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the end designed by their authors. There is a story told of Lord Eldon that on one occasion, when threatened by the mob, with whom he had made himself unpopular, he put his head out of the carriage window and exclaimed, "You may shoot me, if you like, but there will be another Lord Chancellor by eight o'clock to-morrow morning." Intending assassins for their country's sake would do wisely to lay to heart the moral of the tale.

We said just now that, when once the principle of political murder is admitted, under whatever safeguards and restrictions, on the plea of public utility, the practice is sure far to outrun the theory without any shadow of even plausible excuse. But even that is not the worst. We know alike from past and present experiences that under such conditions the murderer who acts from the lowest and most selfish motives may reckon on securing the acquiescence or admiration of those who for reasons of their own sympathize with his act or expect to profit by it. And thus the whole standard of public morality is debased. The legendary heroes of Athenian historyhow far the legend is true matters nothing to our argument-may have shared the courage of Brutus, but, as Thucydides points out, clearly did not share his unselfish patriotism, yet they enjoyed for centuries a full share of his posthumous renown. In our own day we have seen vulgar and brutal murderers raised by the homage of thousands of their countrymen, under the guidance of mitred prelates, to the rank of saints and martyrs," and if the late Father Burke had the manliness to denounce from the pulpit the Phoenix Park atrocity, Archbishop Croke was careful to condone it. And this leads to a further

remark. It is often said that crimes committed under a perverted conviction of duty are more excusable than those which spring from mere selfish greed or passion. And this may be sometimes, though not always, true as regards the individual offender. There is a very real sense in which, as St. Paul points out, it marks a lower level of moral degradation to take pleasure in them that do evil than to do it. Aristotle had affirmed much the same principle long before in the Ethics, in his well-known distinction between the man who sins from deliberate choice and the irresolute man who goes astray from lack of selfcontrol. But there can at all events be no doubt that a false standard of right and wrong is more demoralizing to the public conscience and more dangerous to the State than isolated acts of crime. That alone would sufficiently meet a favorite fallacy of the Parnellites about ordinary crimes being more infrequent in Ireland than in England, even if their statement were strictly accurate, whereas it cannot in fact be accepted without considerable reserve; among convicted criminals in England Irish offenders form a proportion far in excess of their relative numbers in the population. But were it otherwise, it would still remain true that crimes, including political murder, which are committed and defended on principle, are for that very reason more dangerous than ordinary crimes of theft or violence, being perpetrated not merely in disobedience to the law, but in open defiance of it. It is a graver offence to corrupt than to outrage public morality; it is "poisoning the wells." Murder regarded as a fine art" is bad enough, but murder established as a philosophical doctrine is a great deal worse.-Saturday Review.

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THE HOME OF THE ARYANS. BY PROFESSOR F. MAX MÜLLER.

IF we find the same words with the same meanings in Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic, what shall we say? Either the words must have been borrowed from one language by the other,

or they must have belonged to an older language, from which all these so-called Aryan languages were derived. It is not always easy to decide this question, but, generally speaking, the character of each of the Aryan dialects, as we may

call them, is sufficiently marked to enable us to say at once that such and such a word in Latin is Greek, in German is Latin, in Celtic is German. With the exception of such foreign words, however, it is clear that all words, and all grammatical forms also, which the Aryan languages have in common, must have constituted the bulk of a common inheritance from which the principal heirs carried away whatever seemed most useful and valuable to them.

This fact being once firmly established, scholars have rushed at a number of conclusions, which seemed very plausible at first, but have turned out quite untenable after more careful consideration.

