CHINESE IMMIGRATION. 729 



review of the history and institutions of the Chinese as will indicate 

 the genius of their civilization. 



In that period of the existence of the human species when all races 

 were occupied with the common struggle with the elements and with 

 their four-footed rivals, the ancestors of the Aryan and Mongolian, 

 perhaps, possessed no distinguishing characters. If they have descend- 

 ed from a common stock, they separated at a period before the present 

 races of the world had yet become differentiated. There is no evi- 

 dence which indicates a later connection between our race and the 

 Chinese. Language, the most certain guide to prehistoric history, af- 

 fords decided testimony to this conclusion. The study of the Aryan 

 family of languages has shown that the complicated forms our words 

 now have in their divisions into parts of speech, in their inflections, in 

 their prefixes and suffixes qualifying the roots, and in the general prev- 

 alence of polysyllabic words, are but a development from a form of 

 language in which all words were simple sounds for simple things or 

 thoughts were monosyllabic. 



Long before our Aryan ancestors left their early home in Central 

 Asia and commenced their great Western emigration, our language had 

 passed out of the monosyllabic stage. But the Chinese may be said 

 still to retain its simple monosyllabic form ; from which fact it has 

 been thought by some to be " the primitive language." Whitney 

 tells us that " it is a language which possesses neither inflections nor 

 parts of speech, and it has changed less in four thousand years than 

 most others in four hundred, or than many another in a single cen- 

 tury. ... It is, in certain respects of fundamental importance, the 

 most rudimentary and scanty of all known languages." * 



The testimony thus afforded by these languages proves, beyond a 

 doubt, that the Aryan race could have had no union with the ances- 

 tors of the Chinese later than that remote past when our language was 

 in a like state of monosyllabic simplicity. From that remote time, 

 when the savage ancestors of our race shaped their rude weapons of 

 stone, the Chinese have been developing upon one small portion of 

 the earth we have spread over much of the rest. They have been 

 comparatively isolated, and their growth has been therefore more ho- 

 mogeneous, constant, and persistent in one type. From the earliest 

 time to the present, the same people, guided by the same impulses and 

 controlled by the same surroundings, have developed in an unbroken 

 course. 



As some of the characteristics of families of languages are found 

 to be less variable than many of the physical characteristics of races, 

 the former is a better guide in classifying the human races than the 

 latter. A comparison of the language of the Indo-European peoples 

 with the language of the Chinese affords the strongest reason for 

 classifying them as different races. This conclusion receives constant 

 * " Language and the Study of Language," p. 334. 



