely political

considerations it may be outweighed. But the feeling is in itself

altogether simple and natural. So again, the people of Montenegro and

of the neighboring lands in Herzegovina and by the _Bocche_ of Cattaro

feel themselves countrymen in every sense but the political accident

which keeps them asunder. They are drawn together by a tie which

everyone can understand, by the same tie which would draw together the

people of three adjoining English counties, if any strange political

action should part them asunder in like manner. The feeling here is

that of nationality in the strictest sense, nationality in a purely

local or geographical sense. It would exist all the same if Panslavism

had never been heard of; it might exist though those who feel it had

never heard of the Slavonic race at all. It is altogether another

thing when we come to the doctrine of race, and of sympathies founded

on race, in the wider sense. Here we have a feeling which professes to

bind together, and which as a matter of fact has had a real effect in

binding together, men whose kindred to one another is not so obvious at

first sight as the kindred of Germans, Italians, or Serbs who are kept

asunder by nothing but a purely artificial political boundary. It is a

feeling at whose bidding the call to union goes forth to men whose

dwellings are geographically far apart, to men who may have had no

direct dealings with one another for years or for ages, to men whose

languages, though the scholar may at once see that they are closely

akin, may not be so closely akin as to be mutually intelligible for

common purposes. A hundred years back the Servian might have cried for

help to the Russian on the ground of common Orthodox faith; he would

hardly have called for help on the ground of common Slavonic speech and

origin. If he had done so, it would have been rather by way of

grasping at any chance, however desperate or far-fetched, than as

putting forward a serious and well understood claim which he might

expect to find accepted and acted on by large masses of men. He might

have received help, either out of genuine sympathy springing from

community of faith or from the baser thought that he could be made use

of as a convenient political tool. He would have got but little help

purely on the ground of a community of blood and speech which had had

no practical result for ages. When Russia in earlier days interfered

between the Turk and his Christian subjects, there is no sign of any

sympathy felt or possessed for Slaves as Slaves. Russia dealt with

Montenegro, not, as far as one can see, out of any Slavonic

brotherhood, but because an independent Orthodox State at enmity with

the Turk could not fail to be a useful ally. The earlier dealings of

Russia with the subject nations were far more busy among the Greeks

than among the Slaves. In fact, till quite lately all the Orthodox

subjects of the Turk were in most European eyes looked on as alike

Greeks. The Orthodox Church has been commonly known as the Greek

Church; and it has often been very hard to make people understand that

the vast mass of the members of that so-called Greek Church are not

Greek in any other sense. In truth we may doubt whether, till

comparatively lately, the subject nations themselves were fully alive

to the differences of race and speech among them. A man must in all

times and places know whether he speaks the same language as another

man; but he does not always go on to put his consciousness of

difference into the shape of a sharply drawn formula. Still less does

he always make the difference the ground of any practical course of

action. The Englishman in the first days of the Norman Conquest felt

the hardships of foreign rule, and he knew that those hardships were

owing to foreign rule. But he had not learned to put his sense of

hardship into any formula about an oppressed nationality. So, when the

policy of the Turk found that the subtle intellect of the Greek could

be made use of as an instrument of dominion over the other subject

nations, the Bulgarian felt the hardship of the state of things in

which, as it was proverbially said, his body was in bondage to the Turk

and his soul in bondage to the Greek. But we may suspect that this

neatly turned proverb dates only from the awakening of a distinctly

national Bulgarian feeling in modern times. The Turk was felt to be an

intruder and an enemy, because his rule was that of an open oppressor

belonging to another creed. The Greek, on the other hand, though his

spiritual dominion brought undoubted practical evils with it, was not

felt to be an intruder and an enemy in the same sense. His quicker

intellect and superior refinement made him a model. The Bulgarian

imitated the Greek tongue and Greek manners; he was willing in other

lands to be himself looked on as a Greek. It is only in quite modern

times, under the direct influence of the preaching of the doctrine of

race, that a hard and fast line has been drawn between Greeks and

Bulgarians. That doctrine has cut two ways. It has given both

nations, Greek and Bulgarian alike, a renewed national life, national

strength, national hopes, such as neither of them had felt for ages.

In so doing, it has done one of the best and most hopeful works of the

age. But in so doing, it has created one of the most dangerous of

immediate political difficulties. In calling two nations into a

renewed being, it has arrayed them in enmity against each other, and

that in the face of a common enemy in whose presence all lesser

differences and jealousies ought to be hushed into silence.

There is then a distinct doctrine of race, and of sympathies founded on

race, distinct from the feeling of community of religion, and distinct

from the feeling of nationality in the narrower sense. It is not so

simple or easy a feeling as either of those two. It does not in the

same way lie on the surface; it is not in the same way grounded on

obvious facts which are plain to every man's understanding. The

doctrine of race is essentially an artificial doctrine, a learned

doctrine. It is an inference from facts which the mass of mankind

could never have found out for themselves; facts which, without a

distinctly learned teaching, could never be brought home to them in any

intelligible shape. Now what is the value of such a doctrine? Does it

follow that, because it is confessedly artificial, because it springs,

not from a spontaneous impulse, but from a learned teaching, it is

therefore necessarily foolish, mischievous, perhaps unnatural? It may

perhaps be safer to hold that like many other doctrines, many other

sentiments, it is neither universally good nor universally bad, neither

inherently wise nor inherently foolish. It may be safer to hold that

it may, like other doctrines and sentiments, have a range within which

it may work for good, while in some other range it may work for evil.

It may in short be a doctrine which is neither to be rashly accepted,

nor rashly cast aside, but one which may need to be guided, regulated,

modified, according to time, place, and circumstance. I am not now

called on so much to estimate the practical good and evil of the

doctrine as to work out what the doctrine itself is, and to try to

explain some difficulties about it, but I must emphatically say that

nothing can be more shallow, nothing more foolish, nothing more purely

sentimental, than the talk of those who think that they can simply

laugh down or shriek down any doctrine or sentiment which they

themselves do not understand. A belief or a feeling which has a

practical effect on the conduct of great masses of men, sometimes on

the conduct of whole nations, may be very false and very mischievous;

but it is in every case a great and serious fact, to be looked gravely

in the face. Men who sit at their ease and think that all wisdom is

confined to themselves and their own clique may think themselves vastly

superior to the great emotions which stir our times, as they would

doubtless have thought themselves vastly superior to the emotions which

stirred the first Saracens or the first Crusaders. But the emotions

are there all the same, and they do their work all the same. The most

highly educated man in the most highly educated society cannot sneer

them out of being.

But it is time to pass to the more strictly scientific aspect of the

subject. The doctrine of race, in its popular form, is the direct

offspring of the study of scientific philology; and yet it is just now,

in its popular form at least, somewhat under the ban of scientific

philologers. There is nothing very wonderful in this. It is in fact

the natural course of things which might almost have been reckoned on

beforehand. When the popular mind gets hold of a truth it seldom gets

hold of it with strict scientific precision. It commonly gets hold of

one side of the truth; it puts forth that side of the truth only. It

puts that side forth in a form which may not be in itself distorted or

exaggerated, but which practically becomes distorted and exaggerated,

because other sides of the same truth are not brought into their due

relation with it. The popular idea thus takes a shape which is

naturally offensive to men of strict precision, and which men of strict

scientific precision have naturally, and from their own point of view

quite rightly, risen up to rebuke. Yet it may often happen that, while

the scientific statement is the only true one for scientific purposes,

the popular version may also have a kind of practical truth for the

somewhat rough and ready purposes of a popular version. In our present

case scientific philologers are beginning to complain, with perfect

truth and perfect justice from their own point of view, that the

popular doctrine of race confounds race and language. They tell us,

and they do right to tell us, that language is no certain test of race,

that men who speak the same tongue are not therefore necessarily men of

the same blood. And they tell us further, that from whatever quarter

the alleged popular confusion came, it certainly did not come from any

teaching of scientific philologers.

The truth of all this cannot be called in question. We have too many

instances in recorded history of nations laying aside the use of one

language and taking to the use of another, for anyone who cares for

accuracy to set down language as any sure test of race. In fact, the

studies of the philologer and those of the ethnologer strictly so

called are quite distinct, and they deal with two wholly different sets

of phenomena. The science of the ethnologer is strictly a physical

science. He has to deal with purely physical phenomena; his business

lies with the different varieties of the human body, and specially, to

take that branch of his inquiries which most impresses the unlearned,

with the various conformations of the human skull. His researches

differ in nothing from those of the zoölogist or the paleontologist,

except that he has to deal with the physical phenomena of man, while

they deal with the physical phenomena of other animals. He groups the

different races of men, exactly as the others group the genera and

species of living or extinct mammals or reptiles. The student of

ethnology as a physical science may indeed strengthen his conclusions

by evidence of other kinds, evidence from arms, ornaments, pottery,

modes of burial. But all these are secondary; the primary ground of

classification is the physical conformation of man himself. As to

language, the ethnological method, left to itself, can find out nothing

whatever. The science of the ethnologer then is primarily physical; it

is historical only in that secondary sense in which paleontology, and

geology itself, may fairly be called historical. It arranges the

varieties of mankind according to a strictly physical classification;

what the language of each variety may have been, it leaves to the

professors of another branch of study to find out.

