guage to be the rough practical test
of nationality. The exceptions are many; they may perhaps outnumber
the instances which conform to the rule. Still they are exceptions.
Community of language does not imply community of blood; it might be
added that diversity of language does not imply diversity of blood.
But community of language is, in the absence of any evidence to the
contrary, a presumption of the community of blood, and it is proof of
something which for practical purposes is the same as community of
blood. To talk of "the Latin race" is in strictness absurd. We know
that the so-called race is simply made up of those nations which
adopted the Latin language. The Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic races
may conceivably have been formed by a like artificial process. But the
presumption is the other way; and if such a process ever took place, it
took place long before history began. The Celtic, Teutonic, and
Slavonic races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the
test of language. Within those races separate nations are again marked
out by a stricter application of the test of language. Within the race
we may have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which
need not be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only
dialects which are mutually intelligible, or which, at all events,
gather round some one central dialect which is intelligible to all. We
take this standard of races and nations, fully aware that it will not
stand a physiological test, but holding that for all practical purposes
adoption must pass as equivalent to natural descent. And, among the
practical purposes which are affected by the facts of race and
nationality, we must, as long as a man is what he is, as long as he has
not been created afresh according to some new scientific pattern, not
shrink from reckoning those generous emotions which, in the present
state of European feeling, are beginning to bind together the greater
as well as the lesser groups of mankind. The sympathies of men are
beginning to reach wider than could have been dreamed of a century ago.
The feeling which was once confined to the mere household extended
itself to the tribe or city. From the tribe or city it extended itself
to the nation; from the nation it is beginning to extend itself to the
whole race. In some cases it can extend itself to the whole race far
more easily than in others. In some cases historical causes have made