But the
presumption is the other way; and if such a process ever took place, it
took place long before history began. The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic
races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the test of
language. Within those races separate nations are again marked out by a
stricter application of the test of language. Within the race we may
have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which need not
be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only dialects which
are mutually intelligible, or which, at all events, gather round some
one central dialect which is intelligible to all. We take this standard
of races and nations, fully aware that it will not stand a physiological
test, but holding that for all practical purposes adoption must pass as
equivalent to natural descent. And, among the practical purposes which
are affected by the facts of race and nationality, we must, as long as a
man is what he is, as long as he has not been created afresh according
to some new scientific pattern, not shrink from reckoning those generous
emotions which, in the present state of European feeling, are beginning
to bind together the greater as well as the lesser groups of mankind.
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