bastard of Julius Caesar. The exclusive breeding of the Jews is in fact
the most effectual guarantee that whatever does get into the charmed
circle through either proselytism, the violence of enemies, or feminine
unchastity, must ultimately pervade it universally.

It may be argued that as a matter of fact humanity has until recently
been segregated in pools; that in the great civilization of China, for
example, humanity has pursued its own interlacing system of inheritances
without admixture from other streams of blood. But such considerations
only defer the conclusion; they do not stave it off indefinitely. It
needs only that one philoprogenitive Chinaman should have wandered into
those regions that are now Russia, about the time of Pericles, to link
east and west in that matter; one Tartar chieftain in the Steppes may
have given a daughter to a Roman soldier and sent his grandsons east and
west to interlace the branches of every family tree in the world. If any
race stands apart it is such an isolated group as that of the now
extinct Tasmanian primitives or the Australian black. But even here, in
the remote dawn of navigation, may have come some shipwrecked Malays, or
some half-breed woman kidnapped by wandering Phoenicians have carried
this link of blood back to the western world. The more one lets one's
imagination play upon the incalculable drift and soak of population, the
more one realizes the true value of that spreading relation with the
past.

But now let us turn in the other direction, the direction of the future,
because there it is that this series of considerations becomes most
edifying. It is the commonest trick to think of a man's descendants as
though they were his own. We are told that one of the dearest human
motives is the desire to found a family, but think how much of a family
one founds at the best. One's son is after all only half one's blood,