Page:Biological Analogies in History.djvu/26

 the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover, the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe. It has extended to and over half of that new world which was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life between the birth and the death of Pagan Rome. This new world was discovered by one Italian, and its mainland first reached and named by another; and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan's empire, the Spanish, French and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the St. Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes and in the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization. When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to describe totally different phenomena.

The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly than their predecessors of a couple of generations back how artificial most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and rather pathetic humour in the simplicity of half a century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and faith in their own and their fellow countrymen's purity of