It is hard to
believe that the kindred of Turk and Magyar was thought of when a
Turkish Pasha 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 hint that there was a distinction between
Celtic and Teutonic tongues and nations.
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