Page:Race and Nationality.djvu/10

 the numerically stronger people in its own home. But by blood all these people, no matter what their speech, are the same.

In short, there is no war of races in Europe; for in every single nationality concerned in the present struggle the various elements of the European population are represented, and arrayed against the same elements as grouped together in another nationality. The conflict has nothing whatever to do with racial descent. The so-called racial antipathies are feelings that have grown up on another basis and have been given a fictitious racial interpretation.

If we deny the presence of racial contrasts, it may not be amiss to say a word on the fact that we may distinguish with more or less uncertainty individuals that belong to distinct nationalities. This common experience might seem contradictory to what has been said before; but we form concepts of national types partly from essential elements of the form of the body, partly from the mannerisms of wearing hair and beard, and also from the characteristic expressions and motions of the body, which are determined not so much by hereditary causes as by habit. On the whole, the latter are more impressive than the former; and among the nations that are concerned in the present struggle, no fundamental traits of the body occur that belong to one to the exclusion of the others.

It is clear that the term race is only a disguise of the idea of nationality, which has really very, very little to do with racial descent; and that the passions that have been let loose are those of national enmities, not of racial antipathies.

If community of racial descent is not the basis of nationality, is it community of language?

When we glance at the national aspirations that have characterized a large part of the nineteenth Rh