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.
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