to the monosyllabic
Chinese. All these physical characteristics are patent enough, and if
they agreed with each other it would be very easy to classify mankind.
Unfortunately for scientists, however, these criteria of race are most
exasperatingly intermingled. Color does not agree with texture of hair,
for many of the dark races have straight hair; nor does color agree with
the breadth of the head, for the yellow Tartar has a broader head than
the German; nor, again, has the science of language as yet succeeded in
clearing up the relative authority of these various and contradictory
criteria. The final word of science, so far, is that we have at least
two, perhaps three, great families of human beings--the whites and
Negroes, possibly the yellow race. That other races have arisen from the
intermingling of the blood of these two. This broad division of the
world's races which men like Huxley and Raetzel have introduced as more
nearly true than the old five-race scheme of Blumenbach, is nothing more
than an acknowledgment that, so far as purely physical characteristics
are concerned, the differences between men do not explain all the
differences of their history. It declares, as Darwin himself said, that
great as is the physical unlikeness of the various races of men their
likenesses are greater, and upon this rests the whole scientific
doctrine of Human Brotherhood.

Although the wonderful developments of human history teach that the
grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone go but a short way
toward explaining the different roles which groups of men have played
in Human Progress, yet there are differences--subtle, delicate and
elusive, though they may be--which have silently but definitely
separated men into groups. While these subtle forces have generally
followed the natural cleavage of common blood, descent and physical
peculiarities, they have at other times swept across and ignored these.
At all times, however, they have divided human beings into races, which,
while they perhaps transcend scientific definition, nevertheless, are
clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist.

If this be true, then the history of the world is the history, not of
individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who
ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and
overrides the central thought of all history. What, then, is a race? It
is a vast family of human beings, g