Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/28

 persecutors. Christianity slowly followed. Islam propagated itself by the sword, though leaving their lives to the 'peoples of the Book.' Where Muhamadans came in contact with polytheists or with a race that, like the Bantus, has not reached the stage of having deities at all, intermarriage is not excluded, because when the conqueror takes a wife or concubine of the inferior race, she becomes ipso facto a Muhamadan. But when Muslims and Christians or Jews dwell side by side, each race so cleaves to its own faith as to stand sharply apart from the other. Thus in the Turkish and Persian and Arab East there is practically no intermarriage, save when a Christian girl is abducted and forced into Islam. It is Religion that has in those regions forbidden the mixture of races, and created that apparently insoluble problem which we call 'The Eastern Question.' There, Religion becomes Race and Race means Religion. It is difference of beliefs that has for many centuries kept Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, Maronites, Sunnite Turks, Shiah Persians, Kizilbashes, Yezidis, and Druses from mingling their blood to form one people. Even in Christian Europe, the Rumans of Transylvania, clinging to the Orthodox Church, intermarry scarcely at all with the Lutheran Saxons, or the Catholic or Calvinist or Unitarian Magyars and Szeklers, who dwell among them.

Where two races stand in contact, and neither the barrier of Colour nor that of Religion keeps them apart,