THE ETHICS OF TRIBAL SOCIETY. 305 



once the country which Englishmen inhabited. Englishmen are 

 now the people who inhabit England." An East Indian by blood 

 may be an Englishman in the modern sense of the term as well as 

 an Anglo-Saxon of purest lineage, however earnestly Lord Salis- 

 bury may deprecate the idea that a Hindu or any other " black 

 man," even though he may be, like Dadabhoi Naoroji, a gentleman 

 and a scholar, and the peer of the Tory premier himself in political 

 wisdom and ability, should be sent to the British Parliament by 

 an English constituency. It would seem, therefore, that, even at 

 this late day, a man may be her British Majesty's first minister 

 of state and yet entertain the notion, which prevailed in the days 

 of Warren Hastings and still lingers among the siibalterns of the 

 colonial service, that an East Indian is a " nigger." 



Nowhere is national feeling stronger and race feeling weaker 

 than in the United States, where the negro, notwithstanding the 

 prejudice growing out of his former condition of servitude, is as 

 truly an American and as fully sensible of this fact as any scion 

 of the Pilgrim fathers. It is unquestionable that the old Puritan 

 stock is rapidly disappearing from New England, partly through 

 natural extinction and partly through westward migration, and is 

 being supplanted by Irish and Canadian French ; but this circum- 

 stance does not blot New England from the map nor convert it 

 into New Ireland or New France. On the contrary, the descend- 

 ants of the Celtic immigrant are assimilated and transmuted by 

 their environment and become New-Englanders. The conscious- 

 ness of what might be called common territoriality tends not only 

 to bind together and to blend diverse races into that " unity of a 

 people " which constitutes a nation, but also to attenuate and to 

 loosen the social and political unions, which are based upon com- 

 mon descent, and finally ruptures them altogether. 



The aborigines of British America, who can not regard human 

 beings otherwise than from a tribal point of view, still speak of 

 the English as King George's men ; but the inhabitants of Canada 

 consider themselves Canadians irrespectively of their ancestral 

 origin, and the same readiness to sink the claims of lineage when 

 they conflict with territorial interests manifests itself even in the 

 more recent colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Geographical 

 contiguity proves, in such cases, stronger than genealogical con- 

 nections ; the old proverb, that blood is thicker than water, does 

 not hold true of oceans. 



The appeals that have been made in recent times to ethnic an- 

 tipathies and ethnic sympathies for the purposes of political propa- 

 gandism or the promotion of personal ambition are anachronistic 

 attempts to resuscitate the tribal spirit under new forms and on a 

 larger scale by a perverse and pseudo-scientific application of the 

 results of comparative philology to public affairs. The hobby of 



VOL. XLIV. 24 



