orded times, we may again say that, from the
purely scientific or physiological point of view, not only is language
no test of race, but that, at all events among the great nations of the
world, there is no such thing as purity of race at all.

But, while we admit this truth, while we even insist upon it from the
strictly scientific point of view, we must be allowed to look at it
with different eyes from a more practical standing point. This is the
standing point, whether of history which is the politics of the past,
or of politics which are the history of the present. From this point
of view, we may say unhesitatingly that there are such things as races,
and nations, and that to the grouping of those races and nations
language is the best guide. We cannot undertake to define with any
philosophical precision the exact distinction between race and race,
between nation and nation. Nor can we undertake to define with the
like precision in what way the distinctions between race and race,
between nation and nation, began. But all analogy leads us to believe
that tribes, nations, races, were all formed according to the original
model of the family, the family which starts from the idea of the
community of blood, but which allows artificial adoption to be its
legal equivalent. In all cases of adoption, naturalization,
assimilation, whether of individuals or of large classes of men, the
adopted person or class is adopted into an existing community. Their
adoption undoubtedly influences the community into which they are
adopted. It at once destroys any claim on the part of that community
to purity of blood, and it influences the adopting community in many
ways, physical and moral. A family, a tribe, or a nation, which has
largely recruited itself by adopted members, cannot be the same as one
which has never practised adoption at all, but all whose members come
of the original stock. But the influence which the adopting community
exercises upon its adopted members is far greater than any influence
which they exercise upon it. It cannot change their blood; it cannot
give them new natural forefathers; but it may do everything short of
this; it may make them, in speech, in feeling, in thought, and in
habit, genuine members of the community which has artificially made
them its own. While there is not in any nation, in any race, any such
thing as strict purity of blood, yet there is in each nation, in each
race, a dominant