Now at last it is possible to approach--if with extreme precaution--the conception “people,” and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even, after going to much trouble to clear their theoretical basis (up to a point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, race-parts, and speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they have established a racial connexion. If a few “roots” correspond, the curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced this “thinking in terms of peoples.”

But is it the Hellenes, the Dorians, or the Spartans that are a people? If the Romans were a people, what are we to say about the Latins? And what kind of a unit within the population of Italy at _c._ 400 do we mean by the name “Etruscan?” Has not their “nationality,” like that of Basques and Thracians, been made actually to depend upon the build of their language? What ethnic idea underlies the words “American,” “Swiss,” “Jew,” “Boer”? Blood, speech, faith, State, landscape--what in all these is determinative in the formation of a people? In general, relationships of blood and language are determined only by way of scholarship, and the ordinary individual is perfectly unconscious of them. “Indogermanic” is purely and simply a scientific, more particularly a philological, concept. The attempt of Alexander the Great to fuse Greeks and Persians together was a complete failure, and we have recently had experience of the real strength of Anglo-German community of feeling. But “people” is a linkage of which one is _conscious_. In ordinary usage, one designates as one’s “people”--and with feeling--that community, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest to one.[215] And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. For Cæsar the Arverni were a “_civitas_”; for us the Chinese are a “nation.” On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals who, like Isocrates, felt themselves _primarily_ as Hellenes. On this basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other, with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. The Spartiates[216] felt themselves a people in _this_ sense; the “Dorians” of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not. The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont; the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839;[217] the Mamertines[218] by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold of refuge.[219] Was the formative principle very different with the Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief’s following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achæans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there.

We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us; but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal names of to-day. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name-giving is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity. But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli;[220] lastly, an unlimited number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all. If only such names as these be handed down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong. The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons have superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle--but if we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced that an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had taken place here. The names “Romans” and “Quirites,” “Spartans” and “Lacedæmonians,” “Carthaginian” and “Punic” have endured side by side--here again there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of one. In what relation the names “Pelasgi,” “Achæans,” “Danai,” stand to one another we shall never learn, and had we nothing more than these names, the scholar would long ago have assigned to each a separate people, complete with language and racial affinities. Has it not been attempted to draw from the regional designation “Doric” conclusions as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may a people have adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The name “Hellenes” arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected with any movement of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the name of a perfectly unimportant prince, and that, in connexion with the decision of a heritage and not a folk-migration. Paris called the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914--in other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to be covered by these names. The West-European is called in the East a Frank, the Jew a Spaniole--the fact is readily explained by historical circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from the _words alone_?

It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic remains, and the notion of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen “Prussians,” and in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris! The Romans, pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to the lower Danube! Or a part of them perhaps settled in Poland, where Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on the Weser defeated the Saxons, who thereupon emigrated to the neighbourhood of Dresden, their places being taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settlement, according to the dynasty-name, was on the Thames! The historian who writes down the history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that names, too, have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their migrations, modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of Indo-Germanic research in particular. If in historic times the names “Pfalz” and “Calabria” have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven from Palestine to Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what conclusions can be drawn from the history of the Etruscan name and the alleged “Tyrsenian” inscription at Lemnos?[221] Or did the French and the Haytian Negroes, as shown by their common language, once form a single primitive people? In the region between Budapest and Constantinople to-day two Mongolian, one Semitic, two Classical, and three Slavonic languages are spoken, and these speech-communities all feel themselves essentially as peoples.[222] If we were to build up a migration-story here, the error of the method would be manifested in some singular results. “Doric” is a dialect designation--that we know, and that is all we know. No doubt some few dialects of this group spread rapidly, but that is no proof of the spread or even of the existence of a human stock belonging with it.[223]