of purity, purely Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, or any thing else. All
races have assimilated a greater or less amount of foreign elements.
Taking this standard, one which comes more nearly within the range of
our actual knowledge than the possibilities of unrecorded 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,