Aryan race
At the helm of the Aryan race, and, indeed, all races, according to Chamberlain, were the Germanic or Teutonic peoples, who had best preserved the Aryan blood. Chamberlain used the terms Aryan, Indo-European and Indo-Germanic interchangeably, but he went out of his way to emphasise that purest Aryans were to be found in Central Europe and that in both France and Russia miscegenation had diluted the Aryan blood. The Russians in particular had become a semi-Asian people on the account of the rule of the Golden Horde. Much of Chamberlain's theory about the superiority of the Aryan race was taken from the writings of the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau, but there was a crucial difference in that Gobineau had used the Aryan race theory as a way of dividing society between an Aryan nobility vs. racially inferior commoners whereas Chamberlain used the Aryan racial theory as a way of uniting society around its supposed common racial origins.