XIV.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 533 



the seas. Here they already number, including other elements in 

 process of assimilation to the dominant race, about 80 millions- 

 70 in the United States, 5 in the Canadian Dominion, and 5 in 

 Australasia and South Africa. These with 40 millions in the home 

 lands make collectively some 120 millions, enough perhaps to 

 ensure the future control of human destinies to a composite 

 people who may now be denned with some approach to accuracy 

 as Ibero-Kelto-Teutons of Teuton (English) speech. This English 

 tongue need not detain us long. Its qualities, illus- 

 trated in the noblest of all literatures, are patent to i^ng^gf^ Sh 

 the world, indeed have earned for it from Jacob 

 Grimm the title of Welt-Sprache, the "World Speech." It belongs, 

 as might be anticipated from the northern origin of the Teutonic 

 element in Britain, to the Low German division of the Teutonic 

 branch of the Aryan family. Despite extreme pressure from 

 Norman French, continued for over 200 years (1066 1300), it 

 has remained faithful to this connection in its inner structure, 

 which reveals not a trace of Neo-Latin influences. The phonetic 

 system has undergone profound changes, which can be only in- 

 directly and to a small extent due to French action. What English 

 owes to French and Latin is a very large number, many thousands, 

 of words, some superadded to, some superseding their Saxon 

 equivalents, but altogether immensely increasing its wealth of 

 expression, while giving it a transitional position between the 

 somewhat sharply contrasted Germanic and Romance worlds. 



Amongst the Romance peoples, that is, the French, Spaniards, 

 Portuguese, Italians, Rumanians, many Swiss and 

 Belgians, who were entirely assimilated in speech Natkm F 

 and largely in their civil institutions to their Roman 

 masters, the paramount position, a sort of international hegemony, 

 has been taken by the French nation since the decadence of Spain 

 under the feeble successors of Philip II. The constituent elements 

 of these Gallo-Romans, as they may be called, are much the same 

 as those of the British peoples, but differ in their distribution and 

 relative proportions. Thus the Iberians (Aquitani, Pictones, and 

 later Vascones), who may be identified with the Neolithic long- 

 heads, do not appear ever to have ranged much farther north than 

 Brittany, and were Aryanised in pre- Roman times by the P-speaking 



