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.
The sympathies of men are beginning to reach wider than could have been
dreamed of a century ago. The feeling which was once confined to the
mere household extended itself to the tribe or the city. From the tribe
or city it extended itself to the nation; from the nation it is
beginning to extend itself to the whole race. In some cases it can
extend itself to the whole race far more easily than in others. In some
cases historical causes have made nations of the same race bitter
enemies, while they have made nations of different races friendly
allies. The same thing happened in earlier days between tribes and
cities of the same nation. But, when hindrances of this kind do not
exist, the feeling of race, as something beyond the narrower feeling of
nationality, is beginning to be a powerful agent in the feelings and
actions of men and of nations. A long series of mutual wrongs, conquest,
and oppression on one side, avenged by conquest and oppression on the
other side, have made the Slav of Poland and the Slav of Russia the
bitterest of enemies. No such hindrance exists to stop the flow of
natural and generous feeling between the Slav of Russia and the Slav of
the Southeastern lands. Those whose statesmanship consists in some
hand-to-mouth shift for the moment, whose wisdom consists in refusing to
look either back to the past or onward to the future, cannot understand
this great fact of our times; and what they cannot