Surely, it was said, if these languages are all derived from the same source, it ought to be possible to reconstruct that primitive Aryan language. Forthwith the attempt was made, but it proved a failure. If those who began to write fables in the Proto-Aryan speech had attempted to construct, first of all, a Proto-Latin speech out of the fragments scattered in Italian, Provençal, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian, and Roumansch, they would have seen that even this task, which ought to have been much easier, was beyond their power. And why? Because it is a mistake to imagine that there ever was one uniform Proto-Aryan language-tota, teres et rotunda-from which Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and all the rest were derived, as Italian was from Latin. Ancient languages, as I have tried to point out in my Lectures on the Science of Language," live, move, and have their being in dialects, and it is out of a living mass of dialectic speech that literary languages slowly emerge. Dialect has two quite distinct meanings, which ought never to be confounded. It means the ancient feeders of a literary language; but it also means the later channels branching off from a literary language. We can see literary languages emerging before our very eyes, if we watch the less civilized races whose spoken dialects have not yet been centralized by literary cultivation. In the small Island of Mangaia, as its first missionary, the Rev. W. W. Gill, informed me, four dialects were spoken when he arrived there. After twenty years of teaching

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and preaching, and of washing and combing too, the dialect which he himself had learned, with any peculiarities of grammar and pronunciation that might have been due to himself, has become the recognized language of the whole island. If there had been at the same time a French and a German missionary, we might probably have had three Mangaian grammars, and three Mangaian Catechisms and Bibles. But would it have been possible to construct out of them a uniform Proto-Mangaian language? Certainly not. We cannot reconstruct what never existed, and we cannot, therefore, build up a uniform original Proto-Aryan speech containing the type of every word and every grammatical form that meets us in Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic.

The second equally thoughtless endeavor was to fix the date at which the Aryan separation took place. How, in the world, was that to be done? It was thought that, as in geology we can count the years in which certain deposits have taken place within historical times, and argue from that to the years requir ed for the formation of more ancient deposits, we might apply the same test to the growth of language. We see how many centuries it has taken for AngloSaxon to become English, for Latin to become French, for Zend to become Persian. Why should we not be able to discover, without minding a century or two, how long it would have taken for Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, to branch. off from a common stem and accumulate that amount of difference which separates them from each other? The answer is simple enough. There are two kinds of change in language-the one produced by internal, the other by external causes. The internal changes are due chiefly to economy of muscular energy and similar causes; the external changes, and these are the most palpable, are generally the results of political and social revolution, or foreign conquest. Anglo-Saxon would never have become what it has become in English, but for the ill-treatment it received from the Normans. Latin would never have become French, but for the brutality with which it was mangled by Franks and other barbarians. Persian is only

the wreck of Zend, and bears clear traces of all the persecutions which Persia underwent from its Muhammedan conquerors. No one can measure the bearings of such events, any more than a geologist, in his calculations of the progress of stratification, can make allowance for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or cataclysmal floods.

We do not even know how long Sanskrit had been Sanskrit, and Greek Greek before the time when we become aware of their existence. Literature, or, at all events, written literature, is a very late invention in most countries. In India we have no trace of books before the fifth century B.C. In Greece, we know indeed of inscriptions several centuries earlier; but of written books, in our sense of the word, I still doubt the existence before the sixth century B. C. It is true that oral tradition, before the invention of writing and printing, had proved itself a very safe guardian of poetry, and few would doubt that the earliest poetry which we know in India and Greece goes back at least to 1000 B.C. But it may go back, for all we know, to 2000 or 3000 B.C., and even at that time people who spoke Sanskrit and Greek would have been as unintelligible to each other as a Bengali and a modern Greek are at present.

When the attempt at fixing the date of the first Aryan separation was given up as hopeless, much time and ingenuity were wasted on the question whether we might not be able to find out how that separation took place, which races started first, and which remained together for some time after they had broken away from the rest. It is easy to start such problems, but it is far wiser to look before we leap. I was not aware, till I saw it stated by Professor Schrader, in his excellent book called "Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte" (p. 70), that I was myself responsible for the first step in that direction, having been the first to point out that, at some time or other, the Aryan family separated and became divided into two distinct branches, the South-Eastern, comprising the languages of India, Persia, and Armenia; and the North-Western, comprising Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic. I do not mean, however, to shirk that amount of responsi