The science of the philologer, on the other hand, is strictly

historical. There is doubtless a secondary sense in which purely

philological science may be fairly called physical, just as there is a

secondary sense in which pure ethnology may be called historical. That

is to say, philology has to deal with physical phenomena, so far as it

has to deal with the physical aspect of the sounds of which human

language is made up. Its primary business, like the primary business

of any other historical science, is to deal with phenomena which do not

depend on physical laws, but which do depend on the human will. The

science of language is, in this respect, like the science of human

institutions or of human beliefs. Its subject-matter is not, like that

of pure ethnology, what man is, but, like that of any other historical

science, what man does. It is plain that no man's will can have any

direct influence on the shape of his skull. I say no direct influence,

because it is not for me to rule how far habits, places of abode, modes

of life, a thousand things which do come under the control of the human

will, may indirectly affect the physical conformation of a man himself

or of his descendants. Some observers have made the remark that men of

civilized nations who live in a degraded social state do actually

approach to the physical type of inferior races. However this may be,

it is quite certain, that as no man can by taking thought add a cubit

to his stature, so no man can by taking thought make his skull

brachycephalic or dolichocephalic. But the language which a man speaks

does depend upon his will; he can by taking thought make his speech

Romance or Teutonic. No doubt he has in most cases practically no

choice in the matter. The language which he speaks is practically

determined for him by fashion, habit, early teaching, a crowd of things

over which he has practically no control. But still the control is not

physical and inevitable, as it is in the case of the shape of his

skull. If we say that he cannot help speaking in a particular way;

that is, that he cannot help speaking a particular language, this

simply means that his circumstances are such that no other way of

speaking presents itself to his mind. And in many cases, he has a real

choice between two or more ways of speaking; that is, between two or

more languages. Every word that a man speaks is the result of a real,

though doubtless unconscious, act of his free will. We are apt to

speak of gradual changes in languages, as in institutions or anything

else, as if they were the result of a physical law, acting upon beings

who had no choice in the matter. Yet every change of the kind is

simply the aggregate of various acts of the will on the part of all

concerned. Every change in speech, every introduction of a new sound

or a new word, was really the result of an act of the will of some one

or other. The choice may have been unconscious; circumstances may have

been such as practically to give him but one choice; still he did

choose; he spoke in one way, when there was no physical hinderance to

his speaking in another way, when there was no physical compulsion to

speak at all. The Gauls need not have changed their own language for

Latin; the change was not the result of a physical necessity, but of a

number of acts of the will on the part of this and that Gaul. Moral

causes directed their choice, and determined that Gaul should become a

Latin-speaking land. But whether the skulls of the Gauls should be

long or short, whether their hair should be black or yellow, those were

points over which the Gauls themselves had no direct control whatever.

The study of men's skulls then is a study which is strictly physical, a

study of facts over which the will of man has no direct control. The

study of men's languages is strictly an historical study, a study of

facts over which the will of man has a direct control. It follows

therefore from the very nature of the two studies that language cannot

be an absolutely certain test of physical descent. A man cannot, under

any circumstances, choose his own skull; he may, under some

circumstances, choose his own language. He must keep the skull which

has been given him by his parents; he cannot, by any process of taking

thought, determine what kind of skull he will hand on to his own

children. But he may give up the use of the language which he has

learned from his parents, and he may determine what language he will

teach to his children. The physical characteristics of a race are

unchangeable, or are changed only by influences over which the race

itself has no direct control. The language which the race speaks may

be changed, either by a conscious act of the will or by that power of

fashion which is in truth the aggregate of countless unconscious acts

of the will. And, as the very nature of the case thus shows that

language is no sure test of race, so the facts of recorded history

equally prove the same truth. Both individuals and whole nations do in

fact often exchange the language of their forefathers for some other

language. A man settles in a foreign country. He learns the language

of that country; sometimes he forgets the use of his own language. His

children may perhaps speak both tongues; if they speak one tongue only,

it will be the tongue of the country where they live. In a generation

or two all trace of foreign origin will have passed away. Here then

language is no test of race. If the great-grandchildren speak the

language of their great-grandfathers, it will simply be as they may

speak any other foreign language. Here are men who by speech belong to

one nation, by actual descent to another. If they lose the physical

characteristics of the race to which the original settler belonged, it

will be due to inter-marriage, to climate, to some cause altogether

independent of language. Every nation will have some adopted children

of this kind, more or fewer; men who belong to it by speech, but who do

not belong to it by race. And what happens in the case of individuals

happens in the case of whole nations. The pages of history are crowded

with cases in which nations have cast aside the tongue of their

forefathers, and have taken instead the tongue of some other people.

Greek in the East, Latin in the West, became the familiar speech of

millions who had not a drop of Greek or Italian blood in their veins.

The same has been the case in later times with Arabic, Persian,

Spanish, German, English. Each of those tongues has become the

familiar speech of vast regions where the mass of the people are not

Arabian, Spanish, or English, otherwise than by adoption. The Briton

of Cornwall has, slowly but in the end thoroughly, adopted the speech

of England. In the American continent full-blooded Indians preside

over commonwealths which speak the tongue of Cortes and Pizarro. In

the lands to which all eyes are now turned, the Greek, who has been

busily assimilating strangers ever since he first planted his colonies

in Asia and Sicily, goes on busily assimilating his Albanian neighbors.

And between renegades, janizaries, and mothers of all nations, the

blood of many a Turk must be physically anything rather than Turkish.

The inherent nature of the case, and the witness of recorded history,

join together to prove that language is no certain test of race, and

that the scientific philologers are doing good service to accuracy of

expression and accuracy of thought by emphatically calling attention to

the fact that language is no such test.

But on the other hand, it is quite possible that the truth to which our

attention is just now most fittingly called may, if put forth too

broadly and without certain qualifications, lead to error quite as

great as the error at which it is aimed. I do not suppose that anyone

ever thought that language was, necessarily and in all cases, an

absolute and certain test. If anybody does think so, he has put

himself altogether out of court by shutting his eyes to the most

manifest facts of the case. But there can be no doubt that many people

have given too much importance to language as a test of race. Though

they have not wholly forgotten the facts which tell the other way, they

have not brought them out with enough prominence. But I can also

believe that many people have written and spoken on the subject in a

way which cannot be justified from a strictly scientific point of view,

but which may have been fully justified from the point of view of the

writers and speakers themselves. It may often happen that a way of

speaking may not be scientifically accurate, but may yet be quite near

enough to the truth for the purposes of the matter in hand. It may,

for some practical or even historical purpose, be really more true than

the statement which is scientifically more exact. Language is no

certain test of race; but if a man, struck by this wholesome warning,

should run off into the belief that language and race have absolutely

nothing to do with one another, he had better have gone without the

warning. For in such a case the last error would be worse than the

first. The natural instinct of mankind connects race and language. It

does not assume that language is an infallible test of race; but it

does assume that language and race have something to do with one

another. It assumes, that though language is not an accurately

scientific test of race, yet it is a rough and ready test which does

for many practical purposes. To make something more of an exact

definition, one might say, that though language is not a test of race,

it is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, a presumption of

race; that though it is not a test of race, yet it is a test of

something which, for many practical purposes, is the same as race.

Professor Max Müller warned us long ago that we must not speak of a

Celtic skull. Mr. Sayce has more lately warned us that we must not

infer from community of Aryan speech that there is any kindred in blood

between this or that Englishman and this or that Hindoo. And both

warnings are scientifically true. Yet anyone who begins his studies on

these matters with Professor Müller's famous Oxford Essay will

practically come to another way of looking at things. He will fill his

mind with a vivid picture of the great Aryan family, as yet one,

dwelling in one place, speaking one tongue, having already taken the

first steps towards settled society, recognizing the domestic

relations, possessing the first rudiments of government and religion,

and calling all these first elements of culture by names of which

traces still abide here and there among the many nations of the common

stock. He will go on to draw pictures equally vivid of the several

branches of the family parting off from the primeval home. One great

branch he will see going to the southeast, to become the forefathers of

the vast, yet isolated colony in the Asiatic lands of Persia and India.

He watches the remaining mass sending off wave after wave, to become

the forefathers of the nations of historical Europe. He traces out how

each branch starts with its own share of the common stock--how the

language, the creed, the institutions, once common to all, grow up into

different, yet kindred, shapes, among the many parted branches which

grew up, each with an independent life and strength of its own. This

is what our instructors set before us as the true origin of nations and

their languages. And, in drawing out the picture, we cannot avoid, our

teachers themselves do not avoid, the use of words which imply that the

strictly family relation, the relation of community of blood, is at the

root of the whole matter. We cannot help talking about the family and

its branches, about parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins. The

nomenclature of natural kindred exactly fits the case; it fits it so

exactly that no other nomenclature could enable us to set forth the

case with any clearness. Yet we cannot be absolutely certain that

there was any real community of blood in the whole story. We really

know nothing of the origin of language or the origin of society. We

may make a thousand ingenious guesses; but we cannot prove any of them.

