CHAPTER V

THE RACES OF MAN AND THE ARYAN QUESTION

The question of races of mankind is one that has given rise to great diversity of opinion among scientists and students of ethnology, and it may as well be admitted at the outset that no very definite conclusions have as yet been arrived at. One set of ethnologists have been disposed to look to physical characters as the basis of a classification; others have been guided more by language. In the earlier stages of the inquiry the Biblical traditions have entered into the case with prejudicial effect, and with the advances of science this subject as a whole has seemed to grow more confused rather than clearer. For a time there was a certain unanimity in regarding the Egyptians and their allies as Hamites, the Babylonians, Hebrews, Phœnicians, and their allies as Semites, and in bringing all other non-Aryan races into a conglomerate class under the title of Turanians. Latterly, however, the artificial character of such a classification as this has been more and more apparent, and a growing belief tends to consider all the peoples grouped about the Mediterranean as forming a single race, including within that race, as is apparent, members of the old races of Hamites, Semites, and Aryans. Yet another classification would group the peoples of the earth according to their several stages of civilisation. But, without attempting a complete enumeration of all the various systems that have been suggested, one may summarise them all by repeating that there is no complete uniformity of classification accepted by all authoritative students of the subject.

Here as elsewhere, however, there is a tendency for old systems and old names to maintain their hold, and notwithstanding the disavowals of the most recent schools of ethnology, the classification into Hamites, Semites, Aryans, and Turanians is doubtless the one that has still the widest vogue. In particular the Aryan race, to which all modern European races belong, has seemed more and more to make good its claims to recognition. Thanks to the relatively new science of comparative philology, it has been shown, and has now come to be familiarly understood, that the languages of the Hindu and the Persian in the far East are based upon the same principles of phonation as the Greek and Latin and their daughter languages, and the language of the great Teutonic race.

It is this affinity of languages that is the one defining feature of the Aryan race. Since historical studies have made it more and more plain that a nation in its wanderings, whether as a conquering or a conquered people, may adopt the language of another nation, it has become clear that a classification of mankind based on ethnic features would have no necessary correspondence with a classification based upon language. The philologists, therefore, who cling to the word “Aryan,” or to the idea which it connotes, have latterly been disposed to urge, as for example Professor Max Müller does in the most strenuous terms, that in contending for an Aryan race they refer solely to a set of people speaking the Aryan language, quite regardless of the physical affinities of these people. And it is in this sense of the word, and this alone, that the dark-skinned race of India is to be considered brother to the fair-skinned Scandinavian; that, in short, all the nations of modern Europe and the classical nations of antiquity are to be jumbled together in an arbitrary union with the people of far-off Persia and India.

While this classification establishing an Aryan race on the basis of language has the support of all philologists, and, indeed, is susceptible of the readiest verification, there is a growing tendency to frown upon the use of the word “Aryan” itself. The word came into vogue at a time when it was supposed on all hands that the original home of the people to whom it was applied was Central Asia; that this was the cradle of the Aryan race was long accepted quite as a matter of course--hence the general acceptance of the name. But, in the course of the last century, the supposed fact of the Asiatic origin of the Aryans has been placed in dispute, and there is a seemingly growing school of students, who, basing their claims on the evidence of philology, are disposed to believe that the cradle of this race--if race it be--was not Central Asia, but perhaps Western or Northwestern Europe. We must not pause to discuss the evidence for this new view here; suffice it that the evidence seems highly suggestive, if not conclusive.

To many philologists, including some who still hold that the probabilities favour an Asiatic origin of the race, it now seems advisable to adopt a name of less doubtful import, and of late it has become quite usual to substitute for the word “Aryan” the compound word “Indo-European,” or, what is perhaps better, “Indo-Germanic.” Such a word, it is clear, summarises the fact that the Indians in the far East and the Germanic race in the far West have a language that is fundamentally the same, without connoting any theory whatever as to the origin or other relations of these widely scattered peoples. The name thus has an undoubted scientific status that makes it attractive, but nevertheless it is too cumbersome to be accepted at once as a substitute for the word “Aryan” in ordinary usage. Nor, indeed does there seem to be any good reason why such substitution should be made. Words very generally come in the course of time to have an application which their original derivation would not at all justify, and there is no more reason for ruling out the word “Aryan,” even should it be proven absolutely that Asia was not the original cradle of the Indo-Germanic race, than there would be for discarding a very large number of words of Greek and Latin derivation that are familiarly employed in the various modern European languages. Indeed, it may be taken for granted that the generality of people to whom the word “Aryan” is familiar have no such preconception aroused in their minds by the word as it conveys to the mind of special scholars, and in any event where a distinct disavowal is made of any ethnological preconceptions in connection with the word, one is surely justified for convenience sake in continuing to use the word “Aryan” as a synonym for the more complicated term “Indo-Germanic.”