poet of Russia, Pouchkine,
and one of the greatest novelists of France, Alexandre Dumas. But it
is an all-important fact that as civilization advances the word "race"
entirely changes its meaning. Evolution entirely modifies its
processes. Biological factors steadily decrease in importance. Moral
and political and intellectual factors as steadily increase in
importance.

Isolation and selection are the main conditions required to produce a
definite breed of cattle. On the other hand, if we want to produce a
highly civilized type, it is not isolation which is the main
condition, but crossing and blending, mixture and intercourse. As we
rise in the scale of humanity there are no fixed types. All types are
equally plastic. There are no pure types. All types are equally mixed.

Even if we take the Jewish race, which seems to show extraordinary
fixity and stability of type, there is not one dominant Jewish type;
there are fully fifty different Jewish types. There is hardly any
resemblance between the Jew of Tiflis and the Jew of Tangier, between
democratic Ashkenazim and the aristocratic Sephardim. Race is not a
cause, but an effect. It is not biology which explains politics, it is
politics which dominate biology. It is not the physical which explains
the moral, it is the moral which produces the physical. It is not the
racial type which produces a racial belief and a racial community, it
is the religion which produces the race. It is not the Hindu caste
which produces the religion, it is religion which produces the caste.
Similarly, it is the religious and political conditions which have
kept the Jew apart, and which have preserved the characteristics of
the race. Even so, religion and persecution have kept the
characteristics of the Armenians or the Parsees and the Greek colonies
in the Levant.

VII.

A highly gifted race is invariably the outcome of complex elements, of
many cross-currents. Invariably it is the outcome of moral, spiritual,
and political factors. It is the outcome of unity of language, of
unity of religion, of community of traditions and institutions. It is
mainly religion which keeps apart the French and the Anglo-Saxon races
in Canada, and which divides the Celt from the Ulsterman in Ireland.
Let the religious boundary break down, and the Irish Celt will blend
with the Ulster Scot, the French Canadian will mix with the
Anglo-Saxon. The race heresy in its modern form is the sinister shadow
project