It may be that the group which came together, and which formed the

primeval society which spoke the primeval Aryan tongue, were not

brought together by community of blood, but by some other cause which

threw them in one another's way. If we accept the Hebrew genealogies,

they need not have had any community of blood nearer than common

descent from Adam and Noah. That is, they need not have been all

children of Shem, of Ham, or of Japheth; some children of Shem, some of

Ham, and some of Japheth may have been led by some cause to settle

together. Or if we believe in independent creations of men, or in the

development of men out of mollusks, the whole of the original society

need not have been descendants of the same man or the same mollusk. In

short, there is no theory of the origin of man which requires us to

believe that the primeval Aryans were a natural family; they may have

been more like an accidental party of fellow-travelers. And if we

accept them as a natural family, it does not follow that the various

branches which grew into separate races and nations, speaking separate

though kindred languages, were necessarily marked off by more immediate

kindred. It may be that there is no nearer kindred in blood between

this or that Persian, this or that Greek, this or that Teuton, than the

general kindred of all Aryans. For, when this or that party marched

off from the common home, it does not follow that those who marched off

together were necessarily immediate brothers or cousins. The party

which grew into Hindoos or Teutons may not have been made up

exclusively of one set of near kinsfolk. Some of the children of the

same parents or forefathers may have marched one way, while others

marched another way, or stayed behind. We may, if we please, indulge

our fancy by conceiving that there may actually be family distinctions

older than distinctions of nation and race. It may be that the Gothic

_Amali_ and the Roman _Aemilii_--I throw out the idea as a mere

illustration--were branches of a family which had taken a name before

the division of Teuton and Italian. Some of the members of that family

may have joined the band of which came the Goths, while other members

joined the band of which came the Romans. There is no difference but

the length of time to distinguish such a supposed case from the case of

an English family, one branch of which settled in the seventeenth

century at Boston in Massachusetts, while another branch stayed behind

at Boston in Holland. Mr. Sayce says truly that the use of a kindred

language does not prove that the Englishman and the Hindoo are really

akin in race; for, as he adds, many Hindoos are men of non-Aryan race

who have simply learned to speak tongues of Sanscrit origin. He might

have gone on to say, with equal truth, that there is no positive

certainty that there was any community in blood among the original

Aryan group itself, and that if we admit such community of blood in the

original Aryan group, it does not follow that there is any further

special kindred between Hindoo and Hindoo or between Englishman and

Englishman. The original group may not have been a family, but an

artificial union. And if it was a family, those of its members who

marched together east or west or north or south may have had no tie of

kindred beyond the common cousinship of all.

Now the tendency of this kind of argument is to lead to something a

good deal more startling than the doctrine that language is no certain

test of race. Its tendency is to go on further, and to show that race

is no certain test of community of blood. And this comes pretty nearly

to saying that there is no such thing as race at all. For our whole

conception of race starts from the idea of community of blood. If the

word "race" does not mean community of blood, it is hard to see what it

does mean. Yet it is certain that there can be no positive proof of

real community of blood, even among those groups of mankind which we

instinctively speak of as families and races. It is not merely that

the blood has been mingled in after-times; there is no positive proof

that there was any community of blood in the beginning. No living

Englishman can prove with absolute certainty that he comes in the male

line of any of the Teutonic settlers in Britain in the fifth or sixth

centuries. I say in the male line, because anyone who is descended

from any English king can prove such descent, though he can prove it

only through a long and complicated web of female successions. But we

may be sure that in no other case can such a pedigree be proved by the

kind of proof which lawyers would require to make out the title to an

estate or a peerage. The actual forefathers of the modern Englishman

may chance to have been, not true-born Angles or Saxons, but Britons,

Scots, in later days Frenchmen, Flemings, men of any other nation who

learned to speak English and took to themselves English names. But

supposing that a man could make out such a pedigree, supposing that he

could prove that he came in the male line of some follower of Hengest

or Cerdic, he would be no nearer to proving original community of blood

either in the particular Teutonic race or in the general Aryan family.

If direct evidence is demanded, we must give up the whole doctrine of

families and races, as far as we take language, manners, institutions,

anything but physical conformation, as the distinguishing marks of

races and families. That is to say, if we wish never to use any word

of whose accuracy we cannot be perfectly certain, we must leave off

speaking of races and families at all from any but the purely physical

side. We must content ourselves with saying that certain groups of

mankind have a common history, that they have languages, creeds, and

institutions in common, but that we have no evidence whatever to show

how they came to have languages, creeds, and institutions in common.

We cannot say for certain what was the tie which brought the members of

the original group together, any more than we can name the exact time

and the exact place when and where they came together.

We may thus seem to be landed in a howling wilderness of scientific

uncertainty. The result of pushing our inquiries so far may seem to be

to show that we really know nothing at all. But in truth the

uncertainty is no greater than the uncertainty which attends all

inquiries in the historical sciences. Though a historical fact may be

recorded in the most trustworthy documents, though it may have happened

in our own times, though we may have seen it happen with our own eyes,

yet we cannot have the same certainty about it as the mathematician has

about the proposition which he proves to absolute demonstration. We

cannot have even that lower degree of certainty which the geologist has

with regard to the order of succession between this and that stratum.

For in all historical inquiries we are dealing with facts which

themselves come within the control of human will and human caprice, and

the evidence for which depends on the trustworthiness of human

informants, who may either purposely deceive or unwittingly mislead. A

man may lie; he may err. The triangles and the rocks can neither lie

nor err. I may with my own eyes see a certain man do a certain act; he

may tell me himself, or some one else may tell me, that he is the same

man who did some other act; but as to his statement I cannot have

absolute certainty, and no one but myself can have absolute certainty

as to the statement which I make as to the facts which I saw with my

own eyes. Historical evidence may range through every degree, from the

barest likelihood to that undoubted moral certainty on which every man

acts without hesitation in practical affairs. But it cannot get beyond

this last standard. If, then, we are ever to use words like race,

family, or even nation, to denote groups of mankind marked off by any

kind of historical, as distinguished from physical, characteristics, we

must be content to use those words, as we use many other words, without

being able to prove that our use of them is accurate, as mathematicians

judge of accuracy. I cannot be quite sure that William the Conqueror

landed at Pevensey, though I have strong reasons for believing that he

did so. And I have strong reasons for believing many facts about race

and language about which I am much further from being quite sure than I

am about William's landing at Pevensey. In short, in all these

matters, we must be satisfied to let presumption very largely take the

place of actual proof; and, if we only let presumption in, most of our

difficulties at once fly away. Language is no certain test of race;

but it is a presumption of race. Community of race, as we commonly

understand race, is no certain proof of original community of blood;

but it is a presumption of original community of blood. The

presumption amounts to moral proof, if only we do not insist on proving

such physical community of blood as would satisfy a genealogist. It

amounts to moral proof, if all that we seek is to establish a relation

in which the community of blood is the leading idea, and in which where

natural community of blood does not exist, its place is supplied by

something which by a legal fiction is looked upon as its equivalent.

If, then, we do not ask for scientific, for what we may call physical,

accuracy, but if we are satisfied with the kind of proof which is all

that we can ever get in the historical sciences--if we are satisfied to

speak in a way which is true for popular and practical purposes--then

we may say that language has a great deal to do with race, as race is

commonly understood, and that race has a great deal to do with

community of blood. If we once admit the Roman doctrine of adoption,

our whole course is clear. The natural family is the starting-point of

everything; but we must give the natural family the power of

artificially enlarging itself by admitting adoptive members. A group

of mankind is thus formed, in which it does not follow that all the

members have any natural community of blood, but in which community of

blood is the starting-point, in which those who are connected by

natural community of blood form the original body within whose circle

the artificial members are admitted. A group of mankind thus formed is

something quite different from a fortuitous concurrence of atoms.

Three or four brothers by blood, with a fourth or fifth man whom they

agree to look on as filling in everything the same place as a brother

by blood, form a group which is quite unlike a union of four or five

men, none of whom is bound by any tie of blood to any of the others.

In the latter kind of union the notion of kindred does not come in at

all. In the former kind the notion of kindred is the groundwork of

everything; it determines the character of every relation and every

action, even though the kindred between some members of the society and

others may be owing to a legal fiction and not to natural descent. All

that we know of the growth of tribes, races, nations, leads us to

believe that they grew in this way. Natural kindred was the

groundwork, the leading and determining idea; but, by one of those

legal fictions which have such an influence on all institutions,

adoption was in certain cases allowed to count as natural kindred.[2]

The usage of all language shows that community of blood was the leading

idea in forming the greater and smaller groups of mankind. Words like

_phylon, genos, gens, natio, kin,_ all point to the natural family as

the origin of all society. The family in the narrower sense, the

children of one father in one house, grew into a more extended family,

the _gens_. Such were the Alkmaiônidai, the Julii, or the Scyldingas,

the real or artificial descendants of a real or supposed forefather.

The nature of the _gens_ has been set forth often enough. If it is a

mistake to fancy that every Julius or Cornelius was the natural kinsman

of every other Julius or Cornelius, it is equally a mistake to think

that the _gens Julia_ or _Cornelia_ was in its origin a mere artificial

association, into which the idea of natural kindred did not enter. It

is indeed possible that really artificial _gentes_, groups of men of

whom it might chance that none were natural kinsmen, were formed in

later times after the model of the original _gentes_. Still such

imitation would bear witness to the original conception of the _gens_.

It would be the doctrine of adoption turned the other way; instead of a

father adopting a son, a number of men would agree to adopt a common

father. The family then grew into the _gens_; the union of _gentes_

formed the State, the political community, which in its first form was

commonly a tribe. Then came the nation, formed of a union of tribes.

Kindred, real or artificial, is the one basis on which all society and

all government have grown up.

Now it is plain, that as soon as we admit the doctrine of artificial

kindred--that is, as soon as we allow the exercise of the law of

adoption--physical purity of race is at an end. Adoption treats a man

as if he were the son of a certain father; it cannot really make him

the son of that father. If a brachycephalic father adopts a

dolichocephalic son, the legal act cannot change the shape of the

adopted son's skull. I will not undertake to say whether, not indeed

the rite of adoption, but the influences and circumstances which would

spring from it, might not, in the course of generations, affect even

the skull of the man who entered a certain _gens_, tribe, or nation by

artificial adoption only. If by any chance the adopted son spoke a

different language from the adopted father, the rite of adoption itself

would not of itself change his language. But it would bring him under

influences which would make him adopt the language of his new _gens_ by

a conscious act of the will, and which would make his children adopt it

by the same unconscious act of the will by which each child adopts the

language of his parents. The adopted son, still more the son of the

adopted son, became, in speech, in feelings, in worship, in everything

but physical descent, one with the _gens_ into which he was adopted.

