ain _gens_, tribe, or nation by
artificial adoption only. If by any chance the adopted son spoke a
different language from the adopted father, the rite of adoption itself
would not of itself change his language. But it would bring him under
influences which would make him adopt the language of his new _gens_ by
a conscious act of the will, and which would make his children adopt it
by the same unconscious act of the will by which each child adopts the
language of his parents. The adopted son, still more the son of the
adopted son, became, in speech, in feelings, in worship, in everything
but physical descent, one with the _gens_ into which he was adopted.
He became one of that _gens_ for all practical, political, historical
purposes. It is only the physiologist who could deny his right to his
new position. The nature of the process is well expressed by a phrase
of our own law. When the nation--the word itself keeps about it the
remembrance of birth as the groundwork of everything--adopts a new
citizen, that is, a new child of the State, he is said to be
naturalized. That is, a legal process puts him in the same position,
and gives him the same rights, as a man who is a citizen and a son by
birth. It is assumed that the rights of citizenship come by
nature--that is, by birth. The stranger is admitted to them only by a
kind of artificial birth; he is naturalized by law; his children are in
a generation or two naturalized in fact. There is now no practical
distinction between the Englishman whose forefathers landed with
William, or even between the Englishman whose forefathers sought
shelter from Alva or from Louis XIV, and the Englishman whose
forefathers landed with Hengest. It is for the physiologist to say
whether any difference can be traced in their several skulls; for all
practical purposes, historical or political, all distinction between
these several classes has passed away.

We may, in short, say that the law of adoption runs through everything,
and that it may be practised on every scale. What adoption is at the
hands of the family, naturalization is at the hands of the State. And
the same process extends itself from adopted or naturalized individuals
to large classes of men, indeed to whole nations. When the process
takes place on this scale, we may best call it assimilation. Thus Rome
assimilated the continental nations of western Europe to that degree
that, allowing for a few survivals here an