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 every
thing 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 every one 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 than 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 Slavs as Slavs. 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 Slavs. 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 an
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 any one 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 palæontologist, 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 palæontology, 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
language, as in institutions or any thing 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 hindrance 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
intermarriage, 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, janissaries,
and mothers of all nations, the blood of many a Turk must be physically
any thing 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 any one
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 any one 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 toward 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 south-east, 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-travellers. 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 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 _Æmilii_--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.