He became one of that _gens_ for all practical, political, historical

purposes. It is only the physiologist who could deny his right to his

new position. The nature of the process is well expressed by a phrase

of our own law. When the nation--the word itself keeps about it the

remembrance of birth as the groundwork of everything--adopts a new

citizen, that is, a new child of the State, he is said to be

naturalized. That is, a legal process puts him in the same position,

and gives him the same rights, as a man who is a citizen and a son by

birth. It is assumed that the rights of citizenship come by

nature--that is, by birth. The stranger is admitted to them only by a

kind of artificial birth; he is naturalized by law; his children are in

a generation or two naturalized in fact. There is now no practical

distinction between the Englishman whose forefathers landed with

William, or even between the Englishman whose forefathers sought

shelter from Alva or from Louis XIV, and the Englishman whose

forefathers landed with Hengest. It is for the physiologist to say

whether any difference can be traced in their several skulls; for all

practical purposes, historical or political, all distinction between

these several classes has passed away.

We may, in short, say that the law of adoption runs through everything,

and that it may be practised on every scale. What adoption is at the

hands of the family, naturalization is at the hands of the State. And

the same process extends itself from adopted or naturalized individuals

to large classes of men, indeed to whole nations. When the process

takes place on this scale, we may best call it assimilation. Thus Rome

assimilated the continental nations of western Europe to that degree

that, allowing for a few survivals here and there, not only Italy, but

Gaul and Spain, became Roman. The people of those lands, admitted step

by step to the Roman franchise, adopted the name and tongue of Romans.

It must soon have been hard to distinguish the Roman colonist in Gaul

or Spain from the native Gaul or Spaniard who had, as far as in him

lay, put on the guise of a Roman. This process of assimilation has

gone on everywhere and at all times. When two nations come in this way

into close contact with one another, it depends on a crowd of

circumstances which shall assimilate the other, or whether they shall

remain distinct without assimilation either way. Sometimes the

conquerors assimilate their subjects; sometimes they are assimilated by

their subjects; sometimes conquerors and subjects remain distinct

forever. When assimilation either way does take place, the direction

which it takes in each particular case will depend, partly on their

respective numbers, partly on their degrees of civilization. A small

number of less civilized conquerors will easily be lost among a greater

number of more civilized subjects, and that even though they give their

name to the land and people which they conquer. The modern Frenchman

represents, not the conquering Frank, but the conquered Gaul, or, as he

called himself, the conquered Roman. The modern Bulgarian represents,

not the Finnish conqueror, but the conquered Slave. The modern Russian

represents, not the Scandinavian ruler, but the Slave who sent for the

Scandinavian to rule over him. And so we might go on with endless

other cases. The point is that the process of adoption,

naturalization, assimilation, has gone on everywhere. No nation can

boast of absolute purity of blood, though no doubt some nations come

much nearer to it than others. When I speak of purity of blood, I

leave out of sight the darker questions which I have already raised

with regard to the groups of mankind in days before recorded history.

I assume great groups like Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, as having what

we may call a real corporate existence, however we may hold that that

corporate existence began. My present point is that no existing nation

is, in the physiologist's sense of purity, purely Celtic, Teutonic,

Slavonic, or anything else. All races have assimilated a greater or

less amount of foreign elements. Taking this standard, one which comes

more nearly within the range of our actual knowledge than the

possibilities of unrecorded times, we may again say that, from the

purely scientific or physiological point of view, not only is language

no test of race, but that, at all events among the great nations of the

world, there is no such thing as purity of race at all.

But, while we admit this truth, while we even insist upon it from the

strictly scientific point of view, we must be allowed to look at it

with different eyes from a more practical standing point. This is the

standing point, whether of history which is the politics of the past,

or of politics which are the history of the present. From this point

of view, we may say unhesitatingly that there are such things as races,

and nations, and that to the grouping of those races and nations

language is the best guide. We cannot undertake to define with any

philosophical precision the exact distinction between race and race,

between nation and nation. Nor can we undertake to define with the

like precision in what way the distinctions between race and race,

between nation and nation, began. But all analogy leads us to believe

that tribes, nations, races, were all formed according to the original

model of the family, the family which starts from the idea of the

community of blood, but which allows artificial adoption to be its

legal equivalent. In all cases of adoption, naturalization,

assimilation, whether of individuals or of large classes of men, the

adopted person or class is adopted into an existing community. Their

adoption undoubtedly influences the community into which they are

adopted. It at once destroys any claim on the part of that community

to purity of blood, and it influences the adopting community in many

ways, physical and moral. A family, a tribe, or a nation, which has

largely recruited itself by adopted members, cannot be the same as one

which has never practised adoption at all, but all whose members come

of the original stock. But the influence which the adopting community

exercises upon its adopted members is far greater than any influence

which they exercise upon it. It cannot change their blood; it cannot

give them new natural forefathers; but it may do everything short of

this; it may make them, in speech, in feeling, in thought, and in

habit, genuine members of the community which has artificially made

them its own. While there is not in any nation, in any race, any such

thing as strict purity of blood, yet there is in each nation, in each

race, a dominant element--or rather something more than an

element--something which is the true essence of the race or nation,

something which sets its standard and determines its character,

something which draws to itself and assimilates to itself all other

elements. It so works that all other elements are not coequal elements

with itself, but mere infusions poured into an already existing body.

Doubtless these infusions do in some measure influence the body which

assimilates them; but the influence which they exercise is as nothing

compared to the influence which they undergo. We may say that they

modify the character of the body into which they are assimilated; they

do not effect its personality. Thus, assuming the great groups of

mankind as primary facts, the origin of which lies beyond our certain

knowledge, we may speak of families and races, of the great Aryan

family and of the races into which it parted, as groups which have a

real, practical existence, as groups founded on the ruling primeval

idea of kindred, even though in many cases the kindred may not be by

natural descent, but only by law of adoption. The Celtic, Teutonic,

Slavonic races of man are real living and abiding groups, the

distinction between which we must accept among the primary facts of

history. And they go on as living and abiding groups, even though we

know that each of them has assimilated many adopted members, sometimes

from other branches of the Aryan family, sometimes from races of men

alien to the whole Aryan stock. These races which, in a strictly

physiological point of view, have no existence at all, have a real

existence from the more practical point of view of history and

politics. The Bulgarian calls to the Russian for help, and the Russian

answers to his call for help, on the ground of their being alike

members of the one Slavonic race. It may be that, if we could trace

out the actual pedigree of this or that Bulgarian, of this or that

Russian, we might either find that there was no real kindred between

them, or we might find that there was a real kindred, but a kindred

which must be traced up to another stock than that of the Slaves. In

point of actual blood, instead of both being Slaves, it may be that one

of them comes, it may be that both of them come of a stock which is not

Slavonic or even Aryan. The Bulgarian may chance to be a Bulgarian in

a truer sense than he thinks for; he may come of the blood of those

original Finnish conquerors who gave the Bulgarian name to the Slaves

among whom they were merged. And if this or that Bulgarian may chance

to come of the stock of Finnish conquerors assimilated by their

Slavonic subjects, this or that Russian may chance to come of the stock

of Finnish subjects assimilated by their Slavonic conquerors. It may

then so happen that the cry for help goes up, and is answered on a

ground of kindred which in the eye of the physiologist has no

existence. Or it may happen that the kindred is real in a way which

neither the suppliant nor his helper thinks of. But in either case,

for the practical purposes of human life, the plea is a good plea; the

kindred on which it is founded is a real kindred. It is good by the

law of adoption. It is good by the law the force of which we all admit

whenever we count a man as an Englishman whose forefathers, two

generations or twenty generations back, came to our shores as

strangers. For all practical purposes, for all the purposes which

guide men's actions, public or private, the Russian and the Bulgarian,

kinsmen so long parted, perhaps in very truth no natural kinsmen at

all, are members of the same race, bound together by the common

sentiment of race. They belong to the same race, exactly as an

Englishman whose forefathers came into Britain fourteen hundred years

back, and an Englishman whose forefathers came only one or two hundred

years back, are like members of the same nation, bound together by a

tie of common nationality.

And now, having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by

the workings of an artificial law, are still real and living things,

groups in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything

has grown, how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we

to mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and

qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large

classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say

unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one

only, and that that test is language. It is hardly needful to show

that races and nations cannot be defined by the merely political

arrangements which group men under various governments. For some

purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes of ordinary politics,

we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this standard. And in some

parts of the world, in our own western Europe for instance, nations and

governments do, in a rough way, fairly answer to one another. And, in

any case, political divisions are not without their influence on the

formation of national divisions, while national divisions ought to have

the greatest influence on political divisions. That is to say, _primâ

facie_ a nation and government should coincide. I say only _primâ

facie_; for this is assuredly no inflexible rule; there are often good

reasons why it should be otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise,

there should be some good reason forthcoming. It might even be true

that in no case did a government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet

it would none the less be the rule that a government and a nation

should coincide. That is to say, so far as a nation and a government

coincide, we accept it as the natural state of things, and ask no

question as to the cause. So far as they do not coincide, we mark the

case as exceptional, by asking what is the cause. And by saying that a

government and a nation should coincide we mean that, as far as

possible, the boundaries of governments should be so laid out as to

agree with the boundaries of nations. That is, we assume the nation as

something already existing, something primary, to which the secondary

arrangements of government should, as far as possible, conform. How

then do we define the nation, which is, if there is no especial reason,

to the contrary, to fix the limits of a government? Primarily, I say,

as a rule, but a rule subject to exception--as a _primâ facie_

standard, subject to special reasons to the contrary--we define the

nation by language. We may at least apply the test negatively. It

would be unsafe to rule that all speakers of the same language must

have a common nationality; but we may safely say that where there is

not community of language, there is no common nationality in the

highest sense. It is true that without community of language there may

be an artificial nationality, a nationality which may be good for all

political purposes, and which may engender a common national feeling.

