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 any one 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, any thing
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 every
thing; 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 fortuitious concurrence of atoms. Three or four
brothers by blood, with a fourth or fifth man whom they agree to look on
as filling in every thing 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 every thing; 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 had such an
influence on all institutions, adoption was in certain cases allowed to
count as natural kindred.[3]
The usage of all languages shows that community of blood was the leading
idea in forming the greater and smaller groups of mankind. Words like
[Greek: 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 has 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 every thing 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 every thing--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 the Fourteenth, 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 every thing,
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 Slav. The modern Russian
represents, not the Scandinavian ruler, but the Slav 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 any thing 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 every
thing 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 co-equal 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 affect 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 Slav. In point of actual blood, instead of both being Slavs,
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 Slavs 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 alike members
of the same nation, bound together by a tie of common nationality.