ed. He became one of that _gens_ for
all practical, political, historical, purposes. It is only the
physiologist who could deny his right to his new position. The nature of
the process is well expressed by a phrase of our own law. When the
nation--the word itself keeps about it the remembrance of birth as the
groundwork of every thing--adopts a new citizen, that is, a new child of
the state, he is said to be _naturalized_. That is, a legal process puts
him in the same position, and gives him the same rights, as a man who
is a citizen and a son by birth. It is assumed that the rights of
citizenship come by nature--that is, by birth. The stranger is admitted
to them only by a kind of artificial birth; he is naturalized by law;
his children are in a generation or two naturalized in fact. There is
now no practical distinction between the Englishman whose forefathers
landed with William, or even between the Englishman whose forefathers
sought shelter from Alva or from Louis the Fourteenth, and the
Englishman whose forefathers landed with Hengest. It is for the
physiologist to say whether any difference can be traced in their
several skulls; for all practical purposes, historical or political, all
distinction between these several classes has passed away.

We may, in short, say that the law of adoption runs through every thing,
and that it may be practised on every scale. What adoption is at the
hands of the family, naturalization is at the hands of the state. And
the same process extends itself from adopted or naturalized individuals
to large classes of men, indeed to whole nations. When the process takes
place on this scale, we may best call it assimilation. Thus Rome
assimilated the continental nations of Western Europe to that degree
that, allowing for a few survivals here and there, not only Italy, but
Gaul and Spain, became Roman. The people of those lands, admitted step
by step to the Roman franchise, adopted the name and tongue of Romans.
It must soon have been hard to distinguish the Roman colonist in Gaul or
Spain from the native Gaul or Spaniard who had, as far as in him lay,
put on the guise of a Roman. This process of assimilation has gone on
everywhere and at all times. When two nations come in this way into
close contact with one another, it depends on a crowd of circumstances
which shall assimilate the other, or whether they shall remain distinct
without assimilation either way. Sometimes the conquerors assimil