Still this is not quite the same thing as that fuller national unity

which is felt where there is community of language. In fact, mankind

instinctively takes language as the badge of nationality. We so far

take it as the badge, that we instinctively assume community of

language in a nation as the rule, and we set down anything that departs

from that rule as an exception. The first idea suggested by the word

Frenchman or German or any other national name, is that he is a man who

speaks French or German as his mother-tongue. We take for granted, in

the absence of anything to make us think otherwise, that a Frenchman is

a speaker of French, and that a speaker of French is a Frenchman.

Where in any case it is otherwise, we mark that case as an exception,

and we ask the special cause. Again, the rule is none the less the

rule, nor the exceptions the exceptions, because the exceptions may

easily outnumber the instances which conform to the rule. The rule is

still the rule, because we take the instances which conform to it as a

matter of course, while in every case which does not conform to it we

ask for the explanation. All the larger countries of Europe provide us

with exceptions; but we treat them all as exceptions. We do not ask

why a native of France speaks French. But when a native of France

speaks as his mother-tongue some other tongue than French, when French,

or something which popularly passes for French, is spoken as his

mother-tongue by someone who is not a native of France, we at once ask

the reason. And the reason will be found in each case in some, special

historical cause which withdraws that case from the operation of the

general law. A very good reason can be given why French, or something

which popularly passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and

Switzerland, whose inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the

reason has to be given, and it may fairly be asked.

In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the

bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English,

we at once ask the reason, and we learn the special historic cause. In

a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken

which differ alike from English and from French, but which are strongly

akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of a group

of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the settlement of

other nations, the introduction and the growth of other tongues, have

brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find islands which

both speech and geographical position seem to mark as French, but which

are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the English crown. We

soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems so strange. Those

islands are the remains of a State and a people which adopted the

French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did not become a part

of the French State. That people brought England by force of arms

under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part of that

people were afterward conquered by France, and gradually became French

in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave to their

connection with the land which their forefathers had conquered, and

that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never became French in

feeling. This last case, that of the Norman islands, is a specially

instructive one. Normandy and England were politically connected,

while language and geography pointed rather to a union between Normandy

and France. In the case of continental Normandy, where the

geographical tie was strongest, language and geography together could

carry the day, and the continental Norman became a Frenchman. In the

islands, where the geographical tie was less strong, political

traditions and manifest interest carried the day against language and a

weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not become a

Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone remained

Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached to the

English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage. Between

States of the relative size of England and the Norman islands, the

relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of the

smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our

forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman

islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.

These instances, and countless others, bear out the position that,

while community of language is the most obvious sign of common

nationality, while it is the main element, or something more than an

element, in the formation of nationality, the rule is open to

exceptions of all kinds, and that the influence of language is at all

times liable to be overruled by other influences. But all the

exceptions confirm the rule, because we specially remark those cases

which contradict the rule, and we do not specially remark those cases

which do not conform to it.

In the cases which we have just spoken of, the growth of the nation as

marked out by language, and the growth of the exceptions to the rule of

language, have both come through the gradual, unconscious working of

historical causes. Union under the same government, or separation

under separate governments, has been among the foremost of those

historical causes. The French nation consists of the people of all

that extent of continuous territory which has been brought under the

rule of the French kings. But the working of the cause has been

gradual and unconscious. There was no moment when anyone deliberately

proposed to form a French nation by joining together all the separate

duchies and countries which spoke the French tongue. Since the French

nation has been formed, men have proposed to annex this or that land on

the ground that its people spoke the French tongue, or perhaps only

some tongue akin to the French tongue. But the formation of the French

nation itself was the work of historical causes, the work doubtless of

a settled policy acting through many generations, but not the work of

any conscious theory about races and languages. It is a special mark

of our time, a special mark of the influence which doctrines about race

and language have had on men's minds, that we have seen great nations

united by processes in which theories of race and language really have

had much to do with bringing about their union. If statesmen have not

been themselves moved by such theories, they have at least found that

it suited their purpose to make use of such theories as a means of

working on the minds of others. In the reunion of the severed German

and Italian nations the conscious feeling of nationality, and the

acceptance of a common language as the outward badge of nationality,

had no small share. Poets sang of language as the badge of national

union; statesmen made it the badge, so far as political considerations

did not lead them to do anything else. The revivified kingdom of Italy

is very far from taking in all the speakers of the Italian tongue.

Lugano, Trent, Aquileia--to take places which are clearly Italian, and

not to bring in places of more doubtful nationality, like the cities of

Istria and Dalmatia--form no part of the Italian political body, and

Corsica is not under the same rule as the other two great neighboring

islands. But the fact that all these places do not belong to the

Italian body at once suggests the twofold question, why they do not

belong to it, and whether they ought not to belong to it. History

easily answers the first question; it may perhaps also answer the

second question in a way which will say Yes as regards one place and No

as regards another. Ticino must not lose her higher freedom; Trieste

must remain the needful mouth for southern Germany; Dalmatia must not

be cut off from the Slavonic mainland; Corsica would seem to have

sacrificed national feeling to personal hero-worship. But it is

certainly hard to see why Trent and Aquileia should be kept apart from

the Italian body. On the other hand, the revivified Italian kingdom

contains very little which is not Italian in speech. It is perhaps by

a somewhat elastic view of language that the dialect of Piedmont and

the dialect of Sicily are classed under one head; still, as a matter of

fact, they have a single classical standard, and they are universally

accepted as varieties of the same tongue. But it is only in a few

Alpine valleys that languages are spoken which, whether Romance or

Teutonic, are in any case not Italian. The reunion of Italy, in short,

took in all that was Italian, save when some political cause hindered

the rule of language from being followed. Of anything not Italian by

speech so little has been taken in that the non-Italian parts of Italy,

Burgundian Aosta and the Seven German Communes--if these last still

keep their Teutonic language--fall under the rule that there are some

things too small for laws to pay heed to.

But it must not be forgotten that all this simply means that in the

lands of which we have just been speaking the process of adoption has

been carried out on the largest scale. Nations, with languages as

their rough practical test, have been formed; but they have been formed

with very little regard to physical purity of blood. In short,

throughout western Europe assimilation has been the rule. That is to

say, in any of the great divisions of Western Europe, though the land

may have been settled and conquered over and over again, yet the mass

of the people of the land have been drawn to some one national type.

Either some one among the races inhabiting the land has taught the

others to put on its likeness, or else a new national type has arisen

which has elements drawn from several of those races. Thus the modern

Frenchman may be defined as produced by the union of blood which is

mainly Celtic with a speech which is mainly Latin, and with an

historical polity which is mainly Teutonic. That is, he is neither

Gaul, Roman, nor Frank, but a fourth type, which has drawn important

elements from all three. Within modern France this new national type

has so far assimilated all others as to make everything else merely

exceptional. The Fleming of one corner, the Basque of another, even

the far more important Breton of a third corner, have all in this way

become mere exceptions to the general type of the country. If we pass

into our own islands we shall find that the same process has been at

work. If we look to Great Britain only, we shall find that, though the

means have not been the same, yet the end has been gained hardly less

thoroughly than in France. For all real political purposes, for

everything which concerns a nation in the face of other nations, Great

Britain is as thoroughly united as France is. Englishmen, Scotchmen,

Welshmen feel themselves one people in the general affairs of the

world. A secession of Scotland or Wales is as unlikely as a secession

of Normandy or Languedoc. The part of the island which is not

thoroughly assimilated in language, that part which still speaks Welsh

or Gaelic, is larger in proportion than the non-French part of modern

France. But however much either the northern or the western Briton

may, in a fit of antiquarian politics, declaim against the Saxon, for

all practical political purposes he and the Saxon are one. The

distinction between the southern and the northern English--for the men

of Lothian and Fife must allow me to call them by this last name--is,

speaking politically and without ethnological or linguistic precision,

much as if France and Aquitaine had been two kingdoms united on equal

terms, instead of Aquitaine being merged in France. When we cross into

Ireland, we indeed find another state of things, and one which comes

nearer to some of the phenomena which we shall come to in other parts

of the world. Ireland is, most unhappily, not so firmly united to

Great Britain as the different parts of Great Britain are to one

another. Still even here the division arises quite as much from

geographical and historical causes as from distinctions of race

strictly so called. If Ireland had had no wrongs, still two great

islands can never be so thoroughly united as a continuous territory can

be. On the other hand, in point of language, the discontented part of

the United Kingdom is much less strongly marked off than that fraction

of the contented part which is not thoroughly assimilated. Irish is

certainly not the language of Ireland in at all the same degree in

which Welsh is the language of Wales. The Saxon has commonly to be

denounced in the Saxon tongue.

