Till': CONFLICT OF LAXCtUAGKS. 133 



motive behind modern Ivuropean aggressions upon Asia. If 

 the Asiatics were less numerous or less organized, the conflict 

 would be vital. The Asiatic cannot be extenninated or 

 enslaved, but he can be taxed and cheated. Romans in 

 Britain and English in India are striking examples of this 

 kind of conflict. The Romans were in Celtic Britain for four 

 hundred years, and the English have been in India for one 

 hundred and fifty, ruling, taxing and owning the wealth of 

 the country, but not intermarrying — and no Briton spoke 

 Latin only, as far as we know, and certainly no Hindoo 

 speaks English as his vernacular. Such conflicts result lin- 

 guistically onh' in adding to the vocabulary of the subject 

 people words naming the new arts and things the dominant 

 people teaches the former. 



The political conflict, generally associated with the com- 

 mercial, seeks dominance in purely a national sense. The 

 Napoleonic Wars of the beginning of the last century and 

 the Roman conquests beyond Southern Europe were such poli- 

 tical dominative conflicts. The immediate objects of these 

 conflicts have all passed away. The Roman Empire and the 

 Napoleonic Empire beyond France have disappeared, and the 

 peoples involved in each case are as they were before, except- 

 ing only where and in so far as the dominant people followed 

 up the conqueror by a vital conflict — exterminating and dis- 

 placing, or colonizing and intermarrying. Only so far as this 

 process extended, only so far as it became a vital contest, per- 

 manent results remain. Hence, the domain of the Romance 

 Eangiiages covers, not the Imperial Roman territory, not the 

 area conquered, but the country where the Italian peoples set- 

 tled and intermarried or exterminated. And Napoleon could 

 not extend the French language beyond its old territorial lines. 



Thus far the contests we have considered have been between 

 peoples generally contiguous and always contemporaneous. 

 There is another and more subtile conflict that may continue 

 long beyond the life of the people whose dominance started it. 

 Such highly developed peoples as the Romans and (xreeks 



