rors who gave the Bulgarian name to the Slaves
among whom they were merged. And if this or that Bulgarian may chance
to come of the stock of Finnish conquerors assimilated by their
Slavonic subjects, this or that Russian may chance to come of the stock
of Finnish subjects assimilated by their Slavonic conquerors. It may
then so happen that the cry for help goes up, and is answered on a
ground of kindred which in the eye of the physiologist has no
existence. Or it may happen that the kindred is real in a way which
neither the suppliant nor his helper thinks of. But in either case,
for the practical purposes of human life, the plea is a good plea; the
kindred on which it is founded is a real kindred. It is good by the
law of adoption. It is good by the law the force of which we all admit
whenever we count a man as an Englishman whose forefathers, two
generations or twenty generations back, came to our shores as
strangers. For all practical purposes, for all the purposes which
guide men's actions, public or private, the Russian and the Bulgarian,
kinsmen so long parted, perhaps in very truth no natural kinsmen at
all, are members of the same race, bound together by the common
sentiment of race. They belong to the same race, exactly as an
Englishman whose forefathers came into Britain fourteen hundred years
back, and an Englishman whose forefathers came only one or two hundred
years back, are like members of the same nation, bound together by a
tie of common nationality.

And now, having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by
the workings of an artificial law, are still real and living things,
groups in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything
has grown, how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we
to mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and
qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large
classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say
unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one
only, and that that test is language. It is hardly needful to show
that races and nations cannot be defined by the merely political
arrangements which group men under various governments. For some
purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes of ordinary politics,
we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this standard. And in some
parts of the world, in our own western Europe for instance, natio