red. It is good by the law of
adoption. It is good by the law the force of which we all admit whenever
we count a man as an Englishman whose forefathers, two generations or
twenty generations back, came to our shores as strangers. For all
practical purposes, for all the purposes which guide men's actions,
public or private, the Russian and the Bulgarian, kinsmen so long
parted, perhaps in very truth no natural kinsmen at all, are members of
the same race, bound together by the common sentiment of race. They
belong to the same race, exactly as an Englishman whose forefathers came
into Britain fourteen hundred years back, and an Englishman whose
forefathers came only one or two hundred years back, are alike members
of the same nation, bound together by a tie of common nationality.

And now, having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by
the working of an artificial law, are still real and living things,
groups in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which every thing
has grown, how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to
mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and
qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large
classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say
unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one
only, and that that test is language. It is hardly needful to show that
races and nations cannot be defined by the merely political arrangements
which group men under various governments. For some purposes of ordinary
language, for some purposes of ordinary politics, we are tempted,
sometimes driven, to take this standard. And in some parts of the
world, in our own Western Europe for instance, nations and governments
do, in a rough way, fairly answer to one another. And, in any case,
political divisions are not without their influence on the formation of
national divisions, while national divisions ought to have the greatest
influence on political divisions. That is to say, _prima facie_ a nation
and government should coincide. I say only _prima facie_; for this is
assuredly no inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should
be otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good
reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a
government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the less
be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. Th