But is it the Hellenes, the Dorians, or the Spartans that are a people? If the Romans were a people, what are we to say about the Latins? And what kind of a unit within the population of Italy at _c._ 400 do we mean by the name “Etruscan?” Has not their “nationality,” like that of Basques and Thracians, been made actually to depend upon the build of their language? What ethnic idea underlies the words “American,” “Swiss,” “Jew,” “Boer”? Blood, speech, faith, State, landscape--what in all these is determinative in the formation of a people? In general, relationships of blood and language are determined only by way of scholarship, and the ordinary individual is perfectly unconscious of them. “Indogermanic” is purely and simply a scientific, more particularly a philological, concept. The attempt of Alexander the Great to fuse Greeks and Persians together was a complete failure, and we have recently had experience of the real strength of Anglo-German community of feeling. But “people” is a linkage of which one is _conscious_. In ordinary usage, one designates as one’s “people”--and with feeling--that community, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest to one.[215] And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. For Cæsar the Arverni were a “_civitas_”; for us the Chinese are a “nation.” On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals who, like Isocrates, felt themselves _primarily_ as Hellenes. On this basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other, with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. The Spartiates[216] felt themselves a people in _this_ sense; the “Dorians” of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not. The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont; the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839;[217] the Mamertines[218] by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold of refuge.[219] Was the formative principle very different with the Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief’s following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achæans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there.