ushed. Without plunging into any very
deep mysteries, without committing ourselves to any dangerous theories
in the darker regions of ethnological inquiry, we may perhaps be allowed
at starting to doubt whether there is any real primeval kindred between
the Ottoman and the Finnish Magyar. It is for those who have gone
specially deep into the antiquities of the non-Aryan races to say
whether there is or is not. At all events, as far as the great facts of
history go, the kindred is of the vaguest and most shadowy kind. It
comes to little more than the fact that Magyars and Ottomans are alike
non-Aryan invaders who have made their way into Europe within recorded
times, and that both have, rightly or wrongly, been called by the name
of Turks. These do seem rather slender grounds on which to build up a
fabric of national sympathy between two nations, when several centuries
of living practical history all pull the other way. It is hard to
believe that the kindred of Turk and Magyar was thought of when a
Turkish Pasha ruled at Buda. Doubtless Hungarian Protestants often
deemed, and not unreasonably deemed, that the contemptuous toleration of
the Moslem Sultan was a lighter yoke than the persecution of the
Catholic Emperor. But it was hardly on grounds of primeval kindred that
they made the choice. The ethnological dialogue held at Constantinople
does indeed sound like ethnological theory run mad. But it is the very
wildness of the thing which gives it its importance. The doctrine of
race, and of sympathies springing from race, must have taken very firm
hold indeed of men's minds before it could be carried out in a shape
which we are tempted to call so grotesque as this.

The plain fact is that the new lines of scientific and historical
inquiry which have been opened in modern times have had a distinct and
deep effect upon the politics of the age. The fact may be estimated in
many ways, but its existence as a fact cannot be denied. Not in a merely
scientific or literary point of view, but in one strictly practical, the
world is not the same world as it was when men had not yet dreamed of
the kindred between Sanscrit, Greek, and English, when it was looked on
as something of a paradox to hint that there was a distinction between
Celtic and Teutonic tongues and nations. Ethnological and philological
researches--I do not forget the distinction between the two, but for the
present I must group them together--have opened the way for