nations of the same race bitter enemies, while they have made nations
of different races friendly allies. The same thing happened in earlier
days between tribes and cities of the same nation. But, when
hindrances of this kind do not exist, the feeling of race, as something
beyond the narrower feeling of nationality, is beginning to be a
powerful agent in the feelings and actions of men and of nations. A
long series of mutual wrongs, conquest, and oppression on one side,
avenged by conquest and oppression on the other side, have made the
Slave of Poland and the Slave of Russia the bitterest of enemies. No
such hindrance exists to stop the flow of natural and generous feeling
between the Slave of Russia and the Slave of the southeastern lands.
Those whose statesmanship consists in some hand-to-mouth shift for the
moment, whose wisdom consists in refusing to look either back to the
past or onward to the future, cannot understand this great fact of our
times; and what they cannot understand they mock at. But the fact
exists, and does its work in spite of them. And it does its work none
the less because in some cases the feeling of sympathy is awakened by a
claim of kindred, where, in the sense of the physiologist or the
genealogist, there is no kindred at all. The practical view,
historical or political, will accept as members of this or that race or
nation many members whom the physiologist would shut out, whom the
English lawyer would shut out, but whom the Roman lawyer would gladly
welcome to every privilege of the stock on which they were grafted.
The line of the Scipios, of the Caesars, and of the Antonines was
continued by adoption; and for all practical purposes the nations of
the earth have agreed to follow the examples set them by their masters.

[1] From "Historical Essays," Third Series, 1879.

[2] I am here applying to this particular purpose a line of thought
which both myself and others have often applied to other purposes.
See, above all, Sir Henry Maine's lecture "On Kinship as the Basis of
Society" in the lectures on the "Early History of Institutions"; I
would refer also to my own lecture on "The State" in "Comparative
Politics."

[3] While the Swiss Confederation recognises German, French, and
Italian as all alike national languages, the independent Romance
language, which is still used in some parts of the Canton of
Graubuenden, that which is known specially as _Romansch_, is not
recognize