bility. When we find, as we do, in the most ancient languages of India and Persia, in the Vedic Sanskrit, and in Zend, identical words of decidedly secondary character, technical terms even, connected with a peculiar system of religion and sacrifice, and such words not borrowed, but modified according to the phonetic system of either Sanskrit or Zend, we are safe. These two languages must have continued together, after they had separated from the rest, in which no traces of these words occur. Thus we find in Sanskrit hotar, the name of a special priest, in Zend regularly changed into zaotar. We find another name for priest in Sanskrit, atharvan, in Zend, átharvan. The sacrificial plant, which in the Veda is called soma, occurs in Zend as haoma. While other Aryan languages have common numerals up to one hundred only, Sanskrit and Zend have the same word for thousand also, viz. sahasra in Sanskrit, changed regularly in Zend into hazanra. Such evidence is sufficient to prove that the people who spoke Sanskrit and Zend must have remained united for some time after they had left the common Aryan home, and after they had become separated from the speakers of the other Aryan dialects. Beyond this, however, all is uncertain and mere guess-work. It was my chief object in the inaugural lecture which I delivered at Strassburg, in 1872, to warn scholars against wasting their time on an impossible problem. I pointed out how certain peculiar similarities had been discovered:

1. Between Slavonic and German, by Bopp, Zeuss, Grimm, and Schleicher ;

2. Between German and Celtic, by Ebel and Lottner;

3. Between Celtic and Latin, by Newman and Schleicher ;

4. Between Latin and Greek, by Mommsen and Curtius;

5. Between Greek and Sanskrit, by Grassmann, Sonne, and Kern.

But all these similarities prove no more than that the Aryan languages are cognate dialects. If some of them agree on certain points on which they differ from all the rest, this is no more than we should expect; if they differ, this is again exactly what we are prepared for. Nothing but coincidences in late, secondary, or technical terms, such as we

find between Sanskrit and Zend, for instance, but certainly not between Greek and Latin, ought at all to disturb our equanimity. Such coincidences, however, as could in the least compare with the coincidences between Sanskrit and Zend, we find nowhere else, not even between Greek and Latin, and therefore the problem of the gradual separation of the Aryan languages, beyond the great split into a North-Western and a SouthEastern branch, is, from the nature of the case, insoluble, and must be abandoned. I do not deny that the ancestors of Greeks and Romans, of Romans and Celts, of Celts and Germans, of Germans and Slavs, may have remained together for some time before they became finally separated; all I maintain is that the linguistic evidence is too weak to support such conclusions. It may seem a kind of intellectual cowardice to withdraw from an undertaking which appeared so promising, but if there is no evidence for solving a problem the true scholar ought to have the courage to say so, and not to waste valuable time on mere guesswork which simply cumbereth the ground. About the same time when I had published my Strassburg lecture, Professor Schmidt made a bold attempt to save what could be saved of the shipwreck, but in the end his researches led to much the same conclusion. We both admit that there was from the beginning dialectic variety within certain spheres, but the cherished idea of a real pedigree of the Aryan languages had to be surrendered once for all. Let any Roman scholar attempt to fix the time when Italian, Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Roumanian and Roumansch, branched off respectively from Latin, or how long some of them remained united before assuming an independent existence, and he will be less surprised at the failure of all attempts to restore the stemma genealogicum of the ancient Aryan languages.

And now we come to the last question. Is it possible to fix the original home of Aryan speech, and to determine the migrations of the races who spoke Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic, in their progress from their head quarters ?

It is generally taken for granted that n the beginning, whenever that may

have been, there was a large Aryan population somewhere, and that large swarms issued from a central bee-hive which contained untold millions of human beings. This may or may not have been so. But first of all we ought to remember that a common language is by no means a certain proof of a common bee-hive. We know from history how families, clans, and whole nations were conquered and led into captivity, learning the language of their conquerors; how tribes were exterminated, women and children carried off; and how even conquerors had sometimes to learn the language of the country which they had subdued. All this does not destroy the continuity of language, but it breaks the continuity of blood. If the indigenous races of India learned Sanskrit, and dialects derived from Sanskrit, they became representatives of Aryan speech, whatever their blood may have been. Have not the Jews forgotten Hebrew, and learned English, German, and French? Have not the Beauchamps and St. Legers broken their tongues to Saxon idiom and Saxon grammar in England? How then shall we tell what races had to learn the language of their Aryan conquerors or their Aryan slaves? There is no Aryan race in blood, but whoever, through the imposition of hands, whether of his parents or his foreign masters, received the Aryan blessing, belongs to that unbroken spiritual succession which began with the first apostles of that noble speech, and continues to the present day in every part of the globe.

