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.
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