vi THE ARYAN QUESTION. 281 



All that it does prove is that, at some time or other, 

 free and prolonged intercourse has taken place be- 

 tween the speakers of the same language. Phi- 

 lology, therefore, while it may have a perfect right 

 to postulate the existence of a primitive Aryan 

 " people/' has no business to substitute " race " for 

 " people." The speakers of primitive Aryan may 

 have been a mixture of two or more races, just as 

 are the speakers of English and of French, at the 

 present time. 



The older philological ethnologists felt the dif- 

 ficulty which arose out of their identification of 

 linguistic with racial affinity, but were not dis- 

 mayed by it. Strong in the prestige of their great 

 discovery of the unity of the Aryan tongues, they 

 were quite prepared to make the philological and 

 the biological categories fit, by the exercise of 

 a little pressure on that about which they 

 knew less. And their judgment was often uncon- 

 sciously warped by strong monogenistic proclivities, 

 which, at bottom, however respectable and philan- 

 thropic their origin, had nothing to do with sci- 

 ence. So the patent fact that men of Aryan speech 

 presented widely diverse racial characters was ex- 

 plained away by maintaining that the physical 



In the United States the negroes have spoken English 

 for generations; but no one on that ground would call 

 them Englishmen, or expect them to differ physically, 

 mentally, or morally from other negroes." — Pall Mall 

 Gazette, Jan. 10, 1870. But the "axiom in ethnology" 

 had been implied, if not enunciated, before my time; for 

 example, by Desmoulins in 1826 (See above p, 215.) 



