tic history, but in that of racial history nothing whatever. Rome was an Etruscan city, but is not the fact completely without bearing upon the soul of the Roman people? Are the Romans Indogermanic because they happen to speak a Latin dialect? The ethnologists recognize a Mediterranean Race and an Alpine Race, and north and south of these an astonishing physical resemblance between North-Germans and Libyans; but the philologists know that the Basques are in virtue of their speech a "pre-Indogermanic" — Iberian — population. The two views are mutually exclusive. Were the builders of Mycenæ and Tiryns "Hellenes"? — it would be as pertinent to ask were the Ostrogoths Germans. I confess that I do not comprehend why such questions are formulated at all.
For me, the "people" is a unit of the soul. The great events of history were not really achieved by peoples; they themselves created the peoples. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was the fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and the Osmanli what they afterwards were. The "Americans" did not immigrate from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci designates to-day not only a continent, but also a people in the true sense of the word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual upheavals of 1775 and above all, 1861-5.
This is the one and only connotation of the word " people." Neither unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived experience of the "we." The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the vis viva of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal's day meant a people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population.
Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races, but "race" in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science — never for folk-consciousness — and that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for this ideal of blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being. It is inco-ordination of this (wholly metaphysical)
