doctrines and sentiments which have in modern days gained a great power
over men's minds. They have gained so great a power that those who may
regret their influence cannot afford to despise it. To make any
practical inference from the primeval kindred of Magyar and Turk is
indeed pushing the doctrine of race, and of sympathies arising from
race, as far as it well can be pushed. Without plunging into any very
deep mysteries, without committing ourselves to any dangerous theories
in the darker regions of ethnological inquiry, we may perhaps be allowed
at starting to doubt whether there is any real primeval kindred between
the Ottoman and the Finnish Magyar. It is for those who have gone
specially deep into the antiquities of the non-Aryan races to say
whether there is or is not. At all events, as far as the great facts of
history go, the kindred is of the vaguest and most shadowy kind. It
comes to little more than the fact that Magyars and Ottomans are alike
non-Aryan invaders who have made their way into Europe within recorded
times, and that both have, rightly or wrongly, been called by the name
of Turks. These do seem rather slender grounds on which to build up a
fabric of national sympathy between two nations, when several centuries
of living practical history all pull the other way. It is hard to
believe that the kindred of Turk and Magyar was thought of when a
Turkish Pasha ruled at Buda. Doubtless Hungarian Protestants often
deemed, and not unreasonably deemed, that the contemptuous toleration of
the Moslem Sultan was a lighter yoke than the persecution of the
Catholic Emperor. But it was hardly on grounds of primeval kindred that
they made the choice. The ethnological dialogue held at Constantinople
does indeed sound like ethnological theory run mad. But it is the very
wildness of the thing which gives it its importance. The doctrine of
race, and of sympathies springing from race, must have taken very firm
hold indeed of men's minds before it could be carried out in a shape
which we are tempted to call so grotesque as this.