In some other parts of Western Europe, as in the Spanish and

Scandinavian peninsulas, the coincidence of language and nationality is

stronger than it is in France, Britain, or even Italy. No one speaks

Spanish except in Spain or in the colonies of Spain. And within Spain

the proportion of those who do not speak Spanish, namely the Basque

remnant, is smaller than the non-assimilated element in Britain and

France. Here two things are to be marked: First, the modern Spanish

nation has been formed, like the French, by a great process of

assimilation; secondly, the actual national arrangements of the Spanish

peninsula are wholly due to historical causes, we might almost say

historical accidents, and those of very recent date. Spain and

Portugal are separate kingdoms, and we look on their inhabitants as

forming separate nations. But this is simply because a queen of

Castile in the fifteenth century married a king of Aragon. Had

Isabella married a king of Portugal we should now talk of Spain and

Aragon as we now talk of Spain and Portugal, and we should count

Portugal for part of Spain. In language, in history, in everything

else, Aragon was really more distinct from Castile than Portugal was.

The king of Castile was already spoken of as king of Spain, and

Portugal would have merged in the Spanish kingdom at last as easily as

Aragon did. In Scandinavia, on the other hand, there must have been

less assimilation than anywhere else. In the present kingdoms of

Norway and Sweden there must be a nearer approach to actual purity of

blood than in any other part of Europe. One cannot fancy that much

Finnish blood has been assimilated, and there have been no conquests or

settlements later than that of the Northmen themselves.

When we pass into central Europe we shall find a somewhat different

state of things. The distinctions of race seem to be more lasting.

While the national unity of the German Empire is greater than that of

either France or Great Britain, it has not only subjects of other

languages, but actually discontented subjects, in three corners, on its

French, its Danish, and its Polish frontiers. We ask the reason, and

it will be at once answered that the discontent of all three is the

result of recent conquest, in two cases of very recent conquest indeed.

But this is one of the very points to be marked; the strong national

unity of the German Empire has been largely the result of assimilation;

and these three parts, where recent conquest has not yet been followed

by assimilation, are chiefly important because in all three cases, the

discontented territory is geographically continuous with a territory of

its own speech outside the Empire. This does not prove that

assimilation can never take place, but it will undoubtedly make the

process longer and harder.

So again, wherever German-speaking people dwell outside the bounds of

the revived German State, as well as when that revived German State

contains other than German-speaking people, we ask the reason and we

can find it. Political reasons forbade the immediate annexation of

Austria, Tyrol, and Salzburg. Combined political and geographical

reasons, and, if we look a little deeper, ethnological reasons too,

forbade the annexation of Courland, Livonia, and Esthonia. Some reason

or other will, it may be hoped, always be found to hinder the

annexation of lands which, like Zürich and Berne, have reached a higher

political level. Outlying brethren in Transsilvania or at Saratof

again come under the rule "_De minimis non curat lex_." In all these

cases the rule that nationality and language should go together yields

to unavoidable circumstances. But, on the other hand, where French or

Danish or Slavonic or Lithuanian is spoken within the bounds of the new

empire, the principle that language is the badge of nationality, that

without community of language nationality is imperfect, shows itself in

another shape. One main object of modern policy is to bring these

exceptional districts under the general rule by spreading the German

language in them. Everywhere, in short, wherever a power is supposed

to be founded on nationality, the common feeling of mankind

instinctively takes language as the test of nationality. We assume

language as the test of a nation, without going into any minute

questions as to the physical purity of blood in that nation. A

continuous territory, living under the same government and speaking the

same tongue, forms a nation for all practical purposes. If some of its

inhabitants do not belong to the original stock of blood, they at least

belong to it by adoption.

The question may now fairly be asked. What is the case in those parts

of the world where people who are confessedly of different races and

languages inhabit a continuous territory and live under the same

government? How do we define nationality in such cases as these? The

answer will be very different in different cases, according to the

means by which the different national elements in such a territory have

been brought together. They may form what I have already called an

artificial nation, united by an act of its own free will. Or it may be

simply a case where distinct nations, distinct in everything which can

be looked on as forming a nation, except the possession of an

independent government, are brought together, by whatever causes, under

a common ruler. The former case is very distinctly an exception which

proves the rule, and the latter is, though in quite another way, an

exception which proves the rule also. Both cases may need somewhat

more in the way of definition. We will begin with the first, the case

of a nation which has been formed out of elements which differ in

language, but which still have been brought together so as to form an

artificial nation. In the growth of the chief nations of western

Europe the principle which was consciously or unconsciously followed

has been that the nation should be marked out by language, and the use

of any tongue other than the dominant tongue of the nation should be at

least exceptional. But there is one nation in Europe, one which has a

full right to be called a nation in a political sense, which has been

formed on the directly opposite principle. The Swiss Confederation has

been formed by the union of certain detached fragments of the German,

Italian, and Burgundian nations. It may indeed be said that the

process has been in some sort a process of adoption, that the Italian

and Burgundian elements have been incorporated into an already existing

German body; that, as those elements were once subjects or dependents

or protected allies, the case is one of clients or freedmen who have

been admitted to the full privileges of the _gens_. This is

undoubtedly true, and it is equally true of a large part of the German

element itself. Throughout the Confederation allies and subjects have

been raised to the rank of confederates. But the former position of

the component elements does not matter for our purpose. As a matter of

fact, the foreign dependencies have all been admitted into the

Confederation on equal terms. German is undoubtedly the language of a

great majority of the Confederation; but the two recognized Romance

languages are each the speech, not of a mere fragment or survival, like

Welsh in Britain or Breton in France, but of a large minority forming a

visible element in the general body. The three languages are all of

them alike recognized as national languages, though, as if to keep up

the universal rule that there should be some exceptions to all rules, a

fourth language still lives on within the bounds of the Confederation,

which is not admitted to the rights of the other three, but is left in

the state of a fragment or a survival.[3] Is such an artificial body

as this to be called a nation? It is plainly not a nation by blood or

by speech. It can hardly be called a nation by adoption. For, if we

chose to say that the three elements have all agreed to adopt one

another as brethren, yet it has been adoption without assimilation.

Yet surely the Swiss Confederation is a nation. It is not a mere

power, in which various nations are brought together, whether

willingly, or unwillingly, under a common ruler, but without any

further tie of union. For all political purposes the Swiss

Confederation is a nation, a nation capable of as strong and true

national feeling as any other nation. Yet it is a nation purely

artificial, one in no way defined by blood or speech. It thus proves

the rule in two ways. We at once feel that this artificially formed

nation, which has no common language, but each of whose elements speaks

a language common to itself with some other nation, is something

different from those nations which are defined by a universal or at

least a predominant language. We mark it as an exception, as something

different from other cases. And when we see how nearly this artificial

nation comes, in every point but that of language, to the likeness of

those nations which are defined by language, we see that it is a nation

defined by language which sets the standard, and after the model of

which the artificial nation forms itself. The case of the Swiss

Confederation and its claim to rank as a nation would be like the case

of those _gentes_, if any such there were, which did not spring even

from the expansion of an original family, but which were artificially

formed in imitation of those which did, and which, instead of a real or

traditional forefather, chose for themselves an adopted one.

In the Swiss Confederation, then, we have a case of a nation formed by

an artificial process, but which still is undoubtedly a nation in the

face of other nations. We now come to the other class, in which

nationality and language keep the connection which they have elsewhere,

but in which nations do not even in the roughest way answer to

governments. We have only to go into the Eastern lands of Europe to

find a state of things in which the notion of nationality, as marked

out by language and national feeling, has altogether parted company

from the notion of political government. It must be remembered that

this state of things is not confined to the nations which are or have

lately been under the yoke of the Turk. It extends also to the nations

or fragments of nations which make up the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

In all the lands held by these two powers we come across phenomena of

geography, race, and language, which stand out in marked contrast with

anything to which we are used in western Europe. We may perhaps better

understand what these phenomena are if we suppose a state of things

which sounds absurd in the West, but which has its exact parallel in

many parts of the East. Let us suppose that in a journey through

England we came successively to districts, towns, or villages, where we

found, one after another, first, Britons speaking Welsh; then Romans

speaking Latin; then Saxons or Angles, speaking an older form of our

own tongue; then Scandinavians speaking Danish; then Normans speaking

Old-French; lastly, perhaps a settlement of Flemings, Huguenots, or

Palatines, still remaining a distinct people and speaking their own

tongue. Or let us suppose a journey through northern France, in which

we found at different stages, the original Gaul, the Roman, the Frank,

the Saxon of Bayeux, the Dane of Coutances, each remaining a distinct

people, each of them keeping the tongue which they first brought with

them into the land. Let us suppose further that, in many of these

cases, a religious distinction was added to a national distinction.

