It may be questioned whether there is in this matter a greater "pride of race" among Anglo-Saxons than among other Northern European peoples. Neither the French nor the Germans have established great colonies like the English, nor undertaken the administration of a huge Eastern Empire, and have, therefore, not shown what attitude they would adopt under such circumstances. The tolerance and easy-going humanitarianism of the French in relation to "miscegenation" in their dependencies in past times has never had the significance or practical importance which it would have possessed in the English Colonies and in the great Indian Empire. There is, on account of the sporadic and exceptional occurrence of modern instances, no information of any value as to the results of mixture of other races of man. In early times and among more primitive or less civilized peoples there appears to have been, when immigration or conquest gave the opportunity, no obstacle to a free intermixture of an incoming race with the natives of an invaded territory. The "pride of race" has, nevertheless, throughout historic time been a frequent factor in the adjustment of populations of diverse races, and though "colour" has been a frequent "test" or symbol of the superior and exclusive race, it has not been the only characteristic exalted to such importance. Such "pride of race" has frequently excluded the members of a closely allied but conquered racial group from intermarriage with the conquerors, and has only disappeared after centuries of persistence. The term "blue blood" is interesting in this connection. It is the "saing d'azure" of the Gothic invaders, the conquerors of the Iberian and Moorish people of Spain. It refers not to any "blueness" of the blood itself, such as distinguishes veinous from arterial blood, but to the blue colour of the veins as seen through the colourless skin of a northern race (the Goths), as compared with the invisibility of the veins when the skin is rendered more or less opaque by a brown pigment, as in the Moors and the swarthy Iberians.