[Footnote 187:  The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no more definitely ear-marked.]

[Footnote 188:  See page 209.]

[Transcriber’s note:  Footnote 188 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 6448.]

Returning to English, most of us would readily admit, I believe, that the community of language between Great Britain and the United States is far from arguing a like community of culture.  It is customary to say that they possess a common “Anglo-Saxon” cultural heritage, but are not many significant differences in life and feeling obscured by the tendency of the “cultured” to take this common heritage too much for granted?  In so far as America is still specifically “English,” it is only colonially or vestigially so; its prevailing cultural drift is partly towards autonomous and distinctive developments, partly towards immersion in the larger European culture of which that of England is only a particular facet.  We cannot deny that the possession of a common language is still and will long continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual cultural understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence.  A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical, political, and economic determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout its area.

Language, race, and culture are not necessarily correlated.  This does not mean that they never are.  There is some tendency, as a matter of fact, for racial and cultural lines of cleavage to correspond to linguistic ones, though in any given case the latter may not be of the same degree of importance as the others.  Thus, there is a fairly definite line of cleavage between the Polynesian languages, race, and culture on the one hand and those of the Melanesians on the other, in spite of a considerable amount of overlapping.[189] The racial and cultural division, however, particularly the former, are of major importance, while the linguistic division is of quite minor significance, the Polynesian languages constituting hardly more than a special dialectic subdivision of the combined Melanesian-Polynesian group.  Still clearer-cut coincidences of cleavage may be found.  The language, race, and culture of the Eskimo are markedly distinct from those of their neighbors;[190] in southern Africa the language, race, and culture of the Bushmen offer an even stronger contrast to those of their Bantu neighbors.  Coincidences of this sort are of the greatest significance, of course, but this significance is not one of inherent psychological relation between the three factors of race, language, and culture.  The coincidences of cleavage point merely to a readily intelligible historical association.  If the Bantu and Bushmen are so sharply differentiated in all respects, the reason is simply that the former are relatively recent