Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/22

 a mixing of races. Taking our own continent, we see that in France Gauls, Iberians, and Teutons; in Germany, Teutons, Slavs, and doubtless also Celts; in Russia Slavs, Finns, and (to a less extent) tribes of Turkic or Mongolic stock, have been blent to form one nation. The Basques and the Lapps, and the four Scandinavian peoples seem to be of comparatively pure race, but may seem so only because we know little of their early history. In India three or four great stocks have been commingled, and the same thing has apparently happened in Eastern Asia. The original source of the largest of all civilized nations, that which inhabits the temperate parts of North America, was not only itself the product of diverse sources before it crossed the ocean, but has within the last seventy years received such enormous accretions from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Slavs of Central Europe, that it is becoming the most mixed of all the peoples we know.

Conquest and colonization have in modern times been the chief factors in the process of race-blending. In the ancient world, however, another cause of extraordinary and long-continued potency was at work, viz. the importation of forced labour, whether war-captives brought from a distance, or barbarians brought from the countries outside civilization into places where work-people, and especially field-workers, were scarce. From the sixth century B.C. to the fifth A.D. a vast stream of slaves steadily flowed into the Greco-Italic