280 THE ARYAN QUESTION VI 



rnunity of language is no proof of unity of race, is 

 not even presumptive evidence of racial identity. 1 

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

 other, free and prolonged intercourse has taken 

 place between the speakers of the same language. 

 Philology, 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 

 difficulty 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 un- 



1 Canon Taylor (Origin of the Aryans, p 31) states that " Cuno 

 .... was the first to insist on what is now looked on as an axiom 

 in ethnology that race is not co-extensive with language," in 

 a work published in 1871. I may be permitted to quote a 

 passage from a lecture delivered on the 9th of January, 1870, 

 which brought me into a great deal of trouble. "Physical, 

 mental, and moral peculiarities go with blood and not with 

 language. 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.) 



