Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/419

XI.] Whether physical science will ever reach a more definite decision of the same question is at present, at least, very doubtful: its tendency seems now to be toward establishing such a capacity of mutation in species as would explain all the tribes of men as possible varieties of one type; without, of course, at the same time disproving the possibility of their independent origin. It is likely enough that we may, at some time, reach a point where we shall be able to say that, upon the whole, the weight of probability is upon this side, or upon that: anything more certain and categorical we can hardly venture to look for. Happily, the question is one of little practical consequence: the brotherhood of men, the obligation of mutual justice and mutual kindness, rests upon the possession of a common nature and a common destiny, not upon the tie of fleshly relationship. Those who would justify their oppression of a whole race of their fellow-beings by an alleged proof of its descent from other ancestors than their own are not less perverse—more perverse they could not well be—than those who wonld sanctify it as the execution of a curse pronounced by a drunken patriarch upon a portion of his own offspring. It is as shameful to attempt to press science as religion into the service of organized injustice.

But if linguistic science must thus observe a modest silence with regard to the origin of the human race, what has it to say respecting the origin of language itself? This is an inquiry to which we have made a near approach at one and another point in our discussions hitherto, but which we have carefully refrained from grappling with seriously. It has not lain in the direct line of our investigations. We have been engaged in analyzing and examining the recorded facts of language, in order to find what answer we could to our leading question, "why we speak as we do?" and we have been brought at last to the recognition of certain elements called roots, which we clearly see to have been the germs whence the whole development of speech has proceeded, but which we do not dare affirm to have been absolutely the first utterances of speaking men. These, then, are the historical beginnings of speech; and historical research will