THE ROMANCE OF RACE. 517 



thej have done little since but live on the traditions of their far- 

 western ancestors. Tlie truth is, for the eastern hemisphere at least, 

 there is but one civilization, which began in Egypt and the Euphrates 

 Valley, and spread in either direction, eastward to Persia, India, and 

 China, or westward to Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and the Atlantic. 



Even the Chinese language turns out, on examination, to be 

 just the opposite of what earlier investigators thought it. Elder 

 philologists took it for granted that primitive tongues must have 

 been monosyllabic ; and since Chinese is monosyllabic, they regarded 

 it, somewhat illogically, as therefore primitive. But Terrien de 

 Lacouperie and Douglas have shown, on the contrary, that Chinese 

 is really Akkadian by origin, and that it was once polysyllabic, like 

 most other languages. Its words have been shortened by wear and 

 tear, or by that familiar process which turns omnibus into " bus," 

 photograph into " photo," and bicycle into " bike." It consists of 

 words said " for short," like the common abbreviation of William 

 into Bill, Richard into Dick, or Theodore into Theo ; or rather, it has 

 suffered by that imperceptible phonetic change which has reduced 

 eleemosyne to " alms," semetipsissimum to meme, and Aethelthryth 

 to Awdry. In fact, it turns out that Chinese, instead of being one 

 of the most primitive languages, is really one of the most worn and 

 degraded. In place of " psychology " it would content itself with 

 psy; while tel or pho would do duty for " telephone." 



In this case, the diffusion of a language and a culture is by simple 

 migration, as in the well-known instances of Tyre and Carthage, of 

 Greece and Sicily, of England and America. In other cases, the 

 diffusion is rather by conquest, as in the equally well-known in- 

 stances of Alexander's successors, of the Roman Empire, and of the 

 Arabs in Egypt, North Africa, and Syria. Greek, Latin, and Arabic, 

 with their accompanying arts, became naturalized among the subject 

 peoples. Most often, it is the conquerors who thus impose their 

 language on the conquered; we need go no further afield than Wales 

 or Ireland, where the process is incomplete, and Cornwall, where it 

 reached its termination a century ago. But sometimes it is the con- 

 quered who absorb and assimilate the conquerors; the iN^ormans seem 

 to have been good hands at thus losing their identity wherever they 

 went; for in J^ormandy, they dropped their native Scandinavian 

 and adopted old French; while in England again they lost their 

 French, and in a few generations became thoroughgoing English- 

 men. In Ireland, too, as an Irishman expressed it, they " inculcated 

 Celtic habits," and gave rise to the famous saying, so often re- 

 peated, that they were " ipsis Hibernis Iliberniores." 



On a large scale, this absorption of the conquerors by the con- 

 quered appears to have gone on over the entire Malayo-Polynesian 