Let us conceive one village Roman Catholic, another Anglican, others

Non-conformist of various types, even if we do not call up any remnants

of the worshippers of Jupiter or of Woden. All this seems absurd in

any Western country, and absurd enough it is. But the absurdity of the

West is the living reality of the East. There we may still find all

the chief races which have ever occupied the country, still remaining

distinct, still keeping separate tongues, and those for the most part,

their own original tongues. Within the present and late European

dominions of the Turk, the original races, those whom we find there at

the first beginnings of history, are all there still, and two of them

keep their original tongues. They form three distinct nations. First

of all there are the Greeks. We have not here to deal with them as the

representatives of that branch of the Roman Empire which adopted their

speech, but simply as one of the original elements in the population of

the Eastern peninsula. Known almost down to our own day by their

historical name of Romans, they have now fallen back on the name of

Hellênes. And to that name they have a perfectly good claim. If the

modern Greeks are not all true Hellênes, they are an aggregate of

adopted Hellênes gathered round and assimilated to a true Hellenic

kernel. Here we see the oldest recorded inhabitants of a large part of

the land abiding, and abiding in a very different case from the

remnants of the Celt and the Iberian in Western Europe. The Greeks are

no survival of a nation; they are a true and living nation--a nation

whose importance is quite out of proportion to its extent in mere

numbers. They still abide, the predominant race in their own ancient

and again independent land, the predominant race in those provinces of

the continental Turkish dominion which formed part of their ancient

land, the predominant race through all the shores and islands of the

Aegean and of part of the Euxine also. In near neighborhood to the

Greeks still live another race of equal antiquity, the Skipetar or

Albanians. These, as I believe is no longer doubted, represent the

ancient Illyrians. The exact degree of their ethnical kindred with the

Greeks is a scientific question which need not here be considered; but

the facts that they are more largely intermingled with the Greeks than

any of the other neighboring nations, that they show a special power of

identifying themselves with the Greeks--a power, so to speak, of

becoming Greeks and making part of the artificial Greek nation, are

matters of practical history. It must never be forgotten that, among

the worthies of the Greek War of Independence, some of the noblest were

not of Hellenic but Albanian blood. The Orthodox Albanian easily turns

into a Greek; and the Mahometan Albanian is something which is broadly

distinguished from a Turk. He has, as he well may have, a strong

national feeling, and that national feeling has sometimes got the

better of religious divisions. If Albania is among the most backward

parts of the peninsula, still it is, by all accounts, the part where

there is most hope of men of different religions joining together

against the common enemy.

Here then are two ancient races, the Greeks and another race, not

indeed so advanced, so important, or so widely spread, but a race which

equally keeps a real national being. There is also a third ancient

race which survives as a distinct people, though they have for ages

adopted a foreign language. These are the Vlachs or Roumans, the

surviving representatives of the great race, call it Thracian or any

other, which at the beginning of history held the great inland mass of

the Eastern peninsula, with the Illyrians to the west of them and the

Greeks to the south. Every one knows that in the modern principality

of Roumania and in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian

monarchy, there is to be seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a

people who not only, as the Greeks did till lately, still keep the

Roman name, but who speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor

Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of

any of their neighbors, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain.

And any one who has given any real attention to this matter knows that

the same race is to be found, scattered here and there, if in some

parts only as wandering shepherds, in the Slavonic, Albanian, and Greek

lands south of the Danube. The assumption has commonly been that this,

outlying Romance people owe their Romance character to the Roman

colonization of Dacia under Trajan. In this view, the modern Roumans

would be the descendants of Trajan's colonists and of Dacians who had

learned of them to adopt the speech and manners of Rome. But when we

remember that Dacia was the first Roman province to be given up--that

the modern Roumania was for ages the highway of every barbarian tribe

on its way from the East to the West--that the land has been conquered

and settled and forsaken over and over again--it would be passing

strange if this should be the one land, and its people the one race, to

keep the Latin tongue when it has been forgotten in all the neighboring

countries. In fact, this idea has been completely dispersed by modern

research. The establishment of the Roumans in Dacia is of

comparatively recent date, beginning only in the thirteenth century.

The Roumans of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transsilvania, are isolated

from the scattered Rouman remnant on Pindos and elsewhere. They

represent that part of the inhabitants of the peninsula which became

Latin, while the Greeks remained Greek, and the Illyrians remained

barbarian. Their lands, Mossia, Thrace specially so called, and Dacia,

were added to the empire at various times from Augustus to Trajan.

That they should gradually adopt the Latin language is in no sort

wonderful. Their position with regard to Rome was exactly the same as

that of Gaul and Spain. Where Greek civilization had been firmly

established, Latin could nowhere displace it. Where Greek civilization

was unknown, Latin overcame the barbarian tongue. It would naturally

do so in this part of the East exactly as it did in the West.[4]

Here then we have in the southeastern peninsula three nations which

have all lived on to all appearances from the very beginnings of

European history, three distinct nations, speaking three distinct

languages. We have nothing answering to this in the West. It needs no

proof that the speakers of Celtic and Basque in Gaul and in Spain do

not hold the same position in western Europe which the Greeks,

Albanians, and Roumans do in eastern Europe. In the East the most

ancient inhabitants of the land are still there, not as scraps or

survivals, not as fragments of nations lingering on in corners, but as

nations in the strictest sense, nations whose national being forms an

element in every modern and political question. They all have their

memories, their grievances, and their hopes; and their memories, their

grievances, and their hopes are all of a practical and political kind.

Highlanders, Welshmen, Bretons, French Basques, whatever we say of the

Spanish brethren, have doubtless memories, but they have hardly

political grievances or hopes. Ireland may have political grievances;

it certainly has political hopes; but they are not exactly of the same

kind as the grievances or hopes of the Greek, the Albanian, and the

Rouman. Let Home Rule succeed to the extent of setting up an

independent king and parliament of Ireland, yet the language and

civilization of that king and parliament would still be English.

Ireland would form an English State, politically hostile, it may be, to

Great Britain, but still an English State. No Greek, Albanian or

Rouman State would be in the same way either Turkish or Austrian.

On these primitive and abiding races came, as on other parts of Europe,

the Roman conquest. That conquest planted Latin colonies on the

Dalmatian coast, where the Latin tongue still remains in its Italian

variety as the speech of literature and city life; it Romanized one

great part of the earlier inhabitants: it had the great political

effect of all, that of planting the Roman power in a Greek city, and

thereby creating a State, and in the end a nation, which was Roman on

one side, and Greek on the other. Then came the wandering of the

nations, on which, as regards men of our own race, we need not dwell.

The Goths marched at will through the Eastern Empire; but no Teutonic

settlement was ever made within its bounds, no lasting Teutonic

settlement was ever made even on its border. The part of the Teuton in

the West was played, far less perfectly indeed, by the Slave in the

East. He is there what the Teuton is here, the great representative of

what we may call the modern European races, those whose part in history

began after the establishment of the Rouman power. The differences

between the position of the two races are chiefly these. The Slave in

the East has pre-Roman races standing alongside of him in a way in

which the Teuton has not in the West. On the Greeks and Albanians he

has had but little influence; on the Rouman and his language his

influence has been far greater, but hardly so great as the influence of

the Teuton on the Romance nations and languages of western Europe. The

Slave too stands alongside of races which have come in since his own

coming, in a way in which the Teuton in the West is still further from

doing. That is to say, besides Greeks, Albanians, and Roumans, he

stands alongside of Bulgarians, Magyars, and Turks, who have nothing to

answer to them in the West. The Slave, in the time of his coming, in

the nature of his settlement, answers roughly to the Teuton; his

position is what that of the Teuton would be if western Europe had been

brought under the power of an alien race at some time later than his

own settlement. The Slaves undoubtedly form the greatest element in

the population of the Eastern peninsula, and they once reached more

widely still. Taking the Slavonic name in its widest meaning, they

occupy all the lands from the Danube and its great tributaries

southward to the strictly Greek border. The exceptions are where

earlier races remain, Greek or Italian on the coast-line, Albanian in

the mountains. The Slaves hold the heart of the peninsula, and they

hold more than the peninsula itself. The Slave lives equally on both

sides of what is or was the frontier of the Austrian and Ottoman

empires; indeed, but for another set of causes which have affected

eastern Europe, the Slave might have reached uninterruptedly from the

Baltic to the Aegaean.

This last set of causes are those which specially distinguish the

histories of eastern and of western Europe; a set of causes which,

though exactly twelve hundred years old,[5] are still fresh and living,

and which are the special causes which have aggravated the special

difficulties of the last five hundred years. In Western Europe, though

we have had plenty of political conquests, we have had no national

migrations since the days of the Teutonic settlements--at least, if we

may extend these last so as to take in the Scandinavian settlements in

Britain and Gaul. The Teuton has pressed to the East at the expense of

the Slave and the Old-Prussian: the borders between the Romance and the

Teutonic nations in the West have fluctuated; but no third set of

nations has come in, strange alike to the Roman and the Teuton and to

the whole Aryan family. As the Huns of Attila showed themselves in

western Europe as passing ravagers, so did the Magyars at a later day;

so did the Ottoman Turks in a day later still, when they besieged

Vienna and laid waste the Venetian mainland. But all these Turanian

invaders appeared in western Europe simply as passing invaders; in

eastern Europe their part has been widely different. Besides the

temporary dominion of Avars, Patzinaks, Chazars, Cumans, and a crowd of

others, three bodies of more abiding settlers, the Bulgarians, the

Magyars, and the Mongol conquerors of Russia, have come in by one path;

a fourth, the Ottoman Turks, have come in by another path. Among all

these invasions we have one case of thorough assimilation, and only

one. The original Finnish Bulgarians have, like Western conquerors,

been lost among Slavonic subjects and neighbors. The geographical

function of the Magyar has been to keep the two great groups of

Slavonic nations apart. To his coming, more than to any other cause,

we may attribute the great historical gap which separates the Slave of

the Baltic from his southern kinsfolk. The work of the Ottoman Turk we

all know. These latter settlers remain alongside of the Slave, just as

the Slave remains alongside of the earlier settlers. The Slavonized

Bulgarians are the only instance of assimilation such as we are used to

in the West. All the other races, old and new, from the Albanian to

the Ottoman, are still there, each keeping its national being and its

national speech. And in one part of the ancient Dacia we must add

quite a distinct element, the element of Teutonic occupation in a form

unlike any in which we see it in the West, in the shape of the Saxons

of Transsilvania. We have thus worked out our point in detail. While

in each Western country some one of the various races which have

settled in it has, speaking roughly, assimilated the others, in the

lands which are left under the rule of the Turk, or which have been

lately delivered from his rule, all the races that have ever settled in

the country still abide side by side. So when we pass into the lands

which form the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, we find that that composite