And why should there have been in the beginning a vast number of Aryan men? Let us remember that one couple, having two children, would, if every successive marriage was blest with two children only, produce a population of 274,877,906,944 human beings in about 1,200 years. Now the population of the whole earth at the present moment is vaguely estimated at 1,500 millions only. We are not driven, therefore, particularly if the first Aryan separation may be placed at least 2,000 years B.C., to the admission of a vast Aryan stock which was broken up into seven or more nationalities. That may be the more natural hypothesis, but whether more natural or not, it is not the only possible hypothesis. Granted two Aryan

couples, each with seven children, and everything that has to be explained may be explained quite as well with this as with the bee-hive theory. Each of the seven children, by marrying children of the other family, might become, particularly if they settled in different forests or valleys, founders of dialects; and each of these dialects might, in twenty generations, or six hundred years, be spoken by more than two millions of human beings. Two millions of human beings, however, are much more difficult to move from one country to another than two hundred; and it is, at all events, quite open for us to imagine that the Aryan migrations took place by hundreds instead of by millions. If one missionary is able, in twenty years, to impose his peculiar, and perhaps not quite grammatical, dialect on the population of a whole island, why should not one shepherd, with his servants and flocks, have transferred his peculiar Aryan dialect from one part of Asia or Europe to another? This may seem a very humble and modest view of what was formerly represented as the irresistible stream of mighty waves rolling forth from the Aryan centre and gradually overflowing the mountains and valleys of Asia and Europe, but it is, at all events, a possible view; nay, I should say a view far more in keeping with what we know of recent colonization.

But the old question returns, Can we not discover the cradle of our race? I say, decidedly we cannot. We may guess, with more or less probability, but if our guesses are to be submitted to the tests of mathematical certainty, not one of them will stand the test. This ought to be understood; and is, in fact, understood among most scholars. Many opinions held with regard to periods of history which are beyond the reach of historical evidence can never be more than possible or plausible. To demand for them a different character does not show any critical sagacity, but rather ignorance of the limits of our knowledge. Thus, when we see the Celts driven to the western parts of Europe, pushed forward by Teutonic tribes, and these again pressed hard by Slavonic neighbors, we naturally conclude that the Celts were the first to arrive in Europe, the Germans the second, the Slaves the

third.

But there is no mathematical certainty for this. It is nothing but the result of an historical combination, and can never be more. Again, if we see Hellenic civilization extending from Asia Minor to Greece, and from Greece to Italy, and if we find the Italians pressed by successive inroads from the north, we are inclined here too to admit a progress of Aryan speech and thought from the east to the west, and from the north to the South. If, on the contrary, we consider that the Aryan conquerors of India came clearly from the north along the rivers of the Punjab, while before that time they must have dwelt for a certain period together with the people who spoke ancient Persian, and, before that time again, with people who became the founders of the first European dialects, we find it difficult to resist the conviction that some half-way point from which the North-Western and South-Eastern tribes could have diverged may mark the original home of the Aryans.

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But if we proceed to ask in what exact spot the Aryan centre has to be placed geographically, the answers will vary very considerably. "Somewhere in Asia," used to be the recognized answer, and I do not mean to say that it was far wrong; only we must not expect in a subject like this our muchvaunted mathematical certainty. The reasoning which we have to adopt is one that Mill recommends for other complicated and, at first sight, confused sets of appearances. We have to begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it, and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena. The simplest supposition which accords with the more obvious facts is the best to begin with, because its consequences are the most easily traced. This rude hypothesis is then rudely corrected, and the operation repeated, and the comparison of the consequences deducible from the corrected hypothesis with the observed facts suggests still further correction, until the deductive results are at last made to tally with the phenomena.

Now the first rough hypothesis is that the cradle of the Aryans was somewhere

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