and that to the grouping of those races and nations language is
the best guide. We cannot undertake to define with any philosophical
precision the exact distinction between race and race, between nation
and nation. Nor can we undertake to define with the like precision in
what way the distinctions between race and race, between nation and
nation, began. But all analogy leads us to believe that tribes, nations,
races, were all formed according to the original model of the family,
the family which starts from the idea of the community of blood, but
which allows artificial adoption to be its legal equivalent. In all
cases of adoption, naturalization, assimilation, whether of individuals
or of large classes of men, the adopted person or class is adopted into
an existing community. Their adoption undoubtedly influences the
community into which they are adopted. It at once destroys any claim on
the part of that community to purity of blood, and it influences the
adopting community in many ways, physical and moral. A family, a tribe,
or a nation, which has largely recruited itself by adopted members,
cannot be the same as one which has never practised adoption at all, but
all whose members come of the original stock. But the influence which
the adopting community exercises upon its adopted members is far greater
than any influence which they exercise upon it. It cannot change their
blood; it cannot give them new natural forefathers; but it may do every
thing short of this; it may make them, in speech, in feeling, in
thought, and in habit, genuine members of the community which has
artificially made them its own. While there is not in any nation, in any
race, any such thing as strict purity of blood, yet there is in each
nation, in each race, a dominant element--or rather something more than
an element--something which is the true essence of the race or nation,
something which sets its standard and determines its character,
something which draws to itself and assimilates to itself all other
elements. It so works that all other elements are not co-equal elements
with itself, but mere infusions poured into an already existing body.
Doubtless these infusions do in some measure influence the body which
assimilates them; but the influence which they exercise is as nothing
compared to the influence which they undergo. We may say that they
modify the character of the body into which they are assimilated; they
do not affect its personal