-some may be inclined to call it a _reductio ad absurdum_--of a
whole range of doctrines and sentiments which have in modern days
gained a great power over men's minds. They have gained so great a
power that those who may regret their influence cannot afford to
despise it. To make any practical inference from the primeval kindred
of Magyar and Turk is indeed pushing the doctrine of race, and of
sympathies arising from race, as far as it well can be pushed. 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 pacha 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 litera