dominion is just as much opposed as the dominion of the Turk is to

those ideas of nationality towards which Western Europe has been long

feeling its way. We have seen by the example of Switzerland that it is

possible to make an artificial nation out of fragments which have split

off from three several nations. But the Austro-Hungarian monarchy is

not a nation, not even an artificial nation of this kind. Its elements

are not bound together in the same way as the three elements of the

Swiss Confederation. It does indeed contain one whole nation in the

form of the Magyars; we might say that it contains two, if we reckon

the Czechs for a distinct nation. Of its other elements, we may for

the moment set aside those parts of Germany which are so strangely

united with the crowns of Hungary and Dalmatia. In those parts of the

monarchy which come within the more strictly Eastern lands--the _Roman_

and the _Rouman_--we may so distinguish the Romance-speaking

inhabitants of Dalmatia and the Romance-speaking inhabitants of

Transsilvania. The Slave of the north and of the south, the Magyar

conqueror, the Saxon immigrant, all abide as distinct races. That the

Ottoman is not to be added to our list in Hungary, while he is to be

added in lands farther south, is simply because he has been driven out

of Hungary, while he is allowed to abide in lands farther south. No

point is more important to insist on now than the fact that the Ottoman

once held the greater part of Hungary by exactly the same right, the

right of the strongest, as that by which he still holds Macedonia and

Epeiros. It is simply the result of a century of warfare, from

Sobieski to Joseph II, which fixed the boundary which only yesterday

seemed eternal to diplomatists, but which now seems to have vanished.

The boundary has advanced and gone back over and over again. As Buda

once was Turkish, Belgrade has more than once been Austrian. The whole

of the southeastern lands, Austrian, Turkish, and independent, from the

Carpathian Mountains southward, present the same characteristic of

permanence and distinctness among the several races which occupy them.

The several races may lie, here in large continuous masses, there in

small detached settlements; but there they all are in their

distinctness. There is among them plenty of living and active national

feeling; but while in the West political arrangements for the most part

follow the great lines of national feeling, in the East the only way in

which national feeling can show itself is by protesting, whether in

arms or otherwise, against existing political arrangements. Save the

Magyars alone, the ruling race in the Hungarian kingdom, there is no

case in those lands in which the whole continuous territory inhabited

by speakers of the same tongue is placed under a separate national

government of its own. And, even in this case, the identity between

nation and government is imperfect in two ways. It is imperfect,

because, after all, though Hungary has a separate national government

in internal matters, yet it is not the Hungarian kingdom, but the

Austro-Hungarian monarchy of which it forms a part, which counts as a

power among the other powers of Europe. And the national character of

the Hungarian government is equally imperfect from the other side. It

is national as regards the Magyar; it is not national as regards the

Slave, the Saxon, and the Rouman. Since the liberation of part of

Bulgaria, no whole European nation is under the rule of the Turk. No

one nation of the southeast peninsula forms a single national

government. One fragment of a nation is free under a national

government, another fragment is ruled by civilized strangers, a third

is trampled down by barbarians. The existing States of Greece,

Roumania, and Servia are far from taking in the whole of the Greek,

Rouman, and Servian nations. In all these lands, Austrian, Turkish,

and independent, there is no difficulty in marking off the several

nations; only in no case do the nations answer to any existing

political power.

In all these cases, where nationality and government are altogether

divorced, language becomes yet more distinctly the test of nationality

than it is in Western lands where nationality and government do to some

extent coincide. And when nationality and language do not coincide in

the East, it is owing to another cause, of which also we know nothing

in the West. In many cases religion takes the place of nationality; or

rather the ideas of religion and nationality can hardly be

distinguished. In the West a man's nationality is in no way affected

by the religion which he professes, or even by his change from one

religion to another. In the East it is otherwise. The Christian

renegade who embraces Islam becomes for most practical purposes a Turk.

Even if, as in Crete and Bosnia, he keeps his Greek or Slavonic

language, he remains Greek or Slave only in a secondary sense. For the

first principle of the Mahometan religion, the lordship of the true

believer over the infidel, cuts off the possibility of any true

national fellowship between the true believer and the infidel. Even

the Greek or Armenian who embraces the Latin creed goes far toward

parting with his nationality as well as with his religion. For the

adoption of the Latin creed implies what is in some sort the adoption

of a new allegiance, the accepting of the authority of the Roman

bishop. In the Armenian indeed we are come very near to the phenomena

of the further East, where names like Parsee and Hindoo, names in

themselves as strictly ethnical as Englishman or Frenchman, have come

to express distinctions in which religion and nationality are

absolutely the same thing. Of this whole class of phenomena the Jew is

of course the crowning example. But we speak of these matters here

only as bringing in an element in the definition of nationality to

which we are unused in the West. But it quite comes within our present

subject to give one definition from the southeastern lands. What is

the Greek? Clearly he who is at once a Greek in speech and Orthodox in

faith. The Hellenic Mussulmans in Crete, even the Hellenic Latins in

some of the other islands, are at the most imperfect members of the

Hellenic body. The utmost that can be said is that they keep the power

of again entering that body, either by their own return to the national

faith, or by such a change in the state of things as shall make

difference in religion no longer inconsistent with true national

fellowship.

Thus, wherever we go, we find language to be the rough practical test

of nationality. The exceptions are many; they may perhaps outnumber

the instances which conform to the rule. Still they are exceptions.

Community of language does not imply community of blood; it might be

added that diversity of language does not imply diversity of blood.

But community of language is, in the absence of any evidence to the

contrary, a presumption of the community of blood, and it is proof of

something which for practical purposes is the same as community of

blood. To talk of "the Latin race" is in strictness absurd. We know

that the so-called race is simply made up of those nations which

adopted the Latin language. The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races

may conceivably have been formed by a like artificial process. But the

presumption is the other way; and if such a process ever took place, it

took place long before history began. The Celtic, Teutonic, and

Slavonic races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the

test of language. Within those races separate nations are again marked

out by a stricter application of the test of language. Within the race

we may have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which

need not be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only

dialects which are mutually intelligible, or which, at all events,

gather round some one central dialect which is intelligible to all. We

take this standard of races and nations, fully aware that it will not

stand a physiological test, but holding that for all practical purposes

adoption must pass as equivalent to natural descent. And, among the

practical purposes which are affected by the facts of race and

nationality, we must, as long as a man is what he is, as long as he has

not been created afresh according to some new scientific pattern, not

shrink from reckoning those generous emotions which, in the present

state of European feeling, are beginning to bind together the greater

as well as the lesser groups of mankind. The sympathies of men are

beginning to reach wider than could have been dreamed of a century ago.

The feeling which was once confined to the mere household extended

itself to the tribe or city. From the tribe or city it extended itself

to the nation; from the nation it is beginning to extend itself to the

whole race. In some cases it can extend itself to the whole race far

more easily than in others. In some cases historical causes have made

nations of the same race bitter enemies, while they have made nations

of different races friendly allies. The same thing happened in earlier

days between tribes and cities of the same nation. But, when

hindrances of this kind do not exist, the feeling of race, as something

beyond the narrower feeling of nationality, is beginning to be a

powerful agent in the feelings and actions of men and of nations. A

long series of mutual wrongs, conquest, and oppression on one side,

avenged by conquest and oppression on the other side, have made the

Slave of Poland and the Slave of Russia the bitterest of enemies. No

such hindrance exists to stop the flow of natural and generous feeling

between the Slave of Russia and the Slave of the southeastern lands.

Those whose statesmanship consists in some hand-to-mouth shift for the

moment, whose wisdom consists in refusing to look either back to the

past or onward to the future, cannot understand this great fact of our

times; and what they cannot understand they mock at. But the fact

exists, and does its work in spite of them. And it does its work none

the less because in some cases the feeling of sympathy is awakened by a

claim of kindred, where, in the sense of the physiologist or the

genealogist, there is no kindred at all. The practical view,

historical or political, will accept as members of this or that race or

nation many members whom the physiologist would shut out, whom the

English lawyer would shut out, but whom the Roman lawyer would gladly

welcome to every privilege of the stock on which they were grafted.

The line of the Scipios, of the Caesars, and of the Antonines was

continued by adoption; and for all practical purposes the nations of

the earth have agreed to follow the examples set them by their masters.

[1] From "Historical Essays," Third Series, 1879.

[2] I am here applying to this particular purpose a line of thought

which both myself and others have often applied to other purposes.

See, above all, Sir Henry Maine's lecture "On Kinship as the Basis of

Society" in the lectures on the "Early History of Institutions"; I

would refer also to my own lecture on "The State" in "Comparative

Politics."

[3] While the Swiss Confederation recognises German, French, and

Italian as all alike national languages, the independent Romance

language, which is still used in some parts of the Canton of

Graubünden, that which is known specially as _Romansch_, is not

recognized. It is left in the same position in which Welsh and Gaelic

are left in Great Britain, in which Basque, Breton, Provençal, Walloon,

and Flemish are left within the borders of that French kingdom which

has grown so as to take them all in.

[4] On Rouman history I have followed Roesler's "Romënische Studien"

and Jirecek's "Geschichte der Bulgaren."

[5] It should be remembered that, as the year 1879 saw the beginning of

the liberated Bulgarian State, the year 679 saw the beginning of the

first Bulgarian kingdom